Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, the chief rabbi of France, warned French Jews on Tuesday not to blame the Catholic Church for sheltering a wartime Nazi collaborator who evaded justice for 45 years.
Sitruk was referring to Paul Touvier, 74, who headed the French militia that worked for the Gestapo in Lyon during World War II.
He was arrested in Nice on May 24, charged with crimes against humanity.
“We cannot even imagine that the church as such was involved. Jews have suffered in the past from collective accusations. We should not do the same,” Sitruk told an audience in Toulouse in the south of France.
The church was also defended by the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born a Jew and orphaned by the Holocaust.
Lustiger, who stayed in hiding during the war, said “Whenever I feared for my life, I sought refuge in a Catholic institution or knocked at the door of a Catholic priest. I was never turned away and never denounced,” Lustiger said.
Touvier, twice sentenced to death in absentia, was sheltered by church institutions until the statute of limitations on war crimes took effect and he received a presidential pardon.
But the pardon was rescinded and Touvier went into hiding again. At the time of his arrest, he had found sanctuary at the Priory of St. Francis in Nice.
That priory is owned by the excommunicated Roman Catholic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a fundamentalist die-hard opposed to the Catholic-Jewish rapprochement mandated by Vatican Council II.
French Jewry already expressed anger by the tendency of some French Catholics to liken the church’s harboring of a war criminal to the haven some priests gave to Jews during the Nazi era.
Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far right-wing National Party, claimed Tuesday that President Francois Mitterrand ordered Touvier’s arrest to placate Jews angered by his reception of Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir Arafat in Paris earlier this month.
And in Geneva, the daily La Suisse interviewed Touvier’s younger brother, Andre, who claimed he believed Paul was long dead.
Andre Touvier, 61, lives in the border town of Annency. He told the newspaper the last time he saw his brother was at their father’s funeral in 1963.
According to Andre, Paul was the black sheep of a family that included one brother who fought with the Free French under Charles de Gaulle and two sisters who are war widows.
(JTA correspondent Tamar Levy in Geneva contributed to this report.)
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.
