Two American Jewish Committee officials are bringing a message of conciliation to three areas in Europe where relations with the Jewish community have hit serious snags in recent years: Austria, Poland and the Vatican.
Rabbi A. James Rudin, AJCommittee’s director of interreligious affairs, and Ambassador Harvey Feldman, the organization’s recently installed international relations director, left last week to visit Rome and Vienna. On Tuesday, Rudin will continue on his own to Warsaw.
The trip’s focus is a fact-finding visit to Austria, where Rudin and Feldman arrived Saturday. The two men had been invited by the Austrian government to meet with politicians, academies, labor leaders and Jewish officials there.
The invitation, Feldman said, stemmed from “the desire on the part of the Austrian government to improve relations with the international Jewish community, working through the American Jewish community.”
Relations between the Austrian government and Jews worldwide have been strained since the election of President Kurt Waldheim, who served during World War II as an intelligence officer in a German army unit linked to wartime atrocities.
Still, Feldman said he views it as “a positive sign that the Austrians want to establish dialogue with the U.S. Jewish community.”
Feldman said that the Austrian government “would not embarrass us” by asking Rudin and him to meet with Waldheim. “They are not going to put us in that position,” he said. “Would we see him if asked? I think not.”
TRY NOT TO ‘SINK RELATIONS’
On their way to Vienna, Rudin and Feldman stopped in Rome, where they met last Friday with members of the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations With Judaism; Rome’s Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff; and Tullia Zevi, president of the Italian Jewish community.
Both men stressed there that continuing the ongoing Jewish-Catholic dialogue is crucial, particularly when relations between the two faiths suffer a crisis such as that over the Carmelite convent at the site of the Auschwitz death camp.
“In a crisis, you don’t sink relations, but you try to resolve them,” said Rudin. “You don’t run away from a situation when there’s turbulence, you must put it in perspective.”
“The convent situation is a crisis that is being resolved and will be resolved,” Rudin said.
Rudin will get a first-hand look at the progress being made in Poland toward removal of the convent when he visits that country Tuesday.
In New York, Ira Silverman, AJCommittee’s executive vice president, said Sunday that Rudin will be meeting in Warsaw with Polish government officials, Jewish leaders and representatives of the Catholic Church, including those directly involved in the negotiations surrounding the convent.
Rudin said he is making this trip strictly in his capacity as an AJCommittee representative, and not in his role as chairman of the group for interreligious consultations formed last month by AJCommittee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
(JTA staff writer Allison Kaplan in New York contributed to this report.)
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