Pope Benedict XVI visited the Holocaust memorial at Judenplatz in Vienna.
He offered a prayer Friday at the memorial, which is inscribed with the names of 65,000 Jews killed in Austria.
The prayer, he told reporters, was “to show our sadness, our repentance and also our friendship with our Jewish brothers.”
At the memorial, the pope, who is in Austria for three days, met with Paul Chaim Eisneberg and several other leaders of the Jewish community in Vienna.
Some 7,000 Jews remain in the city that before the war had a Jewish population of about 185,000, according to the New York Times.
