c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ In what was a historic first in Christian-Jewish encounters, Pope John Paul II and some of the Vatican’s top-ranking figures met Thursday (March 23) with Israel’s two chief rabbis and some two dozen other leading Israeli rabbis in the Chief Rabbinate’s Jerusalem headquarters, Hechal Shlomo.

And in a closed-door meeting following the public reception, the chief rabbis told the pope they would be interested promoting a three-way, permanent dialogue between members of the Abrahamic traditions _ Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“It came out in the meeting. We proposed that there be a permanent dialogue between all three religions. It is very important,”Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, who represents the country’s Middle Eastern Jewish Orthodox community, told Religion News Service.

Standing between two enormous gold Jewish menorahs, or candleabras, that had survived the Nazi destruction of World War II Poland, Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, presented the Polish-born pontiff with a leather-bound copy of a Torah, or Jewish Bible, inscribed with a verse from the prophet Micah (4:5).

“Let all people walk in the name of his God and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever,” intoned the rabbi, himself a Polish-born survivor of the Holocaust who came to Israel with a shipload of Jewish orphans after World War II.

The verse was a carefully chosen religious double-entendre that, in effect, could be interpreted both by Orthodox Jews and Christians as a declaration of loyalty to their own unique tenets of faith, as well as an overture towards other religious traditions.

The public reception between the rabbis and the pope was tinged with a warmth that exceeded the usual, formal protocols, an atmosphere sharply contrasting with the harshly critical remarks that had been aired previously by a handful of ultra-right Jewish extremists about the papal visit.

As the ailing pontiff entered a reception hall, treading down a red carpet between the two dozen rabbis seated on one side, and an equivalent number of Catholic priests, cardinals and archbishops, on the other, the rabbis all spontaneously rose and crowded around the pontiff to shake his hand.

Some even sought to exchange more personal remarks with the pontiff who shared the same Eastern European background as many of the elderly Jewish leaders present.

“I told him in Polish that I am one of the few Jewish children who survived the Holocaust from Poland, and he told me in Polish, `I had many good Jewish friends, who today remain my friends,”’ said Rabbi Yosef Glicksberg, chief rabbi of the Tel Aviv’s Givatayim area.

The meeting broke a taboo against dialogue that has persisted in the Orthodox Jewish world long after the Vatican initiated its efforts to reconcile with Judaism in the 1960s, a process of rapprochement that culminated in the recognition of the state of Israel in 1993.

Indeed, for 35 years, most Jewish-Catholic encounters have typically involved liberal, non-Orthodox Jews, rather than mainstream Orthodox figures.

Perhaps never before in Jewish and Christian history has such a large and delegation of high-ranking rabbis from the Orthodox Jewish world met with a parallel delegation from Rome.

On the Jewish side, the meeting was attended by much of the mainstream Orthodox rabbinical establishment in Israel, including the chief rabbis of Jerusalem, Haifa, and other major Israeli cities. On the Catholic side, the Vatican entourage included Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the pope’s number two figure. Others present included Cardinals Edward Cassidy, in charge of Catholic-Jewish relations for the Vatican, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, head of the Vatican’s Jubilee Committee, and the Vatican’s diplomatic representative, or ambassador, to Israel, Monsignor Pietro Sambi.

“The very fact of a meeting between the leadership of the Catholic religion and the Jewish religion has a historic meeting,” said Haifa Chief Rabbi Shear-Yishuv Cohen, considered one of the highest ranking rabbis in Israel after the chief rabbis themselves.

“I hope it is the beginning of the fulfillment of the words of the prophets who said all of the peoples of the world will come to worship in Jerusalem.”

Rabbi Daniel Sperber, a prominent professor of Talmud, or Jewish legal thought, at Bar Ilan University, cited the pope personal efforts to promote a better Christian understanding of Judaism as part of the reason for the success of the Jerusalem gathering.

“I think in the last 20 years there has been a tremendous change in the Catholic Churches attitude towards Jews due to the very brave efforts of the pope,” said Sperber, a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council.

“At this stage it is still only a symbolic event, but I hope that it will lead to a greater understanding of the need for greater religious dialogue,” he added, noting that Catholics and Jews face common challenges in preserving their identity and traditions in the prevailing currents of modernity.

“For many rabbis, it wasn’t an easy step to take,” Sperber added. “But I think that the mere fact that the pope came to meet the chief rabbis, rather than the rabbis coming to the pope, and thus displayed good Christian virtues like humbleness and meekness, was a very important move.”

A 1993 meeting between Lau and the pope at the pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo, Italy helped pave the way for Thursday’s larger and more formal encounter.

The Polish-born Lau recounted how the pope broke the ice in that first private meeting by saying to him, “I remember your grandfather,” a distinguished rabbi from Kracow, only a few kilometers away from the pope’s boyhood home of Wadowice.

“The pope was the first pope in history who grew up with Jews, who knew Jews as friends and who didn’t agree to baptize Jewish children after World War II,”said Lau, following Thursday’s short private meeting with the pontiff.

Lau said that in Thursday’s encounter, he and the pontiff had once more discussed an incident in which the pope had persuaded a young Polish Catholic couple to relinquish the Jewish child they had saved during the war to his family rather than adopt him and have him baptized.

“I reminded him today about that child whom he, the pope refused to baptized in 1945. The pope still follows the footsteps of this child,” recounted Lau.

Lau said he would not be disappointed by the pope’s failure to condemn Pope Pius XII’s inaction to save Jews during the Holocaust while he visits Israel on his current pilgrimage.

“I don’t expect one pope to condemn a previous pope,” Lau remarked. “But I told him that I hope you will find a way for the generations who come to emphasize that we have to condemn not only murderers but those who stood on our blood without doing anything or saying something to save our lives then.”

DEA END FLETCHER