After a recent visit to Eastern Europe, activist Rabbi Avi Weiss has warned that the sites of former Nazi death camps are being Christianized by the presence of churches and crosses.
Weiss, with a small group of followers, demonstrated Aug. 17 at a Catholic church located at the Auschwitz/Birkenau death camp, and went on to the Sobibor death camp in Poland, Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic and Dachau, which is located in Germany.
The demonstration recalled the now-notorious one Weiss led in 1989 to protest the presence of a convent at Auschwitz.
It ended with Weiss and his followers being kicked and punched by convent workers in the presence of Polish police.
In contrast, this protest went without incident.
“Revisionism is happening right now in the camps,” said Weiss in a telephone interview from Paris. “This is nothing less than an attempt to Christianize the Holocaust.
“No matter where you stand in Auschwitz, when you look up you see crosses towering over your head,” said Weiss, who heads Amcha-the Coalition for Jewish Concerns.
“If revisionism is taking place right there, then it is inevitable that the history of the Holocaust will be distorted,” he said.
The Auschwitz/Birkenau church, which is located outside the barbed-wire fence that enclosed prisoners, is in a building designed by the Nazis to house the camp commandant’s office.
The building was never used for that purpose, according to Weiss, but was used to beat, rape and murder Jewish women taken there by Nazi guards from inside Birkenau.
It was used as a candle factory following the war and is the only structure remaining of the complex that served as the Nazi headquarters at Auschwitz/Birkenau, said Weiss.
The presence of the church violates a 1987 agreement signed by European Jewish leaders and four Catholic cardinals stipulating that “there will be no permanent Catholic place of worship at Auschwitz/Birkenau,” said Weiss.
LARGE CROSS REMAINS OUTSIDE AUSCHWITZ
During his hour-long protest, Weiss and his followers blocked the entrance to the church, said Psalms and recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
They were surrounded by at least 25 Polish police, said Weiss.
A 40-foot-high cross remains outside the building which housed the controversial convent at Auschwitz, said Weiss.
That building was originally used to store Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder many of the 1.6 million Jews killed at Auschwitz.
The Carmelite nuns who had occupied the site vacated it last year after an international furor over their presence, delicate negotiations between Jewish leaders and Catholic officials, the construction of a new convent and meeting center nearby and, finally, the intercession of Pope John Paul II.
“The issue is that a cross at Auschwitz is as inappropriate as a Jewish star would be at the largest Christian cemetery in the world,” said Weiss.
At Sobibor, where 250,000 Jews and 1,000 non-Jews were murdered by Nazis, a large, two-story Catholic church has been standing since the late 1970s, he said.
It was built on the site of a small, prewar chapel which had been used by Nazis to kill some Jews and was razed by the Nazis after the revolt at Sobibor.
At Theresienstadt there is a 50-foot-high cross at the entrance of the camp, said Weiss.
Dachau is “the worst,” he said. “Today it is a Christian camp.”
There is a Carmelite convent built in 1964 at the back of the concentration camp whose residents “are praying for atonement and reconciliation,” said Weiss.
A Protestant church, in another recently built building, is also located within Dachau and holds regular Sunday worship services, he said.
Bells peal hourly from a Catholic monument near Dachau, said Weiss, overshadowing the menorah which constitutes a Jewish memorial there.
“Dachau is consumed with Christian symbolism and places of worship,” he said.
Weiss is currently meeting with representatives of European Jewish groups in France and Belgium.
Upon his return to the United States he plans to embark on a campaign to focus international attention on the situation at the camps.
“If we really want improved Vatican-Israel relations, this must be a priority and not pushed under the rug,” he said.
“Now it’s up to those Jewish people with the contacts (in the Catholic world) to push this forward,” Weiss said.
The Vatican and Israel established formal diplomatic ties for the first time last year.
If the church at Birkenau/Auschwitz II is not removed by next spring, he warned, he will orchestrate a “massive” protest in time for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps by the allied forces.
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.
