Israel: Jews remembered Pope John Paul yesterday as the champion of a new spirit of reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the biblical people he affectionately called Christianity's elder brothers.
Having lost Jewish neighbours in Poland to the Holocaust, he openly deplored the wartime indifference of many Christians, established ties with Israel, and brought a message of peace with a landmark 2000 tour of the Holy Land.
"John Paul II ushered in a new period of relations with Jews, who had suffered from the Church for many long years," said Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom. "(He) knew how to address the problematic past." Repudiating ancient Catholic dogma, John Paul held that the creation of Christianity did not mean God had broken with the Jews, despite their refusal to accept Jesus as the messiah.
"With Judaism, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion," he told one rabbi. "You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers." Israeli president Moshe Katsav commended the Pope for "bravely put(ting) an end to historic injustice by officially rejecting prejudices and accusations against Jews." John Paul apologised over the killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust, but he rejected charges that the wartime Vatican and Pope Pius XII were acquiescent to the Nazis.
In 1979, on his first journey home to Poland as head of the Catholic Church, John Paul knelt in prayer at Auschwitz. It was the first visit by a Pope to the site of a Nazi death camp.