Jewish and Catholic Leaders Confer in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary

Jewish and Catholic religious leaders who met last week in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary agreed that intensified efforts are needed to teach Catholic priests and educators in those countries about Judaism and their church’s relationship with it.

The unprecedented joint trip was arranged to implement a September 1990 document, known as the Prague Declaration, that called for concrete measures to eradicate anti-Semitism from Catholic teachings, particularly in those Central and Eastern European countries that were essentially closed off to the West during the era of Communist rule.

The group included five representatives of IJCIC, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, which represents world Jewry in dialogue with other faiths.

Representing the Vatican was Monsignor Pier Francesco Fumagalli, secretary of its Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews.

In each country, the joint delegation met with the primate of the local Catholic Church and with the papal nuncio, or Vatican political representative. The group also met with Jewish community officials in Krakow, Prague and Budapest.

A statement signed by both the Jews and the Catholics at the conclusion of the trip said that “priority must be extended in each country to the area of general education and to the training of educators.”

The statement said it is “essential to publish and to disseminate as soon as possible the fundamental texts” of the Catholic Church concerning “its relations to the Jewish people, according to the principles of the Second Vatican Council.”

Those texts should be written in the vernacular languages and distributed “in the broadest possible fashion,” the statement said.

MEETING WITH CARDINAL GLEMP

Joining the group in Poland was Bishop Henryk Muszynski, chairman of the Polish Bishops Commission for Dialogue with Judaism, and Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, archbishop of Krakow.

Several of the Jewish delegates also met with Cardinal Josef Glemp, the country’s primate, who in 1989 accused Jews of exerting control over the international media, among other unflattering charges.

While visiting the United States last fall, Glemp expressed regret for his remarks, met with a group of American Jewish rabbis and invited them to Poland. Last week’s meeting was in response to that invitation, according to the participants.

During the 45-minute session, Glemp assured his Jewish guests “that his concern was ongoing, that anti-Semitism is unworthy of our civilization,” Rabbi Mordecai Waxman reported in a phone interview from Warsaw.

Waxman represented the Synagogue Council of America, an agency of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform leaders that serves as IJCIC’s American secretariat.

According to participants in the meeting, Glemp said “We are expressing our sincere regrets because of the anti-Semitic events which were caused on Polish soil. We can learn much from the Jewish nation.”

Glemp “came off as a man who learned something in his visit to America,” Waxman said. “Apparently Glemp had been impressed on his visit to the U.S., for the first time encountering a vital Jewish community.”

While in Poland, the Jewish and Catholic leaders visited the Umschlagplatz, where, during the Holocaust, Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were assembled for deportation to the death camps.

EMOTIONAL VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ

They also paid an emotional visit to Auschwitz and checked on the progress of the new convent being constructed some distance away from the death camp. The Carmelite nuns who now occupy a building on the Auschwitz grounds are expected to move to the new complex by the end of the year.

Standing before the ovens that cremated many of the 1.5 million Jews who died at Auschwitz, the Jewish leaders recited Kaddish and the Catholics recited Psalm 130, in Latin, which is part of their funeral liturgy.

“We embraced each other there,” said Rabbi Mark Winer, spokesman for the five-member IJCIC delegation.

There was “a sense of fellowship among us and tears all around” as the group contemplated the destruction that had occurred at that site, Winer said in a telephone interview from Warsaw.

The group also visited the museum at Auschwitz, where changes in the presentation of the Holocaust have recently been made. Under Communist rule, exhibits spoke mainly of martyrs in the fight against fascism, rather than victims of a systematic campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.

Some of the exhibits and literature at the museum have been changed to emphasize the uniquely Jewish nature of the tragedy at Auschwitz.

“There’s an increased commitment to the specificity of the Jewish suffering, but they have a ways to go,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee and an IJCIC delegate.

“They have to get into the origin and development of Nazism, some of the heroism of Jews fighting back and an understanding of the enormity of it,” he said in an interview from Warsaw.

‘POLES REALLY DON’T KNOW JEWS’

A museum administrator promised the delegates that changes in the exhibits would be made so that every visitor understands the purpose of the camp was to kill Jews.

And at the Birkenau death camp, less than two miles away, 19 carved-stone memorials in as many languages have been sandblasted so that their Communist-era rhetoric can be replaced with language that makes clear the Jewish suffering at that site, according to Rudin.

Today an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 Jews live in Poland.

“An entire generation of Poles really don’t know Jews,” said Rabbi Waxman, though “they are wrestling with the meaning of Christianity in light of the meaning of the Shoah,” or Holocaust.

“The ultimate irony is that this bleak place which is ‘Judenrein’ (empty of Jews), is the source of the most profound commitment to make teshuvah (repentance) for the anti-Semitic past,” said Rabbi Winer.

“The commitment of the Catholic hierarchy,” he said, “is absolutely inspiring.”