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The current Pope has signed a decree heroic virtues for two previous popes: his predecessor, John Paul II, and Pius XII, who was pope during the Second World War. This is one step before beatification. Predictably, some Jews have already pointed out why they wouldn’t make Pius XII a saint–most historians believe he did little to save Jews from the Nazis.
Deborah Dwork, a historian and Holocaust expert at Clark University, and Rabbi Eric Greenberg, who runs interfaith work at the Anti-Defamation League, wrote an editorial condemning the move as an attack on Jews. Further, the editorial discusses and dismisses historians arguing that Pius XII did more behind the scenes to save Jewish lives than he seemed to have done in public. The Catholic League responded with another editorial that called Dwork and Greenberg’s criticism “unseemly” and pointed out all the things Pius XII was known to have done to save Jews. (To me, it’s not all that impressive, but you read it and see what you think.)
Tracking the issue of Catholic-Jewish relations for this blog has been very interesting for me. I grew up post-Vatican II and most of my adult life has been during the papacy of John Paul II, the pope who did the most to foster positive relations between Catholics and Jews of any pope, ever. The current papacy has made a series of missteps with relation to Catholic-Jewish relations–and people in my generation did not expect them, I think.
It’s true Pope Benedict XVI is German and a voice on the right on Church matters, but he was completely on board with John Paul’s gestures to the Jewish community–in fact, he was the one who prepared a definitive church document, Memory and Reconciliation, that outlines the Church’s responsibility in past anti-Jewish violence. We had reason to expect him to continue in the same line. Ruth Ellen Gruber’s JTA article, After Pius move, Pope Benedict practices delicate Jewish dance, outlines the back and forth of recent papal decisions.
I really don’t know the truth about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. No one does, because the documents historians want to see to find out are in closed Vatican archives. It’s possible that the current pope knows something we don’t. I was trained as a historian and even if I weren’t Jewish I would probably be on Deborah Dwork’s side about opening those archives.
[float=left][/float]I was so thrilled to learn from a recent piece in the Tablet that Antonio Sabato Jr. was actually Jewish! Sabato is best known for his work as the gorgeous Calvin Klein underwear model and actor on General Hospital. (Photo by Jerry Avenaim used under a Creative Commons license.)
Sabato’s mother, Yvonne, is Jewish but did not discover her heritage until she was an adult. Her mother hid her Jewish identity and sent Yvonne to Catholic school. The family had also moved from Prague to Italy. Antonio’s grandparents and uncle were killed in Auschwitz during the Shoah.
In the Tablet Sabato describes his upbringing as “very liberal, Judaism, and Catholicism. He does hope to visit Israel with his mother. (What a good Jewish son!) For now, Sabato is starring on his own reality series, My Antonio in which his mother helps him find true love.
I met Wyman Brent on Twitter–he’s a librarian, which already biased me in his favor. Today he posted to tell his Twitter followers, “Tomorrow at 12 I sign agreement for Vilnius Jewish Library. 1st real Jewish library in Lithuania since war.” In an article in the Baltic Times, “Making the Vilnius Jewish Library a Reality,” he explained,
“It’s kind of strange because I’m not Jewish and I’m not of Lithuanian descent,” said Brent.
There is still a small Jewish community in Vilnius, once called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. (In Yiddish, it’s called Vilna.) This is very interesting to me as a person working for an organization that serves interfaith Jewish families, since most of the small remnant of the formerly vibrant and large communities in Eastern Europe are in such families. And also — it’s Vilna, where Hirsch Glik wrote the stirring song of resistance with the chorus, “Mir zaynen doh” — we are here.
Another web resource about small Jewish communities is the Small Synagogues website, http://www.smallsynagogues.com/. It contains the sweet stories of synagogues in small towns like Abilene, Texas and Sheboygan, Wisc. I really liked the warm tone of Sherry Levine Zander’s articles. That, too, has overlap with the lives of a lot of children of interfaith families who grew up as the only Jews in small towns.
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I learned while I was doing the research for our Jewish Holidays Cheat Sheet that the reason it falls now is that the Israeli government wanted the commemoration of the Holocaust to be tied to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I just read a beautiful book about Catholic Poles who hid Jews in Warsaw during the war, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and another, more recent book about the heroic effort of archivists to preserve a record of the Warsaw ghetto, Who Will Write Our History? by Samuel Kassow. The story of something as huge and overwhelming as the Shoah is only accessible in small piece, individual stories.
Such a story is contained in the film Out of Faith, a documentary about the life of a Holocaust survivor and her relationship with her grandchildren in interfaith marriages. When the film was first released, we published a review of the film, an essay by the director of the film, Lisa Leeman and an essay the producer of the film, L. Marc DeAngelis. They had contrasting perspectives on interfaith marriage and how the Jewish community should deal with it. Leeman is herself the child of an interfaith marriage. Continue reading