The Director of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) has said the organisation’s founding values are ever more relevant, in order to foster cooperation between communities.
Speaking to The Tablet, as the CCJ opened a year-long celebration to mark its 75th anniversary, Elizabeth Harris-Sawczenko said the rise of nationalism and intolerance around the world meant that people looked for scapegoats when things got difficult.
“This is an important anniversary for CCJ. The founding of CCJ in October 1942, was an important act of moral and later practical defiance against the rise of Nazism. With anti-semitism at its heart, that made it essential for people of faith to work together against this unprecedented evil.
“Three quarters of a century later, CCJ’s founding values are ever more relevant: valuing difference, promoting understanding, demonstrating empathy and respect, and challenging prejudice.”
CCJ was Britain’s first national interfaith network. A previous director, Sr Margaret Shepherd, said Catholics could help the Jewish community combat anti-semitism, through gestures of solidarity – citing a recent expression of sympathy from Bishop Kevin McDonald, chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations, to a Leeds synagogue that had been attacked.
Bishop McDonald urged Catholics living in areas where there are Jewish communities to reach out in friendship. He told The Tablet: “When you meet someone of a different faith you are going into a whole other world: be open to it and engage. Vatican II’s declaration Nostra Aetate confirms our rootedness in Judaism: they are our elder brothers and sisters.”
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