1OPINION

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CONTENTS

The Church Still Needs
To Do Much More

MARC H. TANENBAUM

Special to The Jewish News

T

wenty-five years ago
this month, Roman
Catholic hierarchies
from throughout the world
adopted at Vatican Council
II "Nostra Aetate," or "In
Our Time," the historic
declaration that launched
the most dramatic changes
in 1,900 years of Catholic-
Jewish relations.
Next month, international
Catholic and Jewish leaders
are scheduled to meet in
Vatican City with Pope John
Paul II to assess the progress
made during these 25 years
in improving ties between
Catholics and Jews. They
will also examine the prob-
lems that still bedevil

Poland is Exhibit A
of that destructive
pathology which
witnesses
anti-Semitism
flourishing without
Jews.

Catholic-Jewish understan-
ding.
Contrary to some critics,
the achievements have been
significant and encouraging
to anyone open to the im-
pressive evidence of positive
changes. Catholic textbooks
have been revised so that
anti-Semitic references have
been virtually eliminated in
school texts used in the
United States, parts of
Europe and Latin America.
Liturgies and sermons have
rejected anti-Jewish themes.
Catholics and Jews coop-
erate increasingly in a wide
range of social justice efforts.
Cardinals, bishops, priests,
nuns and lay people have
taken part in Holocaust
observances and have mar-
ched in demonstrations to
liberate Soviet Jews — and
Christians.
The record justifies the oft-
repeated judgment that
greater progress has been
made in overcoming
misunderstanding and in

Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum,
the former director of interna-
tional and interreligious af-
fairs of the American Jewish
Committee, was the only rabbi
present at Vatican Council II,
as a guest observer.

building mutual respect and
friendship during these 25
years than throughout the
past 1,900 years.
But hovering over this
historic change are uncer-
tainties and reservations. I
do not speak of the obvious
public issues of establishing
full diplomatic relations
between the Holy See and
the State of Israel, nor of the
Vatican's reflex defense of
its relative silence in the
face of the Nazi campaign to
exterminate the Jews. These
issues are maturing in
Catholic circles, and I think
they will be resolved in the
not-too-distant future.
The critical underlying
issue still to be confronted is
the recognition by Christian
authorities that anti-
Semitism in Western society
is as much psychopatho-
logical as it is theological. In
his recent study, "Anti-
Semitism — A Disease of the
Mind," psychiatrist Dr.
Theodore Isaac Rubin writes,
"Anti-Semitism is a non-
organic disease of the mind
. . . a malignant emotional ill-
ness. People sick with this
disease can be very dangerous
and even murderous but are
not treated accordingly."
Unless the social-
psychological dynamic of an-
ti-Semitism as a sickness is
grasped and dealt with
therapeutically, theological
fine-tuning in imagery and
language could ultimately
become just a surface repair
of uncertain duration.
The psychopathology I
speak of begins with the
systematic demonization of
Jews and Judaism in the
sermons and treatises of the
Church Fathers in the first
four centuries of this era.
Thus, the "golden-tongued"
St. John Chrysostom in his
notorious four sermons
delivered in Aleppo in 387
CE brutally attacked the
synagogue as "the work of
Satan," a "house of prostitu-
tion," and urged that Jews
be packed into their houses
of worship and destroyed.
Church Father Eusebius,
the great historian of
Caesarea in the fourth cen-
tury, wrote two massive
works — Preparatio
Evangelica and Demon-
stratio Evangelica — in
which he formulated one of
the first systematic
theologies of the displace-
ment and rejection of

Continued on Page 11

CLOSEUP

28

Never-Ending Question

ADRIEN CHANDLER

Adoptees puzzle over their past
and ask, "Who am I?"

FOCUS

45

PR or Policy

JAMES D. BESSER
Does Israel need a better case,
or need to make its case better?

ELECTION '90

28

51

Three Portraits

PHIL JACOBS &
KIMBERLY LIFTON

A look at two incumbents
and a behind-the-scenes power.

BUSINESS

57

Mystic Phoenix

MELANIE KOFF
Herb Amster has turned around
an Ann Arbor-based computer firm.

SPORTS

67

Top-Class

MIKE ROSENBAUM
The Koenigs are Andover
leaders, on and off the field.

FINE ARTS

Place Of Their Own

51

77

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Twenty-eight local artists
open their own gallery.

EDUCATION

102

Kids' Cause

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Lunch time is activism time
for these local students.

DEPARTMENTS

15
20
33
37
61
62

Detroit
Notebook
Inside Washington
Background
Community
Synagogues

94
106
110
114
119
146

Cooking
Lifestyles
Births
Single Life
Classified Ads
Obituaries

CANDLELIGHTING

102

Friday, October 26, 1990
6:17 p.m.
Sabbath ends October 27 7:17 p.m.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

7