Jewish Leaders Call off Zurich Meeting with Vatican Officials

Jewish and Catholic leaders have called off a conference on anti-Semitism that was scheduled to take place in Zurich in February because there has been no definite commitment to remove a Carmelite convent from the site of the Auschwitz death camp.

The conference, originally scheduled for Feb. 20-24, was contingent on a request made by the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations that the Auschwitz convent be removed to a site outside the camp before the meeting.

Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, sent a letter Dec. 28 to IJCIC suggesting that if the conditions to remove the Carmelite convent are met, a conference could take place after Passover 1989.

Jewish officials were wary when Willebrands failed to appear at a meeting in Paris on Dec. 20. That conclave was attended by Roman Catholic cardinals from several European cities, who said they had tried to convince the nine nuns living in the convent to vacate the camp.

The cardinals admitted, however, that they were powerless to convince the nuns to obey.

Catholic leaders had expressed a desire to meet with the Jews and begin work on a joint document on the Church and anti-Semitism.

A group of European cardinals and Vatican officials signed a written agreement in February 1987 stipulating that the convent would be removed by Feb. 20, 1989. An alternate site for the convent has been found outside the camp’s perimeter.

A group of French Jewish teachers and Holocaust survivors who visited Auschwitz recently made a video of the camp, shown at the Paris meeting, in which there were clear indications the convent grounds were actually being improved.