Church mourns ‘dynamic’ Jewish community

Poland’s CHURCH has urged its priests and parishes to do more to maintain their country’s estimated 1,000 Jewish synagogues and cemeteries, still surviving 70 years after the Holocaust.

“History’s tragic events have meant the Jewish space in Poland virtually no longer exists. Although it faced extermination during the Second World War, it is nevertheless a vital component of Jewish and Polish memory,” the Polish bishops’ Commission for Dialogue with Judaism said in a statement. “We often don’t realise that, in our localities and neighbourhoods, Jews lived, worked and created as our elder brothers in faith and our co-citizens. Our duty as Christians is to nurture and safeguard their memory and pass it on to our children and grandchildren.”

The appeal was issued during the Church’s annual Judaism Day in Poland, which is now home to just 10,000 Jews, compared with 3.5 million before the 1939-45 Nazi occupation. It said Jews had found refuge in Poland for 1,000 years, and helped create “a unique culture and spiritual climate”, despite periods of “distrust ... and conflict”. “Let this common memory be a call to preserve these traces of the Polish-Jewish past,” said the commission, headed by Lublin auxiliary Bishop Mieczyslaw Cislo.

“Perhaps an old synagogue, Jewish cemetery or mass grave of Holocaust victims hasn’t faded entirely from memory and can still be restored – let’s not allow these signs of life and faith to disappear from the face of the Earth,” the commission said.

* The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, was a milestone, Jewish theologian Edward Kessler underlined at a symposium at Vienna University on the declaration’s 50th anniversary, Christa Pongratz-Lippitt writes. “Jesus was a devout Jew. His mother was not Catholic, but a Jewish woman,” Dr Kessler said.