INDEPTH: POPE JOHN PAUL II
Polish experience shaped Pope's Jewish relations
CBC News Online | April 2005
As a Pole coming of age in the 1930s, Karol Wojtyla watched
the Nazi assault against European Jewry unfold.
He grew up in a mixed Christian/Jewish community in Wadowice,
and his best friend was a young Jew named Jerzy Kluger. He
is the first pope ever to speak Yiddish.
That life experience made John Paul II a historic force in
Jewish relations.
In 1986, he became the first pope since the age of St. Peter
to set foot inside a Jewish place of worship, visiting the
Rome synagogue. In 2000, John Paul visited the Western Wall
in Jerusalem, leaving behind a handwritten note expressing
regret for centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.
"We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who
in the course of history have caused these children of yours
to suffer and, asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit
ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant,"
it read.
The climate was sufficiently new that on Sept. 11, 2000,
more than 150 rabbis and Jewish university professors signed
a statement called "Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on
Christians and Christianity," asserting that "it
is time for Jews to learn about the efforts of Christians
to honour Judaism."
Not every Jew, however, was quite so impressed.
The decision to beatify Pius IX, the pope who kidnapped a
Jewish child in Bologna and who put Rome's Jews back in their
ghetto, was one question mark. John Paul's silence in 2001
when Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said Jews had killed
Christ and tried to kill Mohammad was another.
The campaign to beatify wartime Pope Pius XII, who was criticized
for not doing enough to save Jews during World War II; the
canonization of Jewish convert Edith Stein; the implosion
of a commission of Jewish and Catholic scholars to deal with
the Vatican archives; and lingering bitterness over a Carmelite
convent at Auschwitz - all clouded John Paul's relationship
with Jews.
Yet many Jews would probably concur with Rabbi Michael Kogan
of Montclair University in New Jersey: "This pope is
the best pope the Jews ever had."
"Some Catholics may not like him, but as far as we're
concerned, he's great," Kogan said. "He is determined
that the Church will enter the 21st century free of anti-Semitism."
Copyright 2005 Religion News Service
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