Two Orthodox rabbinical leaders in separate statements, have charged the Vatican with insensitivity to the security needs of Israel. The charges were made by Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and Rabbi Benjamin Blech. president of the Council of Young Israel Rabbis.
Schonfeld accused the Catholic Church of “lacking the moral courage” to recognize Israel and with “yielding to Arab pressure,” and he called for reassessment of Jewish-Catholic relations. His comments focussed on the release Jan. 23 by the Vatican of a lengthy report on the role of the Catholic Church during World War II. which included papal correspondence opposing establishment of Israel.
Blech, in his statement, charged Pope Paul VI with being “politically misguided” and “morally insensitive” for his condemnation of Israel’s air raids last December against terrorist bases in Lebanon while remaining silent about the reason for the raids–the “vicious killing” of Israeli civilians by Lebanon-based terrorists.
Schonfeld said “we wish that the Vatican had shown its resoluteness and the courage of its convictions during the Nazi holocaust as it did recently in its manifestor regarding sexual morality,” adding that “thousands of Jews would have been saved from gas chambers by its forthright intervention.”
CHARGES VATICAN IS INSENSITIVE
He also urged “the Christian leadership of communities throughout the world” to recognize “the bond” between Judaism and Zionism.” He said that despite progress in many areas, “the insensitivity of the Vatican to the major concern of world Jewry, namely, the State of Israel, constitutes a barrier and an obstacle which prevents a true achievement of amity and mutual understanding.”
Msgr. Eugene Clark of the New York Archdiocese said Schonfeld was “poisoning the well of Catholic-Jewish understanding” and perpetuating “the wholly discredited lie that Pope Pius was not anti-Nazi.”
Blech attributed the Pope’s statements to the restoration of Israel in 1948 which he said made an “obvious falsehood” of an “implicit prophecy” of Christian doctrine that “the destruction of the Jewish State and the subsequent dispersion of its inhabitants” was “fitting punishment for rejection of Jesus” as the messiah. According to that Christian doctrine, Blech asserted, Jews “could not ever return to Israel until they accepted Jesus.”
Asserting that “Israel together with Jerusalem in Jewish hands spoil the end of a Christian distortion of history,” Blech declared that “the Pope’s attacks against Israel” represented “a last ditch effort to restore validity to a creed contradicted by contemporary events.”
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