c. 2005 Religion News Service

ROME _ On April 13, 1986, the stately Great Synagogue here opened its rarely used front gates to honor the arrival of Pope John Paul II, whose visit _ the first ever by a pope to a temple _ was celebrated by Jews worldwide.

On that day, the pope, in white regalia, strode up a red carpet rolled out for the occasion and met the city’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, before entering the temple called “Tempio Maggiore.”

“He said many beautiful things that day,” said Toaff, 89, through a translator. “In particular, he said that the Jewish people are like older brothers to Christianity. To me, he was not only a pope, but a friend.”

“This was a new event for Jews. It was a sign of friendship,” said Toaff, one of only two living people mentioned in the pope’s will. “Throughout history, the church had not been very friendly with the Jewish people.”

For Jews, the visit was one of several groundbreaking moments in the papacy of a man who grew up with Polish Jews and suffered under Nazi rule during World War II.

Now, as 115 Catholic cardinals participate in the secret papal election that began Monday, leaders in the Jewish community are hoping that the next pope will build on John Paul’s efforts to establish an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish community and to combat anti-Semitism worldwide.

This is especially important now, said Rabbi James Rudin, senior interreligious adviser for the American Jewish Committee, as anti-Semitism in Europe and in Arab media has become more visible in recent years.

“There’s a concern, I would not use the word `fear,’ that with the passing of John Paul II, some in the Catholic Church may say, `(Jewish relations) was his personal commitment based on his autobiography, based on his life experience,’ and it’s not necessary to give Catholic-Jewish relations the priority, energy and commitment that we’ve gotten from the late pope,” said Rudin, a columnist for Religion News Service.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said John Paul left a record that his successor would find hard not to continue.

“The pope did and wrote and said a lot (about Jews), so there are encyclicals and homilies, and it’s part of the living tradition of this pope. They can’t erase that.”

It is indisputable, Jewish leaders say, that John Paul treated the worldwide Jewish community with more kindness than any previous pope.

He opened full diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel. He visited the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. And he repeatedly asked God’s forgiveness for past anti-Semitism by Christians, calling it a “sin against God and humanity.”

Yet it is also indisputable that John Paul did some things that bewildered Jewish leaders.

He set people along the path to sainthood whose life stories, many Jews felt, compromised the church’s outward opposition to anti-Semitism. He met with Yasser Arafat and bestowed a papal knighthood on Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary-general who had served with Nazi units. And he never fully made available to scholars archived documents on Pope Pius XII, whose actions during the Holocaust remain controversial.

Still, after his death, the overriding theme in statements by Jewish groups was that in all of papal history, nobody gave the Jews more respect, or repented more for past anti-Semitism, than did John Paul.

“The good so outweighed and overshadowed the problematic,” said Foxman, who met the pope eight times. “He apologized for anti-Semitism, called it a sin. He apologized for the role Christianity may have played in the Holocaust. All these things make the (negative) things pale,” he said.

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John Paul’s sensitivity to Jews was noted when he visited Poland in 1979 and stopped at Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp.

At a marker there commemorating Jewish Holocaust deaths, he said: “The very people that received from God the commandment `Thou shalt not kill’ itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference.”

In 1986, at the Great Synagogue in Rome, across the Tiber River from Vatican City, he hugged Rabbi Toaff and affectionately noted historic ties between their two religions.

“With JudaismâÂ?¦ we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion,” the pope said. “You are our dearly beloved brothers, and, in a certain way, it can be said that you are our elder brothers.”

Eight years later, in 1994, the Vatican established full diplomatic relations with Israel. In 1998, John Paul wrote a heartfelt preface to a Holocaust remembrance publication. And in 2000, he visited Israel and left a note in the Western Wall asking God’s forgiveness for past sins against Jews.

It was in this context that several other events of his papacy were viewed by Jews with consternation, including the 2000 beatification _ Catholicism’s penultimate step on the road to sainthood _ of Pope Pius IX, who in the mid-19th century had confined Jews in Rome to a ghetto.

There was also the 1982 canonization of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who gave his life for another inmate at Auschwitz but who also was known for earlier anti-Semitic writings.

Jewish leaders, and many Catholic scholars, also wanted the pope to provide unfettered access to Vatican archives so more information can be revealed about Pope Pius XII. There are Catholics who want Pius XII canonized, but critics say he did not try hard enough to defend Jews against the Nazis during the Holocaust.

“(John Paul’s) positives outweigh the negatives, but there were negatives,” Rudin said. “… When you weigh it, it’s not in any comparison to his positive achievements.”

Several of the papal decisions that upset Jews are explainable, at least in part, by the complexity of the pope’s role and its many different audiences, said William Madges, a theology professor at Xavier University who is helping run a long-planned exhibit in Cincinnati in May on John Paul’s relations with Jews.

An end result of John Paul’s papacy, say people active in interreligious dialogue, is that Catholic-Jewish relations are better than ever.

Nineteen years later at the Great Synagogue in Rome, the pope’s visit still resonates.

“I was next to (the pope) when he came to the synagogue. I touched him, they told me it was good luck,” said Angelo Pavoncello, a Jew who has lived in Rome his whole life. “He said the famous words, `You are our big brother.’ It was a big thing.”

“Many groups: Gentiles, many priests, nuns, they come to the synagogue,” added Pavoncello, 73.

“Never before they came. But since.”

(Jeff Diamant is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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