Astorre Mayer, president of the Jewish Community of Milan, who is also president of the Standing Conference of European Jewish Community Services–representative body of Jewish communities on the European continent– will greet Pope Paul VI in Israel, when the pontiff enters Israel at the Jordanian border, near Megiddo, on January 5, it was announced here today.
Mr. Mayer is going to Israel especially to greet the Pope on behalf of Italian Jewry. At the welcoming ceremonies at the Israeli side of the border with Jordan, Mr. Mayer will be accompanied by Maurice Fisher, Israel’s Ambassador to Rome.
Meanwhile, Pope Paul has stressed publicly, for the third time in a week, the exclusively religious character of his forthcoming visit to the Holy Land. Replying to New Year greetings expressed to him at the Vatican by the diplomatic corps here, yesterday, the Pontiff said his journey would be “an act absolutely free of any kind of political or temporal considerations.” He said he wanted to “reaffirm” this fact “before such a particularly qualified audience” as the Rome diplomatic corps.
Pope Paul asked the diplomats “to use, if necessary, their influence, and that of their governments, to maintain the pilgrimage in its purely spiritual light” and to prevent false interpretations. “God is our witness,” he stated, “that we have before our eyes only the good of the Church and of the great human family when we go to those venerable places” in the Holy Land.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
