An Emotional Prime Minister Acknowledges Pope's Role in New Dialogue
JERUSALEM, MAR 23 (ZENIT.org).- John Paul II's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is also a very intense moment of encounter with the Jewish world. The climax came this morning when the Holy Father visited Jerusalem's Holocaust Memorial.
At dawn, the Jewish press was calling for very decisive intervention by the Pope, as many Jews around the world are unaware of what John Paul II has said and done in regard to the Holocaust. The Pope did not disappoint the media. He paid homage to the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Nazi regime, homage that was characterized by overwhelming, emotion-filled silence, broken by the chant of a Rabbi, who raised his voice in a prayer of lament to the Lord.
After lighting the eternal flame that recalls the extermination of the Jews, facing the inscription of the 21 concentration camps and an urn containing the ashes of Jews who died in Auschwitz crematoriums, the Pope renewed the plea for forgiveness for the responsibilities of Christians during the Holocaust.«As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place. The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.«
Before standing to read his address, evidently emotionally moved, the Pope heard the reading of a letter of a Polish Jew deported to Auschwitz, who was entrusting her son to a Catholic friend. The little boy was later killed in the same concentration camp. The Pope also met some Polish Jews who survived the concentration camps. Among them were his childhood friend, Jerzy Kluger, and Edith Zirer, the Jew from Wadowice who says she owes her life to Karol Wojtyla.
Liberated in January 1945, she left the Skarzysko-Kaienna camp totally weakened by tuberculosis and other ailments that had her virtually paralyzed. A young seminarian by the name of Karol Wojtyla found her, gave her a sandwich and a cup of tea. Then he carried her on his shoulders for almost two miles, from the concentration camp to the railway station, where the girl joined other survivors. After staying in a Krakow orphanage and a French sanatorium, in 1951 she emigrated to Israel where she married.
Jerzy Kluger, who, as a child, listened to the Pope's father tell stories, went to Rome after the Second World War. He met Karol («Lolek,» as he calls him) again in the early 60s, during the time of Vatican Council II. The newspapers emphasized one of the interventions of Bishop Wojtyla, and that is how Kluger realized that the young Bishop was the friend with whom he went to school and played soccer. When a synagogue was constructed in Wadowice, and Wojtyla was already Pope, the Holy Father wrote a letter and asked his friend Jerzy to read it on his behalf during the assembly.
At the Holocaust Memorial, John Paul II said: «In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories that come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoa. My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the War. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors, some of whom perished, while others survived.»
With a firm and composed voice the Holy Father said: «I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust. More than half a century has passed, but the memories remain.»
The Pope then gave the reasons why humanity cannot forget the Jewish Shoah. «We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism. How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a Godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people.»
«Jews and Christians share an immense spiritual patrimony, flowing from God's self-revelation. Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good,» the Pope explained. «We remember, but not with any desire for vengeance or as an incentive to hatred. For us, to remember is to pray for peace and justice, and to commit ourselves to their cause. Only a world at peace, with justice for all, can avoid repeating the mistakes and terrible crimes of the past.»
The Holy Father ended by hoping «that our sorrow for the tragedy, which the Jewish people suffered in the 20th century, will lead to a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews, but rather the mutual respect required of those who adore the one Creator and Lord, and look to Abraham as our common Father in faith.»
Prime Minister Ehud Barak responded to the Pope's address, assuring the Pontiff of his «absolute commitment» to guarantee the rights and freedom of worship of all confessions present in the Holy Land, and to «maintain Jerusalem united, open and free, as it has never been until now.» The Prime Minister greeted the Pope on behalf of all the citizens of Israel: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druses.
Barak quoted the words that the Pope often uses when referring to the Holocaust, «the long night of the Shoah» and he shuddered at the thought of the drama suffered by the Jewish people and his own relatives (his grandparents died in Dachau) during the Nazi regime. «There seemed to be no room for hope in God or the world,» he said. But immediately after, he remembered the «just Gentiles,» as they are referred to in Israel, who «secretly risked their lives to save others' lives. Their names are written on the walls around Yad Vashem, they will always be imprinted on our hearts.»
Among the just, Barak named John Paul II. «You have done more than anyone to apply the Church's historic change toward the Jewish people, a change begun by good Pope John XXIII.» In this respect, according to the Prime Minister, the Pontiff's visit to the Memorial of the Holocaust, is «the climax of this historic journey of healing.»
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