A long-awaited Vatican document addressing its role in the Holocaust is being greeted with nearly universal dismay and anger by Jewish experts on Catholic-Jewish relations.
And it is prompting a renewed call from national Jewish organizations for the Vatican to open its Holocaust-era archives so that the truth of the church’s role during the attempted extermination of the Jews can once and for all be examined by historians.
Delegations of Jews slated to meet with the pope in coming days and weeks intend to voice that demand directly to the pontiff.
The document, a 14-page paper titled “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” was issued at the Vatican on Monday by the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
The document, which took 11 years to produce, acknowledges that individual Catholics did things that were wrong or even sinful in their support of anti- Semitism and Nazi persecution of Jews, and it repents for this – using the Hebrew word teshuvah.
But it absolves the church as such from complicity in the Holocaust.
It even warmly praises the controversial wartime Pope Pius XII – who has long been accused by scholars and other observers of remaining silent in the face of Nazi genocide – for saving hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives “personally or through his representatives.”
Oddly, say the experts, the Vatican document fails to do what the current pope, John Paul II, himself has done in less formal documents and speeches — that is, take direct responsibility for the church’s failure to try to ameliorate the attempted genocide of the Jewish people.
Three key European bishops’ conferences – the Polish, French and, most recently, the German — have acknowledged more culpability than the Vatican statement does.
Those involved in interfaith work are struggling to figure out why the church didn’t go as far as the Jews had hoped – or expected.
“After so many years of dialogue, why at this point have they come out with this very weak document?” asked Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, who has been involved in Catholic-Jewish relations for more than three decades.
Klenicki called the paper “a real insult” and “a pretext for an apology for Pius XII.”
Rabbi Mark Winer, who was in Rome this week as part of a delegation of rabbis and Catholic bishops traveling together to Israel and the Vatican, called the document “a well-crafted speedboat which is so encrusted with barnacles it doesn’t get very far.”
Winer, a White Plains, N.Y., rabbi who is president of the National Council of Synagogues, an umbrella organization of Reform and Conservative congregations, said that although the right terminology is included in the document, “the `remembrance’ is incomplete, the `repentance’ is lacking and the `resolve’ for the future is pretty weak-kneed.”
“In ascribing sinfulness to individual Catholics, it sidesteps responsibility on the part of the church,” said Winer, who is slated to become senior rabbi of London’s largest Reform synagogue. “It never says that Catholic teaching was central to the teaching of contempt about the Jewish people.”
The document was signed by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican Commission, and the Revs. Pierre Duprey and Remi Hoeckman, who serve as its vice president and secretary, respectively.
Cassidy told a news conference announcing the document that it was “more than an apology.”
“We feel that we have to repent,” he said, “not only for what we may have done individually but also for those members of our church who failed in this regard.”
The Vatican Commission took up the task of creating this document at Pope John Paul II’s request in 1987 – a year after the pope had a historic meeting with Rome Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff in Rome’s central synagogue.
It is the third formal document prepared by the commission, following the landmark Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965, which marked the first official gesture of reconciliation by the church to Jews.
The document begins by calling “the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people” the “worst suffering of all.”
Then it opens a survey of Christian-Jewish relations by stating that “disputes between the early church and the Jewish leaders and people who, in their devotion to the Law, on occasion violently opposed the preachers of the Gospel and the first Christians.”
Saying that Jews persecuted Christians in the first century of the common era is a statement straight out of things Christians said of Jews “in the Middle Ages,” Klenicki said.
“There were confrontations, fights in the synagogue between early Christians and Jews, but never persecution. Did the Jews establish concentration camps or gas chambers for Christians? How can they put this at the same level?”
The Vatican statement takes pains to separate anti-Judaism from anti-Semitism, suggesting that only the Nazis were guilty of anti-Semitism.
It also stops far short of taking responsibility as a religious institution for promulgating the tenets of anti-Judaism, in particular the teaching that the Jews killed Jesus.
The widely accepted view is that this central Christian teaching provided the theological foundation for the anti-Semitism of the Nazi years that culminated in the murder of 6 million Jews.
Instead, the Vatican’s document distances Christianity from the Holocaust. “The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime,” it says.
Some in the Jewish community are pointing to the fact that since it is not a document directly from the pope, a window of opportunity remains in which the pontiff can make a further statement about the Catholic role in the Holocaust.
But others disagree.
“Everything that comes from the Vatican is endorsed by the pope,” Winer said.
Moreover, the statement was issued with a cover statement from the pope, who said he hoped that the document would “help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.”
Ultimately, several experts in interreligious affairs said, the only way to resolve the concerns over this statement will be to open the Vatican archives to outside scrutiny.
“Then historians and researchers will be able to read all the correspondence of Vatican Jewish businessman in Turkey.
For now, the emergence of the current secular coalition, led by Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz of the Motherland Party, has eased the worries among Turkey’s 28,000 Jews — a tiny minority in a Muslim country of more than 62 million people.
Kamhi stressed that it was now time to keep the Islamists away from political power — a task that is not so easy.
While Erbakan has been banned from political activity for five years — and his Welfare Party has been outlawed — the movement he headed remains strong.
All but five of the 158 of the Welfare Party’s legislators are still in parliament — now members of a newly formed party called Fazilet, or wisdom.
“Of course we are concerned,” said Kamhi. “One must continuously work on preserving the secular nature of Turkey.”
When a delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations visited Turkey earlier this month, they heard — from Jewish leaders as well as from political figures such as Yilmaz — the pride Turks take in the 500-year tradition of Muslim-Jewish coexistence in Turkey.
Indeed, they have good reason to be proud. Turkey served as a safe haven for Jews ever since the deportation of Jews from Spain in 1492 through World War II.
But the worries are there. A huge plaque at Neve Shalom Synagogue, one of 17 synagogues in Istanbul, commemorates the names of the 22 victims murdered during an Arab terrorist attack during Shabbat prayers on Sept. 6, 1986.
The plaque is a constant reminder that elements hostile to Jews exist in this traditionally friendly country. As a result, the Jewish community has enhanced security.
Istanbul’s only Jewish day school and other Jewish institutions are well guarded. Members of the Conference of Presidents’ delegation had to pass through two steel doors and a metal detector before they could enter.
Parents of children attending the Jewish school are devoted to their Jewish identity and willing to spend $3,000 in annual tuition, an exceptionally high expense in Turkey. The country’s Jewish community subsidizes 40 percent of the school’s annual budget.
But some of these children may not be staying in Turkey.
Etel Baruch, 14, said she plans to go to the United States when she finishes school. Her friend Edna Diler, on the other hand, said she would eventually go to Israel.
“I love Israel because everyone is Jewish there,” she said.
Some 5 percent of Turkey’s Jews attend synagogue daily, with a better attendance on Shabbat. Two or three times a year, the community sends a delegation of officials able to perform Jewish rituals to the small community in neighboring Syria.
The political situation, combined with the dwindling numbers of involved Jews, has taken a toll.
“Six years ago, when we visited the community as it celebrated its 500th anniversary here, the atmosphere was more upbeat,” said Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
With its small numbers, Turkey’s Jews appear not to be involved in the religious pluralism debate raging in Israel and the United States.
“You have come to an organized community, which has no divisions. We have Jews who keep the mitzvot more, those who keep them less and those who keep them so- so. But we are all united,” David Asseo, the chief rabbi of Turkey, told the Conference of Presidents’ delegation.
But this unity might not mean much if there is an Islamic victory in the next elections, slated for 1999 — a victory that many political pundits are predicting. ambassadors in different cities, the answers Pius XII sent to the nuncios, what he told them to do or not to do,” said Klenicki.
“All those documents are very important. They are the key.”
Rabbi A. James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligous affairs, agreed, suggesting that the Vatican might now accede to Jewish demands to open the archives.
He said that, despite its flaws, the Vatican’s document represented an important step forward since it put the official stamp of the Holy See on a number of important tenets.
“One of its important aspects is that it doesn’t give credence to Holocaust deniers who are growing in number and will grow in number as the actual survivors of the Holocaust die a natural death,” said Rudin, who also was in Rome this week on the interfaith mission,
“It is a permanent statement that will stand up and be used hopefully as a teaching document throughout the Catholic churches, seminaries, kindergartens, all the way through, from now into the future, in places where there are no Jews at all, like in Asia and Africa.”
The document’s inconsistencies, many say, clearly reflect deep divisions within the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
“I think that there’s a deep division” between “those Catholics who find the image of a church which acknowledges its sins of the past appealing, and those who find it very threatening,” Winer said.
“I think some see acknowledgment of guilt for the Shoah as a Pandora’s box.”
The document itself appeared to anticipate Jewish disappointment and ask Jews for understanding.
Stressing that it was addressed to Roman Catholics throughout the world, not just in Europe, it invited “all Christians to join us in meditation on the catastrophe which befell the Jewish people, and on the moral imperative to ensure that never again will selfishness and hatred grow to the point of sowing such suffering and death.”
And “most especially” it called on “our Jewish friends” to “hear us with open hearts.”
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.
