Pope Benedict XVI said he came to the Middle East as “a pilgrim of peace,” but on Monday, his first day in Israel seemed to underscore the tensions in the region rather than ease them.
After the pope visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and offered the “deep compassion” of the Roman Catholic Church for Hitler’s victims, Jewish leaders expressed disappointment that the pontiff, who is German, had not mentioned Germany or the Nazis.
Later, at an interfaith meeting where the pope urged greater dialogue, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, the chief justice of the Palestinian Islamic courts, veered from the program and accused Israel of taking innocent lives.
And that was only Day 1.
On Tuesday, the pope is expected to visit some of the most sensitive sites in the world: the Western Wall, holy to Jews; and the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
Later in the week he is expected to visit a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem, and to celebrate a large open-air Mass in Nazareth. Israel has mobilized 80,000 security officers for Benedict’s five-day visit.
At the interfaith meeting on Monday, Sheik Tamimi, speaking in Arabic, urged Muslims and Christians to unite to protest against Israel and called on Benedict to “pressure the Israeli government to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people.”
He also welcomed the pope to Jerusalem, which he called “the eternal political, national and spiritual capital of Palestine.”
The Vatican immediately condemned Sheik Tamimi’s remarks. “In a meeting dedicated to dialogue, this intervention was a direct negation of what a dialogue should be,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a statement.
He said he hoped the episode would not “damage the mission” of the pope in “promoting peace” in the region.
“We hope also that interreligious dialogue in the Holy Land will not be compromised by this incident,” Father Lombardi added.
During Pope John Paul II’s historic trip to Israel in 2000, an interfaith meeting ran aground when Sheik Tamimi and Yisrael Meir Lau, who was then the chief Ashkenazic rabbi of Israel, tangled over Israeli-Palestinian politics.
For Monday’s event, held at the Pontifical Institute of Notre Dame, organizers planned that only the pope would speak; other leaders on the podium included the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, and the chief rabbi of Haifa, Shear Yeshuv Cohen.
“It was discussed very clearly that neither the sheik nor the rabbi would give any kind of discourse,” said the Rev. David Neuhaus, one of the event’s organizers and the cleric responsible for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel. “Sheik Tamimi simply hijacked the microphone.”
According to several people present at the event, as soon as Sheik Tamimi was finished speaking, Benedict shook his hand and was ushered off the stage by the papal entourage.
Just a few hours earlier, the pope had stood at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Remembrance, a dark cement vault. He was there to honor “the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah,” he said, using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
“They lost their lives, but they will never lose their names,” Benedict said. “These are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again.
“Most of all, their names are forever fixed in the memory of Almighty God,” he continued.
Yet Benedict’s visit to Yad Vashem did not entirely heal his vexed relations with the Jewish world four months after he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom denied the scope of the Holocaust.
In his speech, he did not mention Germany, the Nazis or his own experience as an unwilling conscript into the Hitler Youth and Hitler’s army.
By contrast, in his visit to Yad Vashem in 2000, John Paul said: “My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors, some of whom perished, while others survived.”
After the event, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Avner Shalev, said the pope’s visit had been “important.” But he said he was sorry that Benedict had not spoken about anti-Semitism or mentioned “the nature of the murderers, the perpetrators,” as “Nazis” or “Germans,” instead offering a more theoretical discourse.
Rabbi Lau, now the chairman of Yad Vashem’s board of directors, also found fault with Benedict’s speech.
“There is a clear difference between ‘killed’ and ‘murdered,’ ” Rabbi Lau, a Holocaust survivor, told Israel TV, The Associated Press reported. “There is a difference between saying millions in the Holocaust and saying six million. The word six was not said.”
But some of the survivors who met the pope during the ceremony said the very fact of his presence at Yad Vashem was significant.
“I don’t look at him as a German; I look at him as a human being,” said Ed Mosberg, who survived the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland and now lives in New Jersey.
Ruth Bondy, who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and lives near Tel Aviv, said, “In the first years, the Holy See didn’t even recognize Israel.”
The pope’s presence is “some progress,” she said, adding, “I told him thank you for coming.”
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