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Pope falls short of Shoah apology
By Elli Wohlgelernter

JERUSALEM (March 24) - Half a century after one pope refrained from condemning the destruction of European Jewry, his successor stood at the very epicenter of remembrance to pay tribute yesterday to the six million who died.

And while the words of Pope John Paul II at Yad Vashem elicited equal shares of praise and criticism, there was no denying the historic sight of the pontiff's emotional visit to the country's memorial to the victims of the Shoah.

"I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust," the pope said. "More than half a century has passed, but the memories remain."

The 79-year-old pontiff was clearly touched by those recollections, noting that "my own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war."

After rekindling the eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance at the start of the ceremony, the pope leaned on his cane while staring down at the light for a half-minute lost in thought, or perhaps prayer.

His nine-minute speech broke no new ground in the realm of theology, but his historic presence at Yad Vashem was nevertheless seen by his supporters as the culmination of his 22-year campaign to reconcile Catholics and Jews.

"As bishop of Rome and successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution, and displays of antisemitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place," he said. "The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the creator inherent in every human being."

Prime Minister Ehud Barak - who spoke of his grandparents Elka and Shmuel Godin, who were sent from Warsaw to their deaths in Treblinka - hailed the pontiff's efforts in Christian-Jewish relations.

"You have done more than anyone else to bring about the historic change in the attitude of the Church toward the Jewish people... and to dress the gaping wounds that festered over many bitter centuries.

"And I think I can say, Your Holiness, that your coming here today... is a climax of this historic journey of healing."

But the failure of the pope to explicitly apologize for the silence of his predecessor, Pius XII, which many Jews had sought and were expecting, evoked another round of criticism.

"This apology was quite fine... but I wait for chapter No. 2," said Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau, adding that, while he realizes the pope could not criticize Pius XII, John Paul should have addressed the Church's silence.

"We need the condemning of the silence of some during World War II - not for the victims, not for the survivors even, but for the future, for the young generations to come," Lau said.

Barak also made a veiled reference to the silence of the Vatican during the Holocaust, noting that when the Jews "were led from all over Christian Europe to the crematoria and the gas chambers, it seemed that no longer could one place any hope in God or man... And the silence was not only from the heavens."

Indeed, the pontiff began his talk speaking of silence.

"In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence, because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah."

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said, "The last thing we need from popes is silence. The pope should have condemned the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust."

Zuroff also criticized the pope for saying that "only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people," and for his statement: "Let us build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews."

"To blame a godless ideology is to totally shirk responsibility for the teachings of the Catholic Church, which helped create the conditions which made the Holocaust possible," Zuroff said. He added that John Paul "created a symmetry that doesn't exist in reality between anti-Jewish feelings by Christians and anti-Christian feelings by Jews."

Prof. Yisrael Gutman, chief historian at Yad Vashem and one of the six survivors chosen to meet the pope during the ceremony, said that, nevertheless, the pope's visit was "very important. I've followed his work for many many years, and I am very impressed by him as a person... and the way that he consequently is doing his work in this way of more understanding, of cooperation, of respect for people, and a very, very great interest in Jewishness, in Jewish destiny, and a new way of relations between Jews and non-Jews."

(News agencies contributed to this report.)