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Saintly Friend
Brooklyn Jew played key role
for Pope John Paul II.
Ruth Ellen Gruber
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
SHOES
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Rome
eoo
W
hen hundreds of thousands
of people converge on the
Vatican for the beatifica-
tion of Pope John Paul II on May 1, a
Brooklyn-born Jewish orchestra conductor
will have an honored place among them.
Gilbert Levine, whose grandparents
emigrated from Poland and whose mother-
in-law was a survivor of Auschwitz, is a dis-
tinguished conductor who has performed
with leading orchestras in North America,
Europe and Israel.
For 17 years, Levine enjoyed a unique,
and unlikely, relationship with the Polish-
born John Paul, one that led him in 1994
to become the first American Jew to be
granted a papal knighthood. Levine says it
also played a role in his deciding to become
more involved in his own Judaism; he now
attends an Orthodox synagogue.
The connection between the pontiff and
the maestro had much to do with the fos-
tering of Jewish-Catholic relations that was
a cornerstone of John Paul's papacy. But
it had little to do with formal meetings or
dialogue sessions.
Instead, from 1988 until John Paul's
death in 2005 at the age of 84, Levine
worked closely with the Polish pope to pro-
duce a series of landmark classical music
concerts at the Vatican and elsewhere.
Their aim was to use music as a tool to fos-
ter religious dialogue and reconciliation.
"The pope ennobled and enabled me to
think that this was a mission that I should
take with me for the rest of my life,' Levine
told JTA.`And I do, very gladly'
The performances included the unprece-
dented Papal Concert to Commemorate the
Shoah, held at the Vatican on Yom HaShoah
in 1994.
At the beginning of the concert, which
featured the recitation of Kaddish by the
actor Richard Dreyfuss, six Holocaust sur-
vivors lit six candles — one representing
each of the 6 million Jewish victims. One of
the survivors was Levine's mother-in-law,
Margit, who was born in Czechoslovakia
and had lost 40 members of her family in
the Holocaust.
The pope "believed that wordless prayer
was incredibly important, and I believe that
music gave voice to that wordless prayer,"
Levine said."I think he understood and
came to understand through me that art
can do a tremendous amount:'
Levine recounted the story of his years
working with John Paul in an intensely
personal memoir titled The Pope's Maestro,
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Pope John Paul II and Gilbert Levine in
an undated photo.
which was published last fall. The book
traces a relationship that Cardinal
Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul's longtime
secretary, termed "a deep, spiritual friend-
ship:'
"If a Jewish kid from Brooklyn can have
a spiritual friendship with the pope, then
the world can learn something',' Levine
said in a video presentation about the
book.
The friendship began in 1988, in the
waning days of communism, when John
Paul summoned Levine to a private audi-
ence at the Vatican shortly after Levine
had become director of the philharmonic
orchestra in John Paul's beloved Krakow,
the city that had been his archdiocese
before he became pope in 1978.
From the early days of his pontificate,
John Paul had signaled that outreach to the
Jewish world would be one of his priorities.
Born Karol Wojtyla in the small town of
Wadowice in 1920, John Paul had Jewish
friends and neighbors, and he was an eye-
witness to both the Holocaust and totalitar-
ian communism.
In 1986, he crossed the Tiber River
to Rome's Great Temple to become the
first pope to enter a synagogue. There he
embraced Rome's chief rabbi and paid
respects to Jews as Christianity's "elder
brothers in faith:'
A few years later, John Paul oversaw the
establishment of diplomatic relations with
Israel, and in 2000 visited the Jewish state.
John Paul's death triggered an unprec-
edented outpouring of tribute from Jews.
Levine said his bond with the pope
affected his own Jewish identity. "My sense
of Judaism became much more powerful,"
he said. "The pope honored my Judaism
and the faith of our family so deeply and
so honestly, from his heart, that it really
just opened us up to our Jewish faith and
heritage even more than it was before." II
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