The Pope can't call Gaza a genocide. It isn't, insists Bruck - a 93-year old Holocaust survivor.

"Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide" Bruck told Italian media.

What the Pope said about Gaza

The Pope's comments about Gaza came in recently published extracts from a new book devoted to the Jubilee Year of 2025, titled Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Towards a Better World.

"According to some experts, what's happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide" Francis wrote. "Attentive investigation is needed to determine if it fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organisms."

Bruck says Francis uses the term genocide "too easily".

Doing so, she said "diminishes the gravity of true genocide… genocide is what happened to the Armenians. Genocide is the million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, along with five million other Jews also burned in the concentration camps".

For genocide to be happening, Israel would have to have the extermination of the Palestinian population on its agenda. But while the bloodshed in Gaza is a "tragedy that concerns everyone", extermination is not Israel's intention.

In fact, Hamas is the only party to the conflict that has spoken of genocide and has vowed to destroy the Jewish people throughout the world, she said.

What the Pope should say

In Bruck's view, Francis should be more outspoken against what she called a "tsunami" of anti-Semitism washing across Europe.

"I'd like the Pope to raise his voice on the subject, but I don't hear it the way I would like" she said.

Bruck, who once received Pope Francis in her Rome apartment and later wrote a book about the experience - to which Francis contributed the foreword, said she'd tell him what she thinks when he phones her for her birthday, as he has done since they met.

"I'll tell him that I'd like him to intervene decisively against this hatred that's broken out again against the Jews" she said.

In her recent interview, Bruck said she thinks Francis is afraid of the current rise in anti-Semitism.

She says she's saddened, demoralised, disgusted, scandalised and indignant. "I'm truly living a very ugly moment. Anti-Semitism, like fascism, is never dead. It's millennia old and I believe it will never end".

Holocaust survivor

Bruck is a Hungarian-born Jew. She survived the Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps which swallowed both her parents and an older brother .

Bruck, together with a surviving brother and a sister, was liberated by the Allies at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Source

• Crux

The Survivor Speakers Bureau was launched Thursday by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also called the Claims Conference.

"A Holocaust survivor speakers bureau of this scale and reach is unprecedented," said Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference. "At a moment of dramatically rising antisemitism, this program tells the history and educates for the future."

The Nazis and their collaborators killed six million European Jews and people from other minorities during the Holocaust.

Read More

When we consider that our Lord Jesus, our Blessed Mother Mary, St. Joseph, the twelve apostles, and the very first disciples were practicing religious Jews.

We also need to consider that the Christian New Testament is firmly rooted in the Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament.

Having considered, how can we not have but the highest respect for Judaism.

But having the necessary deep respect for Judaism does not therefore mean that Christians must also have respect for the unjust policies of the state of Israel toward Palestinians.

Opposing Israeli government injustice is not antisemitic. On the contrary, it calls Israel to a high moral standard in the spirit of the great Jewish prophets.

Human rights

Sadly, decades of human rights violations have occurred.

Violations like denying adequate supplies of water, blocking access to family farms and olive groves, as well as building Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land.

These are among the injustices Palestinians have long suffered in the Occupied Territories, especially in Gaza which is known as the world's largest outdoor prison.

The Oct. 7, 2023, brutal terrorist attacks by Hamas upon Israel, resulting in the deaths of approximately 1,200 Israeli children, women and men, was not right either.

Combined with the abduction of more than 200 Israeli hostages it is unconscionable and deserving of our condemnation.

But Israel's brutal response, resulting in over 30,000 deaths of mostly innocent unarmed civilian Palestinians in Gaza is also an act of terrorism.

It is an even worse terrorism than that suffered by Israel.

More 11,500 Palestinian children have been killed from Israeli bombs and missiles.

These were mostly supplied by the U.S. and several other nations resulting in large profits for numerous arms manufacturers.

Israel's determination to kill every single member of Hamas has resulted in the collective punishment of all Gazan Palestinians.

Hospitals, schools, neighbourhoods, and churches have not been spared from Israel's wholesale non-stop bombing.

Most Palestinians in Gaza have little or no access to clean water and sanitation, food, medicine and fuel due to Israel's blockade. United Nations experts have accused Israel of "intentionally starving" Palestinians in Gaza.

Genocide

Collective punishment is both gravely immoral, and an act against international law.

The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to ensure that all vital supplies are to immediately be made available to every needy Gazan. And that all efforts to end hostilities are to be made.

However, Israel is ignoring international law and moral law.

Having suffered so terribly from the Holocaust, one would think that committing large scale murder of innocent children, women and men would be unthinkable for Israel.

Yet, almost unbelievably, Israel is committing genocide - yes, genocide - upon the innocents.

Furthermore, Israel is not even following the Mosaic principle of reciprocal justice, that is, measure for measure which states "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Exodus 21:23-27).

Instead, Israel has inflicted far more death and destruction upon mostly innocent Palestinians in Gaza, than it suffered from the deadly attacks of Hamas.

And of course, for Christians we must take to heart, and put into action, the most relevant words of the Jewish Jesus, the Christ, the Lord:

"You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, offer no [violent] resistance to one who is evil.

When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. …

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you".

Pray for Peace

Therefore, let us tirelessly pray for peace in Gaza, and everywhere.

And let us unite with Pope Francis in his urgent call: "Stop the bombs and missiles now!"

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated Catholic social justice and peace columnist.

That is no surprise.

The Vatican had extensive contacts across Europe.

But such revelations about the tragic relationship between Catholics and Jews reminded me of an uncomfortable episode early in my time as editor of Commonweal.

Unpacking a few boxes of papers recently, I came across a copy of the May 2004 issue of Catholic Digest.

As you might suspect, that monthly magazine, founded in 1936 and folded in 2020, was modelled after Readers Digest.

For a period, it had a circulation in the millions.

The May 2004 issue featured articles titled "Fascinated by Mary?", "Miracle in a Bottle" on Lourdes, a historical note on "What Happens When a Pope Dies?", and some health items—"Stroke!" and "Skin

Cancer: Five Facts you Must Know." There were ads for Catholic religious orders and charities as well as one for investing in gold coins.

There was also an article titled "The Suspicious Catholic." It was a profile of me.

I had worked with the author of that profile for five years at a mid-size Connecticut daily newspaper.

We were friendly.

I had left the paper fourteen years before to join Commonweal.

When I became editor of Commonweal in 2003, he contacted me, said he had been doing freelance work for Catholic Digest, and asked if he could write about my appointment as editor.

I was somewhat hesitant since my old colleague was both an enterprising reporter and something of a provocateur.

He interviewed me over the phone, and his questions often seemed to focus on the fact that I was not married to a Catholic but to a Jew.

Since he was Jewish himself, someone who was also in a "mixed" marriage, I didn't think too much of that line of questioning at the time.

Perhaps I should have.

None of my three children were baptized or raised Catholic

Most of the article was unobjectionable, but it did touch on subjects that a certain kind of Catholic would find disturbing—especially the fact that none of my three children were baptized or raised Catholic.

As I explained to the author of the profile, my wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and she was uncomfortable baptizing our children after what her parents had been through in Germany and Poland during the war, where the Church did almost nothing to stop the persecution of the Jews.

The Church's failure to loudly condemn the Nazis was something I had struggled with, but I was eventually convinced that Catholicism is not "inherently anti-Semitic." Vatican II, Nostra aetate, and Pope John Paul II were a great help in that regard.

As for the religious education of our children, I explained that "everyone always says example is the greatest teacher.

My Catholicism is the greatest example." (We'd see about that!)

When it came to my broader theological views, I described myself as being somewhat theologically conservative but open to change.

"People can disagree with the Church and still be faithful Catholics," I said.

I'm not sure if it was that last sentiment, the religious education of our children, the ambiguous title of the article, or just plain old anti-Semitism that set off Catholic Digest's readers, but the response was vehement and almost entirely negative.

Curiously, I ran into the publisher of Catholic Digest not long after "The Suspicious Catholic" was published.

He told me the magazine had never received so much hate mail about one article.

The fantasy that Pius XII could have stopped the Holocaust

Which brings me back to Pius XII, the Holocaust, and my in-laws.

I don't think there is any doubt that Pius XII and the Vatican knew about mass killings early on, just as the new revelations indicate.

Nor is it a secret that Pius's fear of Soviet Communism and his experience and justified fear of German Communists as a diplomat in Weimar Germany distorted his judgment.

Of course, he was not entirely wrong about the Soviets.

Stalin, like Hitler, was a genocidal monster.

Should Pius XII have publicly condemned the Nazi murders of Jews? Of course.

Would it have made a difference? I don't think so.

Would most German Catholics have abandoned the Nazis even if the pope told them to?

That is fantasy.

Like most Europeans, nationalism was the overriding faith of most German Catholics.

I once asked my father-in-law what, if anything, could have stopped Hitler and the Holocaust.

He had been deported from Germany to Poland along with thousands of other Jews in 1938.

He was imprisoned in a concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto. He and his wife hid out for six years, returning to Germany in the last year of the war, hoping to end up in a zone controlled by the Americans or the British rather than the Soviets.

They lucked out.

He dismissed notions that some papal statement or Allied "rescue plan" would have ended the slaughter.

There was only one thing that could end the Holocaust, he said, and that was the total military defeat of Germany.

I don't want to apologise for Pius's inaction, but neither do I want to minimize the complexity of his wartime situation or exaggerate his power to stop the Nazis.

Indeed, it is sobering to think of his choices in dealing with an unapologetically genocidal regime.

I was reminded of his predicament when Mitt Romney recently spoke about why his fellow Republican senators failed to vote to impeach Donald Trump.

They were fearful, scared by violent threats against them and their families if they convicted Trump.

The dangers facing Pius XII, and those he was in some sense responsible for, were of magnitudes greater than anything those senators feared.

Pius wielded no power beyond his example and powers of persuasion, while the likely consequences of any condemnation of Hitler were dire.

On the other hand, Republican senators had real power, and a vote to impeach Trump would have made an enormous, possibly democracy-saving difference. Or so thinks this suspicious Catholic.

• Paul Baumann is senior writer at Commonweal. He writes from the United States.
• Republished in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The documents contain the names of 3,200 Jews whose lives Catholics protected during the occupation.

Rome's Jewish community organisation has verified the listed Jews' identities.

Researchers from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Research Institute and Rome's Jewish community released the findings at an academic workshop on Thursday.

The documents have not yet been made public however.

It seems many Catholic institutions helped their Jewish neighbours.

The new documents provide names and addresses of dozens of Romans sheltered in Catholic institutions.

They list 4,300 people sheltered in the properties of 100 women's and 55 men's Catholic religious orders.

Of those, 3,600 are identified by name, with 3,200 identified as Jews.

"Of the latter, it is known where they were hidden and, in certain circumstances, where they lived before the persecution.

"The documentation thus significantly increases the information about the history of the rescue of Jews in the context of the Catholic institutions of Rome."

Were the sheltered Jews baptised?

Whether any of the Jews on the list were baptised is unclear.

Recently opened Vatican archives suggest the Vatican worked hardest to save Jews who had converted to Catholicism or had Catholic-Jewish parents.

Claudio Procaccia from Rome's Jewish community says the documentation doesn't provide any baptismal information.

But he says some people pretended to have Jewish last names in order to find shelter in Catholic convents, even if they weren't necessarily Jewish.

Jewish research

Procaccia notes the Roman Jewish community published its own research in 2013 about the fate of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

Over 1,000 of Rome's Jews were rounded up immediately after the Nazi occupation began and deported to Auschwitz.

Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research says the new documentation poses new questions.

One is - why did an Italian Jesuit compile the list at the Pontifical Biblical Institute immediately after the liberation of Rome?

"There are many more questions we ask but, while the document lists thousands of Jews who found refuge in religious institutions, it lacks the names of those who were refused assistance ... during the Holocaust."

Source

• AP News
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Raised as a Jew, Stein was an atheist philosopher who converted to Catholicism in 1921 when she was 30. She became a Discalced Carmelite nun in 1938 and took the name Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Pope John Paul II declared her a martyr in 1987 and canonised her in 1998. St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is the co-patroness of Europe.

On Tuesday - her anniversary - Cardinal Michael Czerny joined with her Carmelite sisters and celebrated a Mass for St Teresa Benedicta near Auschwitz.

Like her, members of Czerny's family were also arrested and sent to concentration camps. Some were sent to Auschwitz.

Czerny's homily recounted St Teresa Benedicta's story and how it intersected with his maternal Czechoslovak family.

"With Edith Stein, I share Jewish origins, the Catholic faith and a vocation to religious life ..." he said.

Even when she considered herself an atheist, "her sensitive moral conscience and intellectual honesty led her to reject relativism and subjectivism".

Stein wrote that her "first encounter with the Cross" took place in 1917.

She was visiting a recently widowed friend who told her about her late husband's conversion and her own.

The friend explained that the peace she received at her baptism prevailed even during this time of loss.

Stein "was struck by the serenity that the woman maintained in spite of tragedy," Czerny said.

"No human force could account for or explain such peace," Stein later wrote.

"It was the moment when the light of Christ, Christ on the cross, shone."

In 1933, Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI urging him to speak out against all expressions of antisemitism.

It wasn't until 1998 the Church formally apologised for not taking more decisive action to challenge Nazism and the so-called ‘final solution' to the ‘Jewish problem'.

By the end of the war, Czerny's family was scattered or dead.

His grandmother and her children were considered Jewish as his grandmother was of Jewish descent. His grandfather refused to divorce his Jewish wife, so he was arrested too.

Both her grandmother and two uncles spent time at Auschwitz before being transferred elsewhere. Only his grandfather and mother survived.

Source

• America Magazine
• AP News

In a statement, they said the Catholic bishops under the Nazi regime did not oppose the war of annihilation started by Germany or the crimes the regime committed.

They also said the Nazi-era bishops gave the war a religious meaning.

Bishop Georg Batzing, who is the president of the German bishops' conference, says critics have accused the Church of failing not only to remember its role, but also of not owning up to it.

"We must not sit back, but carry the legacy into the future," he told a news conference.

"This is all the more true given that Europe does not seem to be in a good state at the moment."

Batzing says the "old demon of division, nationalism, ‘ethnic' thinking and authoritarian rule" is appearing in many places.

"Terrifying anti-Semitism is widespread, even here in Germany," he says.

He told the news conference that anyone who has learned the lessons of history must vehemently oppose these tendencies.

"This applies without ifs and buts to the Church, which is committed to the gospel of peace and justice."

Source

• The Catholic Universe
• Image: Holocaust Encyclopaedia - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This will enable scholars to probe accusations that Pius turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

They will find he helped Jews behind the scenes, Holy See officials say.

"I don't think you will find a smoking gun," Father Norbert Hofmann, the top Vatican official in charge of religious relations with Jews, says.

Jews have for many years been seeking transparency from the Vatican on its actions during the Holocaust.

Francis's order to open the archives will allow historians and other scholars to examine them during the next few years.

Some Jews have long accused Pius, whose pontificate spanned 1939 to 1958, of doing little to help those facing persecution by Nazi Germany.

They say he failed to speak out forcefully against the Holocaust, in which around six million Jews were killed.

The Vatican denies these accusations.

They say Pius worked quietly to save Jews and thereby not worsen the situation for many others at risk, including Catholics in parts of Nazi-occupied Europe.

David Kertzer, a Brown University professor who will be examining the archives, has written several books about the papacy and the Jews.

He said scholars were indebted to the Vatican for making the archives available - and that it is necessary to keep an open mind about what might be found in them..

"But clearly there's nervousness in the Vatican and among proponents of Pius XII, and the push to make him a saint, about what might come out of these archives," he told Reuters.

"Pius saw his job as protecting the institutional Church and everything else was secondary."

Pope Francis has said Pius has been treated with "some prejudice and exaggeration".

Source

• Reuters
• Image: History.com

Fuld, was a German-Jew who created the "first modern telephone system" in Germany, named H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG. He and his wife, Lucie Mayer, lived in Germany in the 1930s. Fuld died in 1932. Read more

Anderson made headlines last month when he attended a ‘Make America Straight Again' conference in Orlando, Florida.

In his YouTube post, he said he now planned to conduct a soul-winning and preaching event in New Zealand.

He just has been banned from entering Austalia.

That makes the 33rd country he's no longer allowed to visit because of his insistence that gay people should be executed by the government because the Bible says so.

Just in the past few months, Anderson was banned from entering the Netherlands and the 26 countries of the Schengen area,

He was also banned from Ireland, Botswana, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and Jamaica.

Anderson got worldwide attention several years ago for his violently homophobic comments.

He is a holocaust denier who praised the Pulse nightclub shooter, calling victims "a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles" and "disgusting homosexuals who the Bible says were worthy of death."

He has also said the US government should execute homosexuals by way of a firing squad because that's what the Bible commands. There are also numerous misogynistic comments and holocaust denialism.

Anderson founded his church in 2005. Since then, it has gained notoriety for extremist views.

"Don't expect anything contemporary or liberal. We are an old-fashioned, independent, fundamental, King James Bible only, soul-winning Baptist church," it states on its website.

Its doctrinal statement calls for the execution of gay people, and reads: "We believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty."

He spearheads the New Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement.

The Movement has 22 domestic and eight international churches led by Anderson's colleagues and acolytes.

He has more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers,

Source

• newsweek.com
• friendlyatheist.patheos.com
• lgbtqnation.com
• gaystarnews.com
• premier.org.uk
• Image: mambaonline.com

Here it is: Opening the archives will not - indeed, by definition, cannot - settle the historical controversy about Pius XII and his alleged silence during the Holocaust.

That's because the debate is counter-factual, pivoting not on what Pius did or didn't do, but rather what he should have done.

• Should Pius XII have publicly denounced Hitler?
• Should he have threatened to excommunicate anyone involved in the mechanism of the Holocaust?
• Should he have pressured the Allies to liberate Nazi extermination camps earlier?
• Should he have offered himself in ransom for German prisoners in Rome after the 1943 occupation of the city, or come up with some other dramatic gesture to register disapproval?

Answers to those questions involve subjective judgments about what would have produced the best results in a complicated set of circumstances - whether fortune would have favored the bold, or discretion was the better part of valor - and, alas, there's no "smoking gun" in anyone's archives that will provide conclusive resolution one way or the other.

Moreover, the debate over Pius XII is also a moral one, and as anyone who's ever taken moral philosophy or basic logic knows, one cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is."

You can pile up all the historical facts you like, but in themselves they won't tell you what Pius or anyone else ought to have done.

By now, the basic data points about Pius XII and the Holocaust are wearily familiar to anyone who's followed the back-and-forth since 1963, when Rolf Hochhuth published his play "The Deputy" and thereby launched the accusation that the pontiff was complicit, at least through his silence, in the mass extermination of Jews.

Prior to that point, it's well-established that Pius XII enjoyed broad admiration for his leadership during the war years, including within the Jewish community. Continue reading

• Image: Soundcloud

Pius's role - helping or ignoring the plight of Jews during the holocaust - has been much debated.

On the one hand, he has often been criticised by Jews for his apparent silence during the holocaust. On the other, some Catholic leaders say Pius and other Catholic clergy helped European Jews.

They also argue that during the Nazi regime, broad action by the Church could have resulted in severe reprisals against Catholics.

Although the Vatican usually waits until a pontiff has been dead for 70 years before opening the archives, an exception has been made in this case, so the documentation can be seen while holocaust survivors are still alive. Pius died nearly 61 years ago in 1958.

Vatican archivists began preparing the documentation for consultation in 2006, at the orders of German-born Pope emeritus Benedict XVI.

Francis says he hopes opening the archives will allow "serious and objective historical research" to "evaluate, in the proper light and with appropriate criticism, the praiseworthy moments of the Pontiff..."

The archives will also produce information about "moments of serious difficulties, of tormented decisions," he says.

These moments may have seemed to some as "reticence" but were attempts to keep humanitarian initiatives alive.

The documents are expected to include various letters and messages between Pius and other Vatican officials and Catholic clergy throughout Europe.

Noting that opening the archives is "the right thing to do", International Director of Inter-religious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Rabbi David Rosen, says he hopes the documents will provide a clearer picture of Pius's actions.

The AJC has been raising the issue of opening the archives with the Vatican for the past 30 years, Rosen says.

Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives Bishop Sergio Pagano also reportedly requested time to catalogue the large amount of documents before their release.

Holocaust historian and head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Dr Efraim Zuroff, say Pius never specifically denounced the Nazi persecution and the mass murder of European Jews. Nor did he ask Catholics to help save Jews from persecution.

Zuroff says "two cardinal questions" needed to be answered about Pius's papacy.

"The first is what information reached the Vatican regarding Holocaust crimes, and the second is when did that information reach Pius XII?"

He says the Vatican's papal nuncios who served as ambassadors were active in many countries where Jews were persecuted and murdered, and that he would have received "accurate information regarding the fate of the Jews… at a relatively early date, most probably before such news reached the Allies."

Source

• Times of Israel
• The Jerusalem Post
• CruxNow
• Image: The Times of Israel

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pulled out of the summit scheduled for Monday and Tuesday after Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli cabinet accused Poland of cooperating with the Nazis.

In addition, Israel's acting Foreign Minister, Yisrael Katz, said: "Poles imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother's milk.

"I am the son of Holocaust survivors. The memory of the Holocaust is not something to compromise about. It is obvious. We will not forget, and we will not forgive."

Katz then pledged to ensure that no one would change the historical truth of what happened.

"Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely.

"As (former Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Shamir said — his father was murdered by Poles — he said that from his point of view they sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk. You can't sugarcoat this history."

A statement in response from the Polish Prime Minister's office says "In recent days there have been several false accusations against the Polish state and the Polish nation."

The prime minister's office says the accusations "were partially denied, and there was an apology issued for some of them.

"But these led to further false accusations against the actions of Poles during the Second World War which neither the Polish state nor the Polish nation accepts."

Poland's Prime Minister said Katz's remarks were "racist and unacceptable".

In response to Poland's outrage, Netanyahu's office said he was initially misquoted as saying "The Poles" which would suggest the whole Polish nation was wrong.

However, the Polish government says it is not satisfied with the explanation proffered by the Israeli ambassador that Netanyahu was misquoted.

Source

• Vatican News
• BBC
• Image: Haaretz

Sister Cecylia Maria Roszak OP, who was aged 110, is believed to have been the oldest nun in the world.

During the war, Roszak and eight other sisters were living in Vilnius in Lithuania where they had been stationed since 1938.

Lithuania was invaded by the Nazis in 1941 and was subject to German occupation until January 1945.

During this time, Sr. Roszak and her sisters, led by their superior, Mother Bertranda, hid 17 members of the Jewish resistance in their convent, risking their lives to do so.

One of those she helped was activist and writer Abba Kovner, who later testified at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

After the war, Israel awarded the nuns the "Righteous Among the Nations" medal, which it gave to non-Jewish people who risked their lives during the war to save Jews.

The World Holocaust Remembrance Center says the people who found refuge in the convent were members of illegal Jewish Zionist underground movements.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Times of Israel
• The Independent
• Image: The Independent

Archbishop Waclaw Depo of Czestochowa says the new law's critics are trying to "alter historical truth".

The law imposes fines or up to three years' jail for anyone who "publicly and against the facts attributes to the Polish nation or Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes", or "flagrantly reduces in any way the responsibility of the real perpetrators".

The law has been called "baseless" by Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

His view is echoed by the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem Memorial Institute.

The Institute says the law would impede research and debate on the Holocaust.

Polish newspapers have said US officials have threatened to suspend joint military projects.

The newspapers say President Andrzej Duda and Premier Mateusz Morawiecki would not be received by President Donald Trump or other Administration members.

Archbishop Depo says the world has "turned away from the truth - not just truth about God, but also truth about us and about our history, turning us into executioners".

"In reality, we're a nation of sacrifice and suffering, which first felt the painful blows of the Second World War and then had them extended by years of Soviet occupation".

The archbishop spoke after a conciliatory appeal by representatives of 6850 Poles honoured by Israel for saving Jewish lives under Nazi occupation - members of the Polish Association of Righteous Among Nations - was published in US, European and Israeli newspapers.

The Polish Association of Righteous Among Nations said hundreds of Poles had paid with their lives for showing "kindness and responsibility" to persecuted Jews, while other "ignoble Poles" had "acted on their own behalf" against Holocaust victims.

It urged Jews and Poles to continue building "an alliance and future" based on "friendship, solidarity and truth", and also called for "empathy, judiciousness and thoughtfulness when creating laws".

Controversy over the law had sparked a wave of anti-Jewish feeling and urged the country's Bishops' Conference to speak out, says Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw University professor who co-chairs the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

"Whatever the government intended, the anti-Jewish genie is out of the bottle again, and certain extremist groups seem to think they now have permission, thanks to recent signals, to say and do what they like."

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• The Tablet
• Image: Jewish Website

Father Patrick Desbois was awarded the Lantos Foundation's Human Rights Prize last week for being a "vital voice standing up for the values of decency, dignity, freedom, and justice."

The prize is named after a Holocaust survivor who later became a California congressman.

United States-based Desbois, who teaches at Georgetown University's Programme for Jewish Civilization, is the founder of Yahad-In Unum. This is a Paris-based organisation dedicated to identifying and commemorating Nazi mass-execution sites in Eastern Europe during World War II.

Desbois's research focuses on Jews who were killed in mass shootings by Nazi units in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Romania between 1941 and 1944. He found more that one-and-a-half million Jews were murdered like this.

The award also recognises his work in collecting evidence of the Islamic State's genocide of Yezidis, a Kurdish religious minority in Iraq.

Debois has published two books about his work.

The first, "Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews," was published in 2008.

His second book, a memoir on his life as an anti-genocide activist and Holocaust scholar, is due for publication in 2018.

Source

• Crux
• Times of Israel
• Image: Zakhor Online

On Monday, a Catholic bishop apologized in the name of the Catholic Church for their murder, at a ceremony to mark their passing.

"The Catholic Church mourns the death of all those who suffered torture, pain and humiliation, and who died here in vain," Bishop Rafal Markowski said.

Markowski heads the Council for Religious Dialogue and the Committee for Dialogue with Judaism. It was the first time he had attended the annual memorial service.

"At the same time, the church strongly feels the pain of the members of the Polish nation, particularly the Catholics who contributed to this pain, to the humiliation and, ultimately, to death."

Historians have been critical of the wartime Church for not preventing Catholics from participating in the massacre, and for contributing to anti-Semitic incitement against the Jews in the Jedwabne region.

Exactly who planned and executed the massacre is the subject of an ongoing dispute in Poland.

Some say the Germans, rather than the Poles, were responsible for the atrocity. Some claim even mentioning Polish involvement is a libel that is meant to disgrace the proud name of the Polish nation.

On the other hand, Polish-Jewish historians Jan Tomasz Gross and Anna Bikont, say the Poles were wholly responsible for planning and carrying out the atrocity.

Source

• JTA
• Haaretz
• The Ginger Jewish Genealogist

"I know no one ever believes us nowadays — everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret," Pomsel, now 105, says in an interview with The Guardian.

Instead, Pomsel remembers the niceties of the man history knows as a rabid anti-Semite who strongly supported the Holocaust and would poison his six children when the Nazi war machine collapsed in 1945.

"Sometimes, his children came to visit and were so excited to visit daddy at his work. They would come with the family's lovely Airedale.

They were very polite and would curtsy and shake our hands," says Pomsel, who added that Goebbels and his wife Magda "were both very nice to me."

Pomsel told The Guardian that people who nowadays say they would have stood up against the Nazis "are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn't have …

"The whole country was as if under a kind of a spell … The idealism of youth might easily have led to you having your neck broken."

Now blind, she wants to pass away in "months rather than years" and hopes "the world doesn't turn upside down again as it did then, though there have been some ghastly developments, haven't there?

"I'm relieved I never had any children that I have to worry about."

Source

• Newsmax
• Image: www.truthperfected.com

Francis is scheduled to visit the camp in Poland on July 29.

During World War II, 1.1 million people were killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Francis is in Poland from July 27-31, primarily for the World Youth Day celebrations.

On the papal plane flying back from Armenia last month, the Pope spoke about his planned visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"I would like to go to that place of horror without speeches, without crowds - only the few people necessary," he said.

"Alone, enter, pray. And may the Lord give me the grace to cry."

The Pope noted he had once visited a World War I memorial in Italy and had not spoken.

Fr Federico Lombardi, SJ, the Vatican's press spokesman, confirmed on June 30 that the official programme for the Auschwitz-Birkenau visit had been changed.

Fr Lombardi said the Pope would not give a speech at the death camp.

The Vatican's schedule for the Pope's originally had him giving a speech at the international monument at Birkenau.

Francis's predecessors St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI delivered speeches there.

Fr Lombardi noted that Francis had previously spoken about the horror of the Holocaust.

Pope Francis visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Israel in 2014.

He met six survivors of Nazi camps, kissing their hands in a sign of deference and recognition of their suffering.

Speaking of the atrocity of the Holocaust, Francis asked how could human beings have sunk so horribly low?

In his speech at Yad Vashem, he prayed: "Grant us the grace to be ashamed of what we men have done, to be ashamed of this massive idolatry, of having despised and destroyed our own flesh which you formed from the earth, to which you gave life with your own breath of life."

"Never again, Lord, never again!"

Sources

• The Tablet
• Catholic Herald
• Image: Yad Vashem blog

Gray died on Friday after a long illness.

Gray served as Vicar General to Te Pihopa o Aotearoa for 10 years.

He was suspended as Bishop of Te Waipounamu in February after controversial comments about the Holocaust. The suspension was lifted the week of his death. Read more