An American rabbi who led a campaign against a Catholic convent at the Auschwitz concentration camp has urged the Pope to close a church at the nearby Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, extermination centre. “As a rabbi, I have deep respect for all places of worship - but I also feel Christian houses of worship do not belong at what is in effect the largest Jewish cemetery in the world,” said Rabbi Avraham Weiss. “It’s within the power of Pope Francis, who has shown himself a great friend to the Jewish community, to order the congregation to leave. The building should become a museum, specific to Birkenau, showing how the Nazis carried out their atrocities there. The large crosses in front and on top should be removed.”
The Jewish activist, who is senior rabbi at the Hebrew Institute at Riverdale in New York, published his appeal in the Washington Post after seventieth anniversary commemorations of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz were attended in southern Poland by government and church leaders from around the world.
He added that St John Paul II had ordered the controversial Carmelite convent to close in 1993 after a five-year protest campaign, but said the church constituted “another affront”.
“It’s up to people of moral conscience to raise a voice for the sake of Holocaust memory and declare loud and clear: a church has no place at Auschwitz II,” continued the rabbi, who was stripped and held by Polish police during a 1995 sit-in at the church.
The Polish Church’s Catholic information agency, KAI, said the church of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, had opened in 1982 by agreement with the country’s communist regime. However, it added that the building, outside the camp’s electric fence, had been unfinished in 1945 and had never been used by Nazi officials.
Loading ...
