Aj Committee Undertaking Decade-long Educational Program to Counteract Passion Play

The American Jewish Committee announced today that it will embark on a systematic, decade-long educational program to counteract the anti-Semitic effects of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, national director of AJC’s Interreligious Affairs Department, made the announcement in connection with the publication of the findings of AJC’s line-by-line comparison of the 1960 and 1970 versions of the text of the play. This analysis revealed that, despite some minor changes, the Oberammergau Passion Play remains “fundamentally hostile to Jews and Judaism.” Copies of the study were distributed last spring to thousands of scholars, clergymen and travel agencies in the United States, Canada and Europe. Since that time, Rabbi Tanenbaum declared, thousands of tourists have bypassed the play. He cited, among others, a Catholic priest in Cleveland who is conducting a tour of Europe this summer and who has cancelled his group’s reservations at Oberammergau and is taking them to visit Dachau instead. The study is now in booklet form and titled “Oberammergau, 1960 and 1970: A Study in Religious Anti-Semitism.”

Describing the American Jewish Committee’s plans for a continuing effort to change the Oberammergau Passion Play, Rabbi Tanenbaum stated: “We are now making available our analysis of the Oberammergau play as an educational document to as large an audience of potential tourists as we can possibly reach. If the present response of thousands of Christians is a fair indication, we will carry out this education program on a continuous basis during the next decade.” Rabbi Tanenbaum said he was hopeful that by 1980, as a result of the mounting Christian protest against the play, Oberammergau officials will find the theatrical exploitation of anti-Semitism no longer commercially profitable. “In our projected decade-long education program,” he continued, “we will continue to look forward to the close cooperation and sympathetic understanding of Christians and other men of good will who take seriously the conclusions of recent Biblical and theological scholarship, as well as the emerging humanistic sentiment, who increasingly insist that these insights and convictions become translated into the real world of Jewish-Christian relationships.”

Rabbi Tanenbaum also reported that the German airline Lufthansa, has discontinued advertising the Oberammergau Passion Play as a tourist attraction, and that a number of priests, ministers and Christian educators who lead overseas tours of Europe have declined to attend the 1970 play. A professor of Biblical Studies at Lenoir Rhyne College, Hickory, N.C. sent a copy of the original AJC critique to 70 members of the Lenoir Rhyne College choir, who will tour Europe this summer. He attached a memorandum in which he wrote: “You will bear in mind that, at the direction of the elected leaders of the delightful country which you will be visiting, no more than 25 years ago six million Jews–brothers of Christ according to the flesh–were systematically slaughtered. Remembering this, you will want to ask yourself whether passion plays, such as Oberammergau, and all that was said and preached about Jews crucifying Christ and bearing the guilt of his death upon their heads, did not contribute toward that tragedy.”