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October 17, 2003/Tishri 21 5764, Vol. 56, No. 4
Pope's reign advances Jewish-Catholic relations
RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
ROME - Twenty-five years ago this month, white smoke billowed from a chimney above the Vatican to signal the election of a new pope - Karol Wojtyla, the 58-year-old archbishop of Krakow, the first pontiff ever chosen from Poland and the first non-Italian to sit on the papal throne in 456 years.
Wojtyla, who took the name John Paul II to honor his immediate predecessor, was slated to mark the silver anniversary of his election on Oct. 16.
Now 83 and visibly marked by age and illness, he has left a decisive mark on the world, on Catholicism and, in particular, on the long-troubled relations between Catholics and Jews.
Today, despite some lin-gering tensions and un-resolved issues - including conflicting views of the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II - many Jewish observers say John Paul II will be remembered as the best pope the Jews ever had.
Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Com-mittee's international director for interreligious affairs, describes John Paul's contributions to Catholic-Jewish reconciliation as "unique and historic."
The pope, he said, "has had the courage and vision to take the Catholic-Jewish rela-tionship on to a new level of deeper dialogue, in which the relationship with the Jewish people is seen within the Catholic world as being something that is at the root and heart of Christian identity itself."
John Paul II was elected to the papacy only 13 years after the Vatican's historic Nostra Aetate declaration opened the way toward Jewish-Catholic dialogue. That declaration, issued in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII, condemned anti-Semitism and for the first time officially repudiated the age-old assertion that the "perfidious Jews" were collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
John Paul's papacy expanded on the Nostra Aetate, and in Jewish terms it has been marked by dramatic "firsts" - starting with the pontiff's own personal history. Perhaps most importantly, he was an eyewitness both to the Holocaust and to the oppressive and often anti-Semitic policies of totalitarian communism.
Born in 1920 in the southern Polish town of Wadowice, near Krakow, Wojtyla grew up at a time when Poland was the heartland of European Jewry.
During World War II, Poland became the Nazis' main killing field. Half of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Polish Jews. Wojtyla himself worked in a Nazi slave labor camp and studied for the priest-hood clandestinely.
Given this history, it was highly symbolic that in 1979, on John Paul's first visit to Poland after his election as pope, he knelt in prayer at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a sign of commemoration for the Jews killed there.
The most dramatic of his many meetings with Jews took place in April 1986, when he left the Vatican and crossed the Tiber River to visit the Great Synagogue in Rome, becoming the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship since the apostle Peter, considered the first pope.
At the end of 1993, the pope took another unprecedented step, overseeing the formal establishment of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican, 45 years after the founding of the Jewish state.
The pope's visit to Israel in March 2000 was historic. He visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, and at the Western Wall he bowed his head in prayer.
But the pope's Mideast visit was not without its low points. When he visited Syria, some criticized the pope for remaining passive when President Bashar Assad engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Other issues also have continued to pester Catholic-Jewish ties, including differences over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, whom the Vatican wants to beatify but whom critics accuse of ignoring pleas to save Jews during the Holocaust.
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