About half the nuns at the Auschwitz convent have already left the premises, according to Kalman Sultanik, vice president of the World Jewish Congress.
Sultanik, who was in Poland last week, said members of the Polish government and Polish Catholic Church officials told him that several, perhaps “seven or eight” of an estimated 15 nuns at the Carmelite convent have left and that the others will leave soon.
Sultanik said he has “no idea” where the nuns went.
There was no connection made between the nuns leaving the convent and their eventual relocation to an interfaith center, Sultanik said.
“Everybody knows that building a center will take a year or two, and they all know that relocating the nuns has to take place,” he explained.
However, Sultanik said there is a feeling in the Polish Catholic Church that “the center would do a lot of good for the young people.”
Most important, he emphasized, is that “the Polish Church and government want to get this whole business behind them, to resolve it according to the signed agreement.”
The nuns were supposed to have left the convent by Feb. 22, 1989, according to an agreement signed two years earlier in Geneva by nine Catholic and nine Jewish religious and community officials. The date passed with no movement by the nuns to evacuate.
Since the breakdown of official Catholic Jewish ties over the convent matter, French and Belgian Carmelite nuns visited their sisters at the Auschwitz convent to try to convince them to abide by the agreement, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The Israeli newspaper also said the head of the Belgian Jewish community, Joseph Wybran, who was murdered last week, had met with the mother superior at the convent for an hour and a half.
She told Wybran she would leave the convent as soon as the new convent would be ready, but said she did not understand why she had to leave, according to the Post.
Sultanik also reported that Poland is primed to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel, which were ruptured in 1967. He met with officials of the Foreign Ministry, Religion Ministry and Solidarity, who greeted him at the airport.
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