Charging that the Oberammergau Passion Play “remains deeply hostile to Jews and Judaism,” the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith sent a cable Saturday to the Archbishop of Munich urging him to cancel his plans to attend the play, which opens May 18. The production, which has been staged every ten years since 1634, has been widely regarded as anti-Semitic, and a recent analysis in the London Tablet by Sister Louis Gabriel, director of the Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies at the Convent of Our Lady of Slon, concluded that it “distorted” and “falsified” the Gospels. The cable was sent to Julius Cardinal Doepfner by AJ Congress president Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld and ADL chairman Dore Schary. Three years ago, Cardinal Doepfner had called on a monk to revise the text, but the monk reported that his changes had been rejected by the play’s organizers. The AJ Congress also reported that Lufthansa, the German airline, had agreed to suspend advertising for their tours that include tickets to the play, pending Jewish acceptance of a revised text.
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