Pope Responds Warmly to Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Service

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial service held at Temple Emanu-E1 in New York April 22, has drawn a warm response from Pope John Paul 11, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) reported today. WAGRO president Benjamin Meed; who had written to the Pope about the event, received a letter yesterday conveying the Pontiff’s acknowledgement.

The letter, addressed to Terence Cardinal Cooke Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, was signed by Archbishop Giovanni Coprio substitute Vatican Secretary of State. Cooke referred it to the New York Board of Rabbis with a request that it be brought to the attention of Meed. The letter stated that Meed’s message, transmitted by Coordinal Cooke, reached the Pope “as he is preparing for his journey to Poland during which he intends to visit Warsaw and Auschwitz.”

It stated that “In the April 22 commemoration of the uprising of his Jewish fellow countrymen the Holy Father sees a reminder of the need to safeguard at all times the objective and inviolable rights of every human being.” The letter observed that “Man is made in the image and after the likeness of God. As such, he is superior to systems and ideologies. The repeated attempts to subordinate him to what is lower than him and the curtailment of the rights of any individual or group of human beings must be countered by vigilance and self-sacrifice. His Holiness prays that through the commemoration many will be inspired with such an attitude and he invokes God’s blessings on their work for the good of all.”

Meed, whose organization organized the annual Warsaw Ghetto memorial, said the Pope’s understanding and compassion for the remembrance of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a significant development in Gotholic-Jewish relations which, he hoped, “will serve as a memorandum for history.”