Friendship with Jews affirmed at Israel’s Holocaust memorial

On Sunday, Pope Francis made an emotional visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, meeting survivors of what he called a “boundless tragedy” as he sought further to repair relations between the Church and the Jewish community, writes James Macintyre.

The Pope drew on the book of Genesis for his short address at the museum, saying: “In this place … we hear God’s question echo once more: ‘Adam, where are you?’… Here we are, Lord, shamed by what man, created in your own image and likeness, was capable of doing.” He met six Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem, kissing the hand of each.

On Tuesday the Pope reportedly said on the plane back from the Holy Land that the beatification process of Pope Pius XII, seen by many Jews as having done too little to try to prevent the Holocaust, had “stalled” in the absence of a confirmed miracle.

Francis further reached out to the community when he addressed rabbis at Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, and visited the Western Wall, for Jews the world’s most revered site, where he placed a hand-written Lord’s Prayer in the wall and read a chapter from the Song of Songs with the Western Wall’s Rabbi, Shmuel Rabinovitch.