Pope John Paul II has been angrily censured by Jewish leaders in Europe and the United States for equating abortion with the Holocaust in remarks he made during a mass he celebrated Tuesday in his native Poland.
Even a Polish newspaper was appalled by the analogy.
Jean Kahn, president of CRIF, the representative council of French Jewish organizations, said the analogy was reprehensible and beyond understanding. “Remembrance of the Holocaust has a sacred character, which even the pope, the spiritual leader of Catholicism, cannot transgress,” Kahn said.
Henry Bulawko, president of an organization of former deportees and concentration camp inmates, said the pope’s remarks “deeply hurt the survivors of the Nazi camps and the relatives of those who were murdered there.”
Bulawko expressed hope that “the highest moral authority of Christianity will be inspired by the example of the Polish president,” Lech Walesa, who, addressing the Knesset in Jerusalem last month, “asked the Jewish people to forgive him for the Crimes of anti-Semitism perpetrated on Polish soil.”
The Polish-born pope, speaking to some 10,000 believers in Radom, delivered a stinging condemnation of abortion, which the Polish legislature recently refused to outlaw. The killing of the unborn ranks among the worst crimes of genocide, he declared.
He said that alongside the victims of war and mass murder in the 20th century lay “yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.”
A WORD ‘USED AND ABUSED’
In Berlin, Heinz Galinski, leader of the German Jewish community, issued a statement Wednesday charging that the pope’s declaration was yet another attempt to exploit the Holocaust to advance a political agenda. It came from a religious leader whose church has yet to deal truthfully with the role it played during the Nazi era, Galinski said.
There were equally strong reactions Wednesday from Jewish organizational leaders in the United States.
“The comparison of the Holocaust to abortion is something we totally reject and should be avoided by representatives of the Catholic Church,” Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said in New York.
He said it was part of an attempt to universalize and, to some extent, trivialize the Holocaust.
Rabbi A. James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious affairs, expressed regret that the two issues were linked.
The pope, he pointed out, has made “many eloquent statements about appropriately teaching and remembering the tragedy of the Holocaust. Indeed, from the intensity of his own personal experience, he has powerfully articulated the uniqueness of the evil of the Holocaust,” Rudin said.
“Precisely because of the unique and unparalleled event, the American, Jewish Committee strongly believes that the Holocaust and the current debate about abortion should not be linked,” he said.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said, “The word Holocaust’ has been used and abused in describing the situation of women and the abortion question. Such indiscriminate use of the term diminishes the original sense of the word.”
‘MISINTERPRETATION OF JEWISH VIEWS’
Seymour Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, the Jewish community’s official link to the Vatican, observed that “abortion is the free choice of an individual or is practiced for medical reasons.”
But the “genocide of an entire people perpetrated by the Nazis was carried out against the Jews for no other reason than they were born Jews,” Reich said.
“This represents another example of misinterpretation of Jewish views and sensitivities by the Catholic Church and underscores the need for greater open contacts and discussions,” he said.
In Warsaw, the Polish youth daily Sztandar Mlodych aimed unprecedented criticism at the pope Wednesday for comparing abortion to the Holocaust. The analogy was inadmissable and offensive, the newspaper declared.
The furor was apparently unnoticed by U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle, who arrived in Warsaw Wednesday, on the third leg of a European tour.
Quayle placed a wreath at the Umschlagplatz, the site in Warsaw from which the Nazis sent 400,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp in 1942-43.
(Contributing to this report were JTA correspondent David Kantor in Bonn and JTA staff writer Debra Nussbaum Cohen in New York.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
