International Jewish group readies response to pope’s Shoah document

NEW YORK, Sept. 2 (JTA) – An international group of Jewish interreligious affairs experts is set to issue a critical response to the Vatican’s statement on the Catholic Church’s role during the Holocaust. The response from the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations would not be the first Jewish reaction to the document, but it does represent the first formal comment by a coalition of Jewish groups that interacts regularly with senior church officials. A draft of IJCIC’s response to Rome, scheduled to be released later this week, says that by calling the Holocaust a major fact in the history of the century, the Vatican’s document “should render impossible the obscenity of Holocaust Denial among Catholics and we see in this one of the major positive aspects of the Document.” The long-awaited Vatican document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” received a mixed report when it was issued in March. “Fifty, 75, 100 years from now, there can never be any doubt that the Holocaust took place, because here is a definitive statement from the Catholic Church by a pope from Poland,” Rabbi A. James Rudin, the interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee and a member of IJCIC, said in an interview this week. But IJCIC’s nine-page response enumerates a host of problems with the Vatican statement, ranging from claims that the document minimizes the connection between church doctrine and anti-Semitism to charges that the Vatican lionizes Pope Pius XII for saving “hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives” without providing sufficient documentary evidence to support this claim. IJCIC’s members include representatives from the three main branches of Judaism, the Israel Interfaith Committee and some major Jewish organizations, among others. Immediately following the document’s release in Rome, IJCIC members articulated their reactions directly to church representatives during a meeting at the Vatican of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee. IJCIC representatives say they do not expect the Vatican to respond to their statement. The next meeting of the liaison committee is currently scheduled for the year 2000. Until then, Jewish leaders say they hope Catholic churches, schools, universities and seminaries will use “We Remember” to bolster Holocaust education among the world’s 1 billion adherents of Catholicism. Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said the IJCIC response “represents the maturity of the dialogue. We can be candid with one another and discuss issues on a substantive level.”