2 Friday, April 11, 1986
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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PURELY COMMENTARY
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Pope's Synagogue Visit In Rome: A Long-Awaited Prologue
ready begun to track down and
Will the visit on Sunday by Pope
John Paul II to the Rome Central
Synagogue mark an amending of old
grievances?
A history of persecutions is being re-
constructed in viewing the unusual
schedule for that visit.
It will be the first time since the
very beginnings of Roman Catholicism
that a Popp will have stepped into a
Jewish house of worship.
The question has been raised
whether the most persistent Jewish de-
mand upon the Vatican under the lead-
ership of John Paul II — recognition of
Israel — will be inspired. It is already
being dismissed in Israeli and Jewish
circles, yet it is a challenge that remains
alive.
Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff com-
mented upon the approaching Sunday's
historic event: "To build an edifice of re-
ciprocal understanding, one needs a lot
Pope John Paul II
of stone. In this case, the Papal visit sas-
sumes the dimensions of a pillar."
The Fifth Lateran Council in
The synagogue the Pope will,visit is
1215 decreed .that Jews must
one of three serving the Rome Jewish
wear "different dress" and
community of 20,000. Will the Pontiff
should be accused of deicide,
wear the Cross as a symbol of Chrisian-
•sacrilege and usury. The Council
ity and therefore be viewed as symboliz-
of Basel in 1434 established that
ing anti-Jewish acts performed in the
Jews could not attend university
Vatican's name? Expressing the hope
and Jewish doctors could not
that the Pope will refrain from using
treat Christians — though popes
that symbol, a Rome Jewish citizen said:
maintained an ambiguous rela-
"The Pope's white biretta, or mitre, will
tionship to their favorite Jews,
suffice as an obligatory head cover in a
using them both as personal doc-
synagogue."
tors and bankers, despite the
It should be indicated that Rome's
council's ruling.
20,000-member Jewish community, re-
In 1555, Pope Paul IV de-
siding along the Tiber River below Capi-
creed that all Jews must live in
tal Hill, is the oldest kehilla in the
the ghetto of Rome, separate
Western world. When Titus subdued the
from Christians.
Jewish nation in 70 BCE he exited many
It was only 20 years ago that
Jews to Rome as slaves.
the Second Vatican Council
Rabbi Toaff and, many of his
abolished . ' the accusation of
parishioners and fellow Roman Jews
deicide, arguing that Jews could
speak with frankness about the Papal
• not be held collectively responsi-
synagogue visit. They view it as
ble for the death of Christ. In
courageous. Yet they do not forget that
1959, Pope John XXIII, "the good
until 1848 the popes who governed Rome
Pope" who once ran from his car
forced the Jewish community's rabbi on
to bless Jews coming out of a
the last Sunday of carnival to kneel be-
Rome synagogue, ordered his
fore him and offer a bouquet of flowers
church to drop from the Good
with an envelope containing a monetary
Friday liturgy the offensive
tribute. The so-called "voluntary tax"
phrase "perfidious Jews" used
was accepted with "traditional kick in
by popes, bishops and priests
the pants" from a booted foot, in the
from centuries to denounce Jews
Pope's presence.
for having crucified Christ.
In a revealing article in the Chicago
And for decades Jews have
Tribune (March 23), Uli Schmetzer
pointed the finger of accusation
quotes Chief Rabbi Toaff in relatioTh
at Pope Pius XII for his failure to
that humiliation:
denounce the Nazi Holocaust.
"When one of my predecessors, the
The Vatican has tried in vain to
Rabbi Modigliani, begged to be-exempted
whitewash the image of Pius,
from this painful duty because he was
who was the first Vatican nuncio
too old and ill, the reply was, 'Then send
in Berlin between 1920 and 1929
a younger man.' "
before he became pope.
In hig important historical review of
In 1965, Pope Paul VI tried to
Jewish experiences, Schmetzer gives
defend Pius during a visit to the
these accounts of Jews under Papal -op-
Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem.
pression:
. . .
In Renaissance days, when
popes ruled Rome with an iron
fist, Jews were fed pasta, ordered
to strip to the waist and whipped
to make them run down the cen-
tral Via del Corso to the delight
of carnival crowds. The pontiff of
the day usually watched from a
balcony.
When popes made their
triumphal entry into Rome after
being chosen in conclave in the
old days, they expected a gar-
landed Jew converted to Chris-
tianity to greet them from below
the Arch of Titus, symbol of the
subjugation of the Jewish people.
The practice prompted a popular
Roman saying, "It's always the
Pf11e, conver t 1!1091' the arc h. .....
baptism to save the child for its
Jewish religion or was his action
prompted by prejudice?
The name of the priest, the
rabbi said, was Karol Wojtyla,
now Pope John Paul II.
Why recall and remember these
facts?
It is like the cringing who ask now,
"Why keep emphasizing the Holocaust?"
It is because history will not be
erased and will not be forgotten, and in
the interest of continuing the aims of
bringing humanism into the hearts of
humanists, the historical recollections
must not be shunned.
The Chicago Tribune renders a serv-
ice by reconstructing some of the events
in the long history of Papal discrimina-
tion. There were the saintly among them
who rejected the prejudices. The fair-
minded also will be remembered.
Exemplary was the firm stand that
was taken by Cardinal Lorenzo Gan-
ganelli who later became Pope Clement
XIV. He presented an encyclical in
which the ritual murder charge against
the Jews was branded infamous and
false. (See "The Ritual Murder Libel" by
Philip Slomovitz, Commonweal, March 5,
1937.)
Facts are facts. The evil is as in-
erasable as the ecumenically blessed.
Hopefully, the synagogue visit of
Pope John Paul II will be a road toward
unending bridging of the most human
and honorable among all faiths and na-
tions.
Dubnow Admonition
Perpetuated In
Gilbert's 'Holocaust'
A duty expressed as "Never Forget,"
in the "Always Remember" commitment,
finds new moral power and sentimental
consideration in The Holocaust: A His-
tory of the Jews of Europe During the
Second World War (Holt, Rinehart and
Winston).
It is the monumental work that con-
tains the tragic record of the horrors,
with an emphatic consideration of the
Jewish shocks and sufferings. It is the
eminent authors admonition to mankind,
contained in the title of the Epilogue: "I
will tell the world." He does just that
and he calls to witness those who are
fused in the indictments as well as in
the personal commitments that the guilt
should be punished and never erased
from memory.
Gilbert not only "tells the world" but
documents every assertion in his accusa-
tions and fact-finding. He does not
whitewash. He doesn't exonerate where
the crimes are so evident. In his treat-
ment of the Nazi era he points the accus-
ing finger at Germany. In the immediacy
He was jeered and insulted by
of the post-war era he exposes the Polish
the crowd.
crimes.
Even the current Pope has
There has been a tendency to refer
not totally escaped the stigma of
to the horrors which accumulated into
anti-Semitism. Rabbi Toaff told
the Holocaust testimony to speak and
the story of a Polish priest who
write only about Nazis. Gilbert does not
refused to baptize a child given
equivocate. He deals with Germans and
to the care of a Catholic couple
identifies them. He raises the question of
by. a Jewish couple being de-
vengeance and in that aspect he makes
ported to a Nazi concentration
this documented declaration exposing
camp during World War II.
the guilty as they were:
The priest said the child
On May 10, 1945 in Flensburg
could not be baptized — and thus
naval hospital, SS General
converted to Christianity — un-
Richard Glueks, head of the con-
less he was sure its parents were
centration camp directorate, was
dead. The parents survived. They
found dead. It was not clear
were located many years later in
whether Glueks had committed
the United Stites. •
suicide, or had been killed by
The rabbi's story left the
the priest -refus e - ------
- "Jewish
- avengers" who had al-
to kill a number of those who
had carried out the policy of
mass murder.
A small amount of vengeance
there undoubtedly was, but ven-
geance was the path of a minor-
ity. "Sometimes," Israel Gutman,
a survivor of Majdanek, Au-
schwitz and Gunskirchen has
written, the "desire and expecta-
tion of revenge" were the "hope"
that kept camp .inmates alive
"during the final and most ardu-
ous stages of camp life," but,
once the war was over, "we find
only a few cases of revenge, or
organized vengeful activity on
the part of the survivors. As Dr.
Zalman Grinberg, a survivor of
the Kovno ghetto • and the death
marches, told those survivors
who were still living in huts in
Dachau on. May 27, nearly a
month after liberation, but a day
nevertheless on which thirty-five
Jews had died as a result of con-
tinuing illness and weakness:
"Hitler has lost every battle
on every front except the battle
against defenseless and unarmed
men, women and children. He
won the war against the Jews of
Europe. He carried out this war
with the help of the German na-
tion.
"However, we do not want
revenge. If 'we took this ven-
geance it would mean we would
fall to the depths of ethics and
morals the German nation has
been in these past ten years.
.
"We are not able to slaughter
women and children! We are not
able to burn millions of people!
We are not able to starve hun-
dreds of thousands!"
The urgency throughout the judg-
ment of the guilty is not only to re-
member but also to retain the records of
the horrors.
That is who' "Write and record," the
last words of the murdered historian
Simon Dubnow, remain the guidelines
for action.
In recalling the martyrdom of Dub-
now, Gilbert provides a partial account
of what the Germans did in the Riga
Ghetto where the historian was
humiliated and murdered. Gilbert also
appeals for retaining the records:
German Jews were also de-
ported to Riga and Kovno. On
November 27 the first' of nineteen
trains left the Reich for Riga: it
came from Berlin. Even as this
train was on its way from Berlin,
the Riga ghetto was the object of
a massive raid, during which
10,600 Jews were seized, taken to
pits in the nearby Rumbuli for-
est, and shot. When the train
from Berlin arrived a few days
later, most of the thousand Ger-
man Jews were likewise taken
out to Rumbuli, and killed. Then,
in a second, three-day raid on the
Riga ghetto, from December 7 to
December 9, a further twenty-five
thousand Riga Jews were killed,
among them the eighty-one -
year-old doyen of Jewish histo-
rians, Simon Dubnow.
According • to one ac co unt,
Dubnow.was murdered by a Ges-
tapo officer who had formerly
been one of his pupils. Another
account tells of how, sick and
with a fever, with enfeebled legs,
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