Karol Wojtyla and the Jews

Karol Wojtyla, who later became the late Pope John Paul II, grew up in prewar Poland.

People today forget - or perhaps neve rknew - the anti-semitism that was ingrained in the Catholic faith for many centuries. During the middle ages, jews frequently had more economic, religious and personal freedom in the Moslem middle east than in the mostly-Catholic west. During World War II, it was remarked that many Polish Catholics would rather kill a Jew than a Nazi; Jews escaping from the Ghettos and camps in Poland faced a gauntlet of corrosively anti-semitic Poles between them and liberty, or indeed survival. Many of the Righteous Among the Nations honored at Yad Vashem are Poles that ran the double risk of death at the hands of the Germans and betrayal by their own countrymen and coreligionists.

This, from the story of Antoni Gawrylkiewicz, a Polish teenager credited with rescuing 16 Jews:

. In the words of Prof. Eliach: "Countless times he would open the entrance to our pit and throw in food during the most dangerous circumstances." When Zipporah Sonenson gave birth to a baby boy, named Hayyim, while in hiding in a stable in June 1944, Antony quickly placed him in a basket and brought him together with his father and others to a Christian family for safekeeping. As the danger of detection increased, Antoni moved his wards to a new shelter, in the village of Lebednik, leading them at night over a 5 kilometer stretch.

Suspected of hiding Jews, Antoni was apprehended by a Polish underground unit, and sustained severe beatings for refusing to disclose the presence of the hidden Jews. As a result, he remained bedridden for days, recovering from his wounds. Gawrylkiewicz also helped other Jews who came to at night begging for food, and he would share with them the food he had brought for himself while tending his herd. Travails for the rescued persons did not stop with liberation, for Yaffa's mother and baby-brother Hayyim were murdered by members of a Polish underground unit in their grandmother's house in Eishyshok. Yaffa Eliach sadly comments: "Unfortunately, Antoni was not there to save us."

Pope Pius, the wartime pontiff, was fairly useless in illuminating the Holocaust. And until Vatican II, there was considerable anti-semitic language in the Catholic liturgy.

And so Pope John Paul II's actions were of more profound import than perhaps today's American media can comprehend.

The Jerusalam Post has no such handicap in its remembrance of the late Pontiff:"The Jewish People will remember John Paul II as someone who courageously stood up and put an end to an historic injustice when he officially disavowed the prejudices and accusations – for which our people and our faith had suffered from venomous anti-Semitism, persecutions and bloodshed – against the Jews that had multiplied in Catholic church writings and amongst its believers. He also initiated and fostered an enhanced and fruitful dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, and between Israel and the Vatican."

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom issued a statement saying that "Israel, the Jewish people and the entire world, lost today a great champion of reconciliation and brotherhood between the faiths."

"On behalf of the government and people of Israel, we extend our condolences to the Catholic Church and the flock of Pope John Paul II," Shalom said.

"This is a great loss, first and foremost for the Catholic Church and its hundreds of millions of believers, but also for humanity as a whole. I had the privilege of meeting with His Holiness twice, and I was deeply impressed by his insights and his unique humanity. The State of Israel joins all those who mourn his loss."For this alone, John Paul II was an epochal figure.

Scott Johnson's articulate elegy is along similar lines.

Posted by Mitch at April 3, 2005 11:58 AM | TrackBack