The Pope Who Turned Anti-Semitism Aside

The Boston Globe ^ | Apr. 7, 2005 | Jeff Jacoby

[Zivasmate]

THE POPE WHO TURNED ANTISEMITISM ASIDE By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe

Thursday, April 7, 2005

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/07/the_pope_who_turned_anti_semitism_aside/

As a young boy in the 1930s, my father attended public school in Snina, a town in eastern Czechoslovakia. Twice a week, a Catholic priest would come in to teach the catechism, during which the few children who were Jewish were sent to wait outside. As they left the classroom, my father recalls, the priest invariably made some insulting remark about the Jewish people.

For Jews in the Europe of my father's youth, such Christian contempt was a fact of life. Its origins lay in the church's ancient claim that God had rejected the Jews when they rejected Jesus and that his covenant with Israel had been superseded by a new covenant with a "new Israel" -- namely, the Christian church. This 'teaching of contempt fed an often virulent anti-Semitism, which created the climate for Europe's long history of persecuting Jews. Sixty-five years ago that history culminated in the Holocaust.

Yet not every priest in that era treated Jews with disdain.

Consider the story of Moses and Helen Hiller, a Jewish couple in Nazi-occupied Poland who entrusted their 2-year-old son to a Catholic family named Jachowicz in November of 1942. The Hillers begged their friends to keep their child safe -- and, should they not survive, to send him to family members abroad who would bring him up as a Jew. Soon after, the Hillers were deported to Auschwitz. They never returned.

The Jachowiczes came to love the little boy as their own and decided, when the war was over, to adopt him. Mrs. Jachowicz asked a young priest in Krakow to baptize the child, explaining that he had been born Jewish and that his

[Zivasmate]

Orthodox Jewish folks don't generally refer much to leaders of other religions, but in this case, do we have a choice. We have lost a wonderful human being and a historic person.

[ambrose]

bump!

[Jersey Republican Biker Chick]

Beautiful article. Thank you for posting.