Polish Jews Complain to Pope About His Abortion Comparison

When Polish Jewish leaders met in Warsaw on Sunday with Pope John Paul II, they complained about his comparison of abortion to the Holocaust in comments he made last week during an earlier stop on his nine-day tour of Poland.

His comparison prompted an uproar in Jewish communities worldwide.

The delegation of six Polish Jews also urged the pontiff to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, something which the Vatican has refused to do.

The pope told the Jewish leaders the Middle East situation does not yet permit such ties.

“We told him that we considered his remarks putting abortion and the Holocaust on the same plane were unfortunate,” a member of the Jewish delegation, Konstanty Gebert, told reporters in Warsaw. He said that the pope offered no reply.

The Vatican has rejected Jewish criticism of the pope’s comments, saying there was nothing wrong with comparing the “killing of the unborn” to the Holocaust, in which the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million European Jews.

But during the meeting, the pope did call the Holocaust “unprecedented in human history,” according to Rabbi A. James Rudin, who on Sunday spoke by telephone with Stanislaw Krajewski, a member of the Jewish delegation.

Rudin is national director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee here.

During their meeting at the Vatican Mission in Warsaw, the Jewish leaders also told the pope that they hope he will work to uproot the residual anti-Semitism in Poland.

The Jewish delegation expressed appreciation of the pastoral letter condemning anti-Semitism that was read in Poland’s Roman Catholic churches in January.

Poland’s prewar Jewish community of about 3.5 million people was wiped out in the Holocaust. Today, under 10,000 Jews live in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.