On the Danger of Forced Conversion“We would have never thought about educating our children in the spirit of Christianity; that is foreign to us. What we do now is only a means of sustaining our children; the end justifies the means.”This quote can be easily attributed to a Cristão-novo of the 16th century. And many Portuguese Jews did exactly that: convert in an act of self-preservation. In a Dec. 1942 memorandum—written in Hebrew and recovered from the Oyneg Shabes (Warsaw Ghetto) archive—an anonymous author warns Jews against conversion as a means of self-preservation. As many as several hundred Jewish children survived the Holocaust in Polish monasteries—many of them were raised as Catholics.