c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Because Karol Joseph Wojtyla was Polish-born, his election to the papacy on Oct. 16, 1978 was met with widespread skepticism within the Jewish community. There was concern the new pope would reflect the traditional anti-Semitism that marked much of Jewish history in Poland.

But John Paul II proved the skeptics wrong. His extraordinary contributions to building mutual respect and understanding between Catholics and Jews are historic in nature, and he will be remembered as the “best Pope the Jews ever had.”

In addition to the pope’s own theology, geography and chronology were partly responsible for his unique relationship with Jews and Judaism. On the eve of World War II in 1939 when the future pope was 19, the Polish Jewish community of 3.5 million was a center of rich spiritual, intellectual and cultural resources, and represented 10 percent of that country’s total population. In his native Wadowice, one-quarter of young Karol’s schoolmates were Jews.

Wojtyla was a young man during the German occupation of Poland and he was a personal witness to the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust) in which 6 million Jews were murdered throughout Europe. But Poland was the Nazis’ chief killing field and the monstrous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was not far from Wojtyla’s own village. By war’s end over 3 million Polish Jews had been killed.

As a result of that horrific experience, Pope John Paul II needed no academic seminars or scholarly papers to instruct him about the radical evil of the Holocaust. The tragedy was indelibly etched in both his head and his heart.

During his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979, John Paul II knelt in prayer before the stone marker in memory of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In later years he called the Shoah “an indelible stain on the history of the (20th) century. …”

In his travels, the pope actively sought visits with the Jewish communities in many lands, and he repeatedly condemned hatred of Jews and Judaism as a “sin against God.” John Paul’s 1986 visit to Rome’s Grand Synagogue was the first visit by a pope to a Jewish house of worship since Peter.

In his synagogue address, the Pope reminded Catholics that Jews are “our elder brothers in faith” and the Jewish covenant with God is “irrevocable.” In 1994, the pope hosted a historic Vatican concert to commemorate the Shoah. I was present at that occasion and vividly remember his poignant plea never to forget the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

A few months earlier the Holy See and the State of Israel had established full and formal diplomatic relations, and this important action combined with the pope’s public denunciations of anti-Semitism and his reverent remembrance of the Holocaust changed the initial Jewish perception of John Paul II.

His personal intervention in 1993 satisfactorily resolved the decade-long standoff between Jewish groups and Carmelite nuns who refused to abandon a convent that abutted the Auschwitz concentration camp. After John Paul intervened, the nuns left the building.

In 1998, the Vatican released “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” Although there was much criticism from both Catholics and Jews about the document itself, John Paul II’s brief introductory letter was universally praised. In it the pope urged Catholics to “ … examine themselves on the responsibility which they too have for the evils of our time.”

In 2000, John Paul II visited Israel and, once again I was privileged to be there for another important event in his pontificate. Unlike Pope Paul VI’s brief visit to Israel in the mid-1960s when the pontiff never once mentioned the Jewish state’s name, John Paul II was an honored guest at the official residence of the Israeli president and in the offices of the chief rabbinate.

The pope’s sorrowful visit to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, where he met with Polish Jewish survivors, was televised around the world, and the most lasting image of the entire pilgrimage _ perhaps of his entire pontificate _ was John Paul II’s slow walk to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site, where he inserted a prayer of reconciliation into one of the Wall’s many crevices.

Still, there were serious Catholic-Jewish flashpoints during John Paul II’s long reign. In 1987, he accorded full diplomatic honors to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim during a visit to the Vatican. At the time of the visit, the United States had placed Waldheim on its “watch list” and forbid him entry because of Waldheim was accused of participating in war crimes against Jews and other groups.

The intense negative reaction to the Waldheim visit nearly cancelled the pope’s scheduled meeting a few months later with U.S. Jewish leaders in Miami. However, the meeting took place and the pope electrified his audience by declaring “Never Again!” in reference to the Shoah. John Paul II had another highly successful meeting with Jewish leaders during his October 1995 visit to the United States.

Toward the end of his long pontificate, some serious problems arose in Catholic-Jewish relations, most notably the question of making the appropriate wartime records of the Vatican available to a team of Catholic and Jewish historians. It is an issue John Paul II’s successor must confront if those relations are to grow in strength.

But by the time those issues arose, John Paul II was already covered with the mists of legend. In death, he has earned an imperishable place in Jewish history because under his gifted _ indeed, revolutionary _ leadership, the Catholic Church intensified the long overdue process of healing its relationship with its “elder brother.”

My most vivid memory of my 10 meetings with John Paul II took place in the Papal Library in 1990. When he learned our American Jewish Committee leadership delegation was flying from Rome to Warsaw the next day, John Paul II grew rhapsodic, began to sway and said, “Ah, Friday afternoons, Sabbath candles in the windows, Psalms being sung, children’s voices … .” He was mentally back home among his Jewish neighbors and friends in Wadowice. I think he really never left them.

(Rabbi A. James Rudin is senior interreligious adviser for the American Jewish Committee)

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