Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 January 2020

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #2 Holocaust deniers and twisters of the truth

In spite of the numerous eyewitness accounts to the horrendous events that took place during the Holocaust, many today still deny its very existence.

The loss of six million Jewish people in the Holocaust confirms that when anti-Semitism festers, the ultimate result can be catastrophic.
We should be aware what happened after 1918 and how there grew a hatred against certain groups of people, starting with Jews, then Roma, continued by the prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and all that  contradicted the way the government foresaw the best community to live in. All refuters or protestors had to be silenced, and because non of the onlookers dared to react it became quite easy to continue to deport people.

Today, as global anti-Semitism rises, we must go beyond solemn moments of remembrance and speak out against anti-Semitism (hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel) and anti-refugees as well as any hatred against other people or religious groups. After World War I many thought it would never again, but just a few years later in 1939 a new and even more horrible war was at the doorstep of Europe that was going to fall in pieces.

When Europe got to hear what Nazi Germans did to Jews, nobody wanted to believe it, at first.

Regarded as exaggeration and Polish war propaganda, a lot of the reports sent to different news agencies and governments were simply not believed

Despite “strong demands” by the Polish and Jewish resistance for Britain or the US to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz and other death camps,
 “the military’s attitude was: ‘We’ve got to concentrate on military targets, not on civilian things’,” 
said Davies, an authority on Polish history.
“One of the targets that the (British) military did bomb was a synthetic fuel factory near Auschwitz”
 in 1943-44, he added.

Although British warplanes flew over the death camp itself, incredibly, no orders were given to bomb it.

Professor Dariusz Stola, an expert on the history of Polish Jews, echoes this assessment.
“Military leaders didn’t like civilian politicians meddling in their business,”
he said.

For Allied military leaders, bombing Auschwitz, or its supply lines
 “was looking like a humanitarian operation and they didn’t want it,” 
said the former head of the Warsaw-based Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of all Nazi Germany’s death and concentration camps and the one where most people were killed. And it is the only one to have been preserved as it was when it was abandoned by the Germans fleeing the advancing Red Army.

Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.
Once Europe’s Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90 percent of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish citizens killed under Nazi German occupation between 1939 and 1945.

Even after the liberation of the first camp by Russians, other camps had to be seen by Americans, to have more people to come to the  realization that the unseen horror could really have been something which had to overcome thousands of people.

We must never forget those who suffered during the Holocaust. For the sake of the Jewish People and all people everywhere, we must never forget what happened so that it will never happen again.

We should listen to the voices of the survivors of those inhuman detention camps and should see what is going on at the moment in Europe and the United States. Everywhere around us we can see politicians who want to be very popular and who do not mind twisting the truth or even to tell lies to enlarge their popularity.

Again people shall have to choose if they are going to stand by and be silent or if this time they shall react in time!

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Preceding

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

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Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):
  1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
  2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
  3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
  4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
  5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking

By the commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp #1 Finding a solution to a created problem

In a series of articles we can look back at an industrialized killing machine that took the lives of nearly 6,000 people a day. 75 years ago for those who were still (somewhat) alive on the 27th of January 1945, there was a liberation from the horror camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not from the atrocities they had to witness and the horror which would haunt them for the rest of their life.

Of the estimated 1.3 million people — at minimum — who were deported to the concentration, labour and extermination camp Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.1 million were murdered, through mass exterminations, starvation, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.
Gross of the survivors still suffer the effects of the trauma they experienced during the Holocaust.

How the Nazi Killing Machines Developed


In the part of Europe which could not keep up to the agreements mad in Versailles after World War I fertile soil was created for economical and political unrest. Ideal to undermine the government was speaking along ideas the majority of the people had, giving certain people the fault or cause of all the misery.

Creating a scapegoat, the popular political figures had to make sure they could win more votes and as such knew they had to get away with the "problem" they had showed to the people. Best was also to create a pure people, done away with all what did not fit the picture of a good Arian soul.
Speeches creating hatred against one group of people, at first, took care lots of Germans started to believe that those who lived in big houses and had lots of shops, were the bad guys who had to be eliminated and their places given to the real Germanic race.

It took not many years before the lies about the Jews were accepted as a real truth to be handled. So people turned against the Jewish inhabitants and wanted them away. The Nazi government forced the Jews from their homes and herded them into railway cattle cars.

Initially, however, the Germans used killing groups called Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to round up and massacre entire Jewish communities.

Rivka Yosselevska, who testified at the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, was one of a few who survived the Nazi massacre of 500 Zagrodzki ghetto Jews (near Pinsk in Belarus) in August 1942. Yosselevska lost her daughter, mother, father, and sister, as well as other relatives in the slaughter. She said her daughter had asked her when they we were lined up in the ghetto,
 “Mother, why did you make me wear the Shabbat dress; we are being taken to be shot.”
At the mass grave, she asked,
 “Mother, why are we waiting? Let us run!”
Yosselevska said,
 “Some of the young people tried to run, but they were caught immediately, and they were shot right there. It was difficult to hold on to the children. ... The suffering of the children was difficult; we all trudged along to come nearer to the place and to come nearer to the end of the torture of the children.”

Although Yosselevska was shot in the head, she lived. For three days, she lay among the dead. The farmer who found her, hid and fed her. He also helped her to join a group of Jews hiding in the forest where she managed to survive until the Soviet army arrived in 1944.

Eventually, the Nazis decided that shooting as a method of mass killing was too expensive and inefficient. It required killing to be done one bullet at a time. And it demoralized the troops.

The Wannsee Conference Decides the Final Solution


In 1942, Nazi Party officials met near Berlin at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the “Final Solution” for the destruction of European Jewry. There they coordinated the deportation of Europe’s Jews to extermination camps that were already operating or were under construction in German-occupied Poland.

As many as 11 million Jews were to be transported to these killing centres, including residents of countries not then under Nazi control, such as Ireland, Sweden, Turkey, and Great Britain.

They decided that the mass transportation of these populations would be accomplished by train.

The SS and the police coordinated with local auxiliaries or collaborators in occupied territories to round up the victims and transport them to the death centres. In charge of all this was SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was later to meet his demise at the end of a rope in an Israeli prison.

To disguise their intentions, Nazi authorities referred to these deportations as “resettlements” to labour camps in the “East.” In reality, they were killing centres for mass murder.

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Find more about this terrible political and human offence: Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution to the Jewish Question):
  1. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
  2. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
  3. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
  4. Is it really true that Anti-Semitism will never be tolerated? 
  5. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking


 


Tuesday, 7 June 2016

Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and Rescue from the Holocaust

English: Kindertransport monument at Liverpool...
English: Kindertransport monument at Liverpool Street Station. A project established by the Association of Jewish Refugees, it pays tribute to those Britons who aided the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children from the Nazi persecution which led onto the holocaust. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Breaking Israel News which  offers news from Israel from an Orthodox Jewish perspective to both Jewish and Christian readers has an article on the new book concerning what happened after the  Kristallnacht in November 1938.
Britain, the only willing host country, began the Kindertransport, taking in over 10,000 Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Conscientious objectors and shunners of politics our faith group which the magazine falsely accuses to be "an obscure Christian sect", were according to them "unlikely hosts". For us Christadelphians we have to have respect for the creatures of God and we do have to protect the weaker ones. Therefore is was very clear by the changing times we had to do something against the cruelty one group of people caused to an other group of human beings. In the face of the growing evil that threatened the Jews, our faith-group found we could not let everything happen just like that; We had to undertake action.
Today we can look back at the secret and other work the Christadelphians have done during the war years. Not wanting to take up the arms, the Christadelphians as pacifists, used their hands and their love to contribute to the humanitarian actions.
It is known that their participation in the Kindertransport saved 250 Jewish children from almost certain death.

The book project came as a result of Jason Hensley’s visit last year to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC for a national conference of educators. Hensley, M.Ed, a principal of a small private school in California, was so affected by what he learned that he created a Holocaust course in his school. The message from the conference that impressed him most deeply was the reminder that the Holocaust is not about statistics, but about individuals.
 
Read more at
The Lost Story of How One Christian Sect’s Biblical Beliefs Kept 250 Jewish Children Alive

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Part of the Family: Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and Rescue from the Holocaust

In 1938 and 1939, the Kindertransport occurred––a movement to bring thousands of Jewish children out of Nazi occupied territories to safety in Great Britain. These children came without their parents, almost always without a knowledge of English, and also little experience with English culture. They came to a new family, a new country, and a new life. Approximately 250 of these children were sponsored by Christadelphians, a small Christian group.

They came and lived in houses with Christadelphian families, or lived in hostels that the Christadelphians had started. So often the Holocaust is considered in terms of statistics––how many perished and how many were affected. Yet it is often the individual stories that provide the most powerful human connection and the opportunity to learn. Rather than focus on the statistics, this series examines the experiences of these people, who came to England as children, and lived with Christadelphians. Ten of the former Jewish refugees, and their families, were contacted and collaborated in this effort to bring about this first volume. These are their stories.


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Tuesday, 15 December 2015

25 Orthodox rabbis issued a statement on Christianity

The moral introspection generated by the Holocaust was further stimulated by the campaign of some Jewish intellectuals, notably Jules Isaac, who urged the Catholic Church to undo the “teaching of contempt” that had characterized its approach to Jews through the ages.
However, exclusive attention to this dimension obscures the larger forces transforming the moral and intellectual landscape of the 1960s. The egalitarian impulse that produced the civil rights movement in the United States and de-colonization worldwide did not sit well with traditions of religious exclusivism and triumphalism, let alone the condemnation of the other to discrimination and damnation.

There have been commemorations celebrating the 50th anniversary of the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions” titled “Nostra Aetate,” whose fourth section deals with Judaism and marks a genuinely significant moment.

Jewish reactions were for the most part highly favourable, though various objections were raised that strike me as expressions of hypersensitivity. Thus, the document should have “condemned” anti-Semitism rather than merely “decrying” it; the final version should have retained the term “deicide” in characterizing the offence for which the Jews bear no guilt.

The declaration was seen as too little, too late, and the notion that Jews were being exonerated for crucifying Jesus was seen as at least marginally insulting. Thus, some Jews whose long-standing bill of particulars against the Church featured the guilt that it assigned to the Jewish people for the Crucifixion nonetheless dismissed the historic revocation of this theology as an event that should have no consequences for their own resentful stance.

To implement the new relationship, the Church established a Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, which issued its first official document (“Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate (No.4)”) in 1974. In 1985, it issued “Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church.” And in 1998, it issued a document on the Holocaust titled “We Remember.” Despite occasional formulations that some Jews, rightly or wrongly, found inadequate or objectionable, these documents fleshed out “Nostra Aetate” in a direction that reflected advances achieved by ongoing dialogues and even dealt with some of the specific concerns that Jews had expressed regarding the original declaration.

In “Nostra Aetate” itself, and much more so in subsequent Church documents and papal utterances, the abiding value of Judaism has been affirmed and even emphasized. In theological language, the covenant between God and the original Israel remains in effect. What precisely that covenant is—the Abrahamic and/or the Mosaic—is not quite settled, and some Jews have virtually demanded that Christians declare that the Mosaic covenant remains in full force. I have argued that this demand is unwise. It raises intractable questions about the parameters of the Jewish need to observe that covenant and constitutes a telling example of the inappropriate dictation to others of what their own religion must teach.

> Please do read more about this subject:

Vatican II at 50; Assessing the impact of ‘Nostra Aetate’ on Jewish-Christian relations By David Berger

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Tuesday, 27 January 2015

January 27 - 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide

English: Photo of the Nazi extermination camp ...
Photo of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken by a United States Army Air Force plane, August 25, 1944. Crematoria II and III are visible. For reference as to the date of the photo and what it shows, see The Case for Auschwitz by Robert Jan van Pelt, 2002, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0253340160, page 175. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Today seventy years ago soldiers could not believe their eyes. They found the last extermination camp of the Germans still functioning.

Serbian 1990 War camp
On January 27, 1945, the Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and  found 7,000 survivors. Another 50,000 inmates had been marched out several days earlier by the camp’s staff in order to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Most of them perished before the war ended. Auschwitz, where over one million people – most of them Jews, but also several non-Jewish Poles, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons and Jehovah’s Witnesses  — were killed, has become a symbol for the Holocaust and for evil as such, and rightly so. But people thought at that time and some even now that this could never again happen. Like they said "Never again" at the end of World War I in the last few years we have seen very similar extinguish camps and Serbia was the most horrible place after World War II where the international community did not take action straight away though they did clearly knew what was happening there.

Luckily for humankind not yet any genocide took place in the form or magnitude as the German extermination camps. We luckily never saw any more such torture and horror coming over one specific race or group of people.
The Caucasian race and Germans and extreme right people should shame themselves and sink deep into the ground that their ancestors could bring such a terrible fear over one group of people. For the Jewish people, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, a cemetery without graves and still many families are not sure where their ancestors found their death and are put into the ground.

HKP survivor Pearl Good
points to Plagge’s name on
the Wall of the Righteous at Yad Vashem
Though the present generation can not be culpable for what their ancestors did, plus we must know that not all Germans did agree with this situation or did become such monsters. The thousands and thousands which were cramped together in huge place, too small for the amount of people, had to face dehumanization as part of the camp system, but they also could find friendships which went beyond all human expectations. There were remarkable acts of solidarity and humanity by camp inmates. Among them were non-Jews, who at risk to their own lives, sought to ease the pain, to give aid and to rescue Jews. They proved that even within the brutality and the murder, people could choose not to remain indifferent. There were even stories of German soldiers , even SS officers who like Maj Karl Plagge, Wehrmacht officer, engineer and Nazi Party member who used his position as a staff officer in the Heer (Army) to employ and protect some 1,240 Jews.  {Good 2005, p. 154.}

On 27 January of 2015 many international leaders shall come together in the afternoon, going along the fortified walls, barbed wire, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and cremation ovens of the largest of the concentration camp complexes created by the Nazi German regime, which show the conditions within which the Nazi genocide took place in the former concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich.
The Nazi policy of spoliation, degradation and extermination of the Jews was rooted in a racist and anti-Semitic ideology propagated by the Third Reich.

According to historical investigations, 1.5 million people, among them a great number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured and murdered in this camp, the symbol of humanity's cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century. 

A few of those who saw the liberating soldiers coming closer to the camps where at that time still not sure what was going to happen with them and for sure could not count on it they would survive it. It is known that also many died  in a few weeks time after coming out in the world of the living again, when they became ill of the food they ate after their liberation.

Having been many times between life and death those survivors would continuously have to live with a huge nightmare and many still find themselves today crawling on the barrack floor or through the mud, because they no longer could walk. Many of them also  remember how they just kept thinking, I must survive, I must survive.

What we commemorate today should be printed in the minds of many generations to come. We may not be at ease thinking that what was unprecedented in human history, this mass killing motivated by the perverse, race-based ideology of the Nazis, who sought to track down and kill every last Jew and any others they considered to be inferior, would not happen again.

Humankind may have come united to overcome the Nazi menace but everywhere we see the (Neo-)Nazi spook turning up again.  Today, we see many similarities with the period coming up to the 1940ies. The economical but also political crisis's and pressure form all sides against immigrants. Not much yet seems to have changed for the minorities which everywhere often face bigotry.  We can not ignore that sectarian tensions and other forms of intolerance are on the rise. Since two years in Belgium and France we have seen a growing amount of anti-Semitic attacks. In several countries in the West it happens that Jews are being killed solely because they are Jews.

Those who belong to Christianity should make it very clear that all people, believers, non-believers and other-believers are all created in the image God. They should react against those who torture or kill others because of different beliefs. they also should demand from their governments and from those countries where there is inequality that the rights of humans shall be respected.

Vulnerable communities around the world continue to bury their dead while living in fear of further violence.
The mission of the United Nations was shaped by the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.  We want to see that their commitment to protect the vulnerable, promote fundamental human rights and uphold the freedom, dignity and worth of every person shall be worked out fully.

It is good to see that for the past decade, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme has mobilized students and educators around the world to help them achieve these goals. 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust:

"The violence and bias we see every day are stark reminders of the distance still to travel in upholding human rights, preventing genocide and defending our common humanity.

We must redouble our efforts to eradicate the deep roots of hatred and intolerance.  People everywhere must unite to stop the cycles of discord and build a world of inclusion and mutual respect.”
From the ashes of the murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps arose the words “Never Again” – spoken as shorthand for our collective responsibility to act in the face of genocide.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik who like many Jews who grew up in the 1950s, internalized a deep sense of responsibility to safeguard the memory of the Shoah – so that the world would understand anti-Semitism’s dangers and prevent Jewish persecution in the future.
He says:
Yet, when I heard about atrocities in faraway places like Cambodia and Rwanda, the notion that I could do something – that I should do something – never materialized in my head. My mindset shifted because of one man, Rabbi Harold Schulweis – with whom I co-founded Jewish World Watch. As he changed my perspective, Rabbi Schulweis dramatically changed my life – and saved thousands of others.
How many of our generation had not heard "Plus jamais" or "Never Again". this they said already after the first World War and repeated it as if they saw the summit after the second World War.

We must confess that our industrialised world did not manage to avoid the horrors of the Holocaust to be followed by genocide after genocide, atrocity after atrocity – from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Darfur to Congo. Since 1945, 46 genocides have claimed the lives of tens of millions.

In 2004, at 80-years-old, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis founded an organization – a movement – that has become one of America’s largest and loudest anti-genocide groups. In the decade since that Rosh Hashanah, Jewish World Watch has been at the forefront of advocacy efforts that helped to bring about pressure to end the genocide in Darfur, drive the most lethal militias out of Congo, and create broad awareness among governments and global corporations about the threat of emerging genocides around the world.

Regarded as the most influential synagogue leader of his generation led the Conservative Valley Beth Shalom (VBS) in Encino for nearly 45 years, introducing significant innovations in synagogue life while also insisting upon connecting the Jewish world with the larger community worldwide through foundations, outreach organizations and, his most successful program, developed late in his life, Jewish World Watch.

Rabbi Ed Feinstein, his friend and successor as senior rabbi at VBS said about Harold Schulweis who died in December at his home after a long struggle with heart disease, that he
"was  a public intellectual who redefined what it is to be a Jew, an author and passionate orator who met injustices and suffering with action,”
In 2004, Schulweis delivered a sermon at VBS on the Jewish high holidays calling for a Jewish response to genocide. He challenged the congregation:


“We took an oath, “Never again!” Was this vow to protect only Jews from the curse of genocide? God forbid that our children and grandchildren ask of us, ‘Where was the synagogue during Rwanda, when genocide took place and eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered in one hundred days?’”

Schulweis’ concern for genocide around the world, led him to reach out to the large Armenian population in his San Fernando Valley neighbourhood after his 2004 sermon at VBS on the Jewish high holidays calling for a Jewish response to genocide.
He had challenged the congregation to take an oath, “Never again!”and not only to protect Jews from the curse of genocide.

In 2005, the rabbi officiated with Archbishop Hovnan Derderian of the Armenian Church of North America at the first joint commemoration of the Jewish and Armenian Holocausts. He joined band members of the rock band, System of a Down, all of them children of survivors of the Armenian Holocaust, in an educational program affirming the common responsibilities of Jewish and Armenian youth to remember their collective experiences of genocide, and to act to prevent its re-occurrence.

The Jewish World Watch and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR) (originally called the Institute for Righteous Acts) provides monthly financial support to some 500 aged and needy non Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Foundation preserves the legacy of the rescuers through its national Holocaust teacher education program.

Such education programs and us remembering what happened in the 1930-1940ies but also using those awful memories to warn those living today that we always should be at the look out to avoid such disasters coming over humankind.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik, Esq., President and Co-Founder of Jewish World Watch – a multi-faith coalition representing hundreds of thousands in the fight against genocide and mass atrocities, says:
We live during a time in grave need of Rabbi Schulweis’ message. From Congo and Sudan, from Iraq to Syria, from Burma to the Central African Republic, we are called to take the words “Never Again” and turn them into action. In his memory, let us continue to breathe life into the best of our Jewish values to create a better world.

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 Find also to read:

  1. Holocaust Survivor Eva Kor Explains How to Stay Hopeful During Tough Times
    The fact that I have overcome so much adversity in my life helps me to have hope during tough times. I believe if I could survive Auschwitz, if I could survive crawling on the barrack floor between life and death, I could probably survive anything. Basically that is the way we gain confidence in our ability. When we overcome one difficulty and one hardship, we can build on that when any other hardship comes along in life. I also like the fact that people who hear me speak can tune in and feel inspired. They see that I could do it, and they realize they can overcome whatever they are trying to overcome too. That is helpful to realize, that maybe each of us can help others overcome by sharing our stories.
  2. Turning ‘never again’ into action: the legacy of Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
  3. Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, ‘Rabbi of Rabbis’ and world-renowned Jewish leader, dies at 89
  4. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
  5. Zwarte bladzijde 70 jaar bevrijding – Herdenking Auschwitz
  6. 2012 mensenrechten rapport – 2012 Human Rights report
  7. Vredesweek 2012 en Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
  8. De Vredesweek vraagt Internationale Gemeenschap Verantwoordelijkheid te nemen
  9. Malaysia requires sole use of God's title for Muslims
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Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Renewed Catholic-Jewish relations still with a blemish

It is a good sign we may find some trials of the new pope, Francis I, to bring the monotheist faithgroups Jews Christians and Muslims closer to each other again.


The Jews of Antwerpen
The Jews of Antwerpen (Photo credit: CharlesFred)
Catholic-Jewish relations for sure need some boost now we can see many fundamentalist groups trying to undermine such relations and trying to bring more extreme right-wing thoughts in the forefront. In Western Europe we might see again a growing anti-Semitism and a growing hate against Muslims. That hate is mostly triggered by fundamentalist faith-groups giving their 'religion' a bad name.

The world should always remember that the minority faith where people only wanted to honour Only One God Who created heaven and earth, suffered centuries of persecution. The world was warned already in the old days, many centuries before Jesus was born, that those people were the chosen people of God, but would also have to suffer much because of their choice. Also Jeshua, the Nazarene Jew warned his followers they should know when they would like to follow him, they would be a target of spot and bullying. Followers of Christ would in case they originally did not belong to the People Israel, also be taken up in the Family of God. But that would mean they also as part of the Body of Christ, would be part of God's people and would have to suffer likewise. though they may become protected more than those who did not accept the Messiah.

The Jews would have to live in ghettos and face the horrors of the Holocaust. Christians were persecuted but Jews were more and still are persecuted and shunned.

It is a pity the Jews have one distorted picture of the Christians, because they always see the majority of them being Trinitarians often raging against Jews. It is true when they say Christianity began as an offshoot of Judaism, because Jeshua (Jesus Christ) was a Jew, who never intended to make an other religion. After the church leaders of followers of that Jew made a bond with the men in power they took on the Greek-roman cultur with its many gods and holy days. they made Jeshua part of a three-une god like in the pagan cultures and as one bigger group they formed Christendom that became the main religion across Europe. It was that group which treated the tiny minority that did not follow Jesus as a tri-une god with persecution, exclusion and expulsion. Many Christians and Jews found their death as other people who did not want to confirm to the doctrines of that church.

Archbishop Angelo Roncalliin Worl War II was using his wartime post as Vatican ambassador in Istanbul to run a network of nuns, diplomats and other people to issue forged visas and baptismal and immigration certificates to Jews from the Balkans to get them to Turkey and then to British-mandate Palestine.
Later as Pope John XXIII he modernised the Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), whose landmark document "Nostra Aetate" (In Our Times) repudiated the 2,000-year-old concept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus.

Rabbi David Rosen, International Director of Inter-religious Affairs of American Jewish Committee, said:
"Nostra Aetate ushered in amazing changes in Catholic-Jewish relations around the world, even if the degree to which it was internalized depended on whether Catholics and Jews lived side by side." 
Today we can see a lesser nice site of that Roman Catholic Church which got several of its members really helping Jews out of love for the children of God. But some of them also could have taken action and used the situation to 'win more souls' for the 'good faith'.


A great many individual Catholics, priests, nuns, bishops, and others acted heroically to save Jews and to oppose Hitler. To pick one example among many, Archbishop Jean-Geraud Saliege of Toulouse bluntly declared that ”the Jews are our brothers, like so many others, and no Christian can forget this fact.” The Archbishop said this from the pulpit, in 1942, in the middle of occupied Europe. He was not alone in such heroism.
Unfortunately, as an institution the Catholic Church, particularly Pope Pius XII, spectacularly failed. The Church bears general responsibility and (in many cases) specific guilt both its failure to intervene and for particular actions taken against Jews.
Not many Catholics shamed themselves for certain actions taken by their church against people of other faiths. Several Roman Catholics became right wing fighters against those who did not want to come to the real faith of the god son Jesus. All others where considered blasphemous, and the Jews traitors to God. Many in charge of that Roman Catholic Church did not want to react against the way some of their flock were thinking. For years the West could see what was going on in Germany, but not many reacted against the genocide taking place.


Pope Pius XII called Pastor Angelicus, was the...
Pope Pius XII called Pastor Angelicus, was the most Marian Pope in Church history. Bäumer, Marienlexikon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As head of the Chruch you would think Popes Pius XI and Pius XII could do something against the Nazi doctrine, but they failed to plainly condemn Nazism and specific genocide against Jews (and others). From historical sources we know that diplomats representing France, Poland, Brazil, the United States, and Britain approached the Vatican more than once with the request that the Pope specifically denounce Nazi crimes against Jews. British diplomat Francis D’Arcy Osborne, wrote:
A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican…
Terrible was it when after the war the Catholic Church did not enough to bring the Jewish kids back to their family or did not allow them to keep their faith. Instead they tried to keep them away from their faith.

  in his article The Pope at Yad Vashem writes:
Some misdeeds continued beyond the war. Jewish children were hidden in Catholic homes or religious institutions during the war. When children were baptized, the Church sometimes deliberately obstructed their return to surviving Jewish relatives. As one notorious 1946 memorandum directed:
1) Avoid, as much as possible, responding in writing to Jewish authorities, but rather do it orally.
2) Each time a response is necessary, it is necessary to say that the Church must conduct investigations in order to study each case individually.
3) Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing.
4) For children who no longer have their parents, given the fact that the Church has responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by the Church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves. This, evidently, is for children who would not have been baptized.
5) If the children have been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now, providing that the children have not received baptism they can be given back.
It is to be noted that this decision of the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.


He bears no personal stain for actions undertaken almost seventy years ago.

Some Christians do not seem to like what he is doing the last few weeks, which shows how there are still too many Christians who do not want to see their connection with the Jews, and how many still consider a whole people guilty for what some of their folks did. It would be the same as the Jews would consider all Christians guilty for killing so many Jews. The same with the Muslims, too many Christian are generalising the Islamic community, equalising them all with those lunatic fundamentalists. You also could say it would be the same if we all would consider the Christians on the same line as some freaky fundamentalist Christians like the Westboro Church a.o.

We should welcome Pope Francis I his efforts to helpfully mediate the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis even at a time when still a debt remains unacknowledged and unpaid.

Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s director of international interreligious affairs and former head of the IJCIC, welcomed the Pope’s speech as conciliatory.
“Pope Francis is a very good friend of the Jewish people, and we rejoice in the fact that he will continue to advance the path of his predecessors in deepening the Catholic-Jewish relationship.”

Some christians do have problems with the Christian connection with Jews

Mainly American Christians do show their disgust with Judaism. Doing so they forget that Jeshua, Jesus Christ, the man who they are supposed to follow was a very devout Jew, belonging to the Jewish sect of the Essenes.

Many Americans say the Jews killed Jesus, but it would be the same as Europeans saying the Americans killed our compatriots in World War II or they killed the Afghanistan and the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Vietnamese and the Koreans and so on. It were some Jews and other people present in Jerusalem at that time who were agitated by the Pharisees and certain Jewish leaders, but not by all the Jews, who also saw in Jesus one of their own.

Also the new Pope is aware it would be better if more Christians started to investigate the Jewish roots of Christianity and the Christian flowering of Judaism.
Francis said.
 “I understand it is a challenge, a hot potato, but it is possible to live as brothers.”
Francis’ statement seems to go further than his predecessor, St. John Paul II, who made headlines in 1986 as the first pope to visit Rome’s main synagogue and declared Jews to be the “elder brothers” of the Christian faith.
“Every day, I pray with the Psalms of David. My prayer is Jewish, then I have the Eucharist, which is Christian,”
the Argentine pontiff added.

Too many Christians do not use the Old Testament, but it was the main part of Jesus his teaching. At that time there was only the Old Testament which was brought to the beleivers in the One God, which was the Divine Creator, God of Adam, God of Abraham and the God of Israel, God His people.

Those Jews are still God His people, we may never forget that.

Certain  right-wing Christians in their denial of the Jewish connection even go so far to deny the Christians would not have killed many of those people of God. A denial of the Holocaust the pope criticizes as “madness.”


Deutsch: Pius XII., Glückwunschschreiben zum 1...
Deutsch: Pius XII., Glückwunschschreiben zum 100. Jubiläum des Pilger in Speyer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Francis I also defended the record of Pope Pius XII, who led the Roman Catholic Church during World War II. Francis will soon have to decide whether to advance the sainthood cause for the controversial wartime pope, who is accused of failing to speak out publicly against the mass murder of Jews. For years, Jewish leaders and Nazi hunters have demanded the Vatican open up its secret wartime files.


Some Jews have accused Pius, who ruled from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The controversy has put a strain on Catholic-Jewish relations for decades.


Francis said he was concerned about
 “everything which has been thrown at poor Pius XII,”
while stressing that he sheltered Jews in the convents of Rome and other Italian cities, as well as the popes’ summer residence in Castel Gadolfo. Strange though that the Catholic Church did not come sooner with proof of such actions. We do know about nuns and priests who took all possibilities to bring Jews in safety. Many also told lies to the German soldiers to protect others. Their concious may have got very harsh times. but how was the concious of pope Pius XII?

The Vatican says Pius worked behind the scenes to save thousands of Jews and did not speak out more forcefully for fear that his words could have led to more deaths of both Jews and Christians at the hands of the Nazis


Pope Francis warns us to be careful, all being able to make mistakes.
"I don't want to say that Pius XII did not make any mistakes - I myself make many - but he has to be seen in the context of that era. For example, was it better for him not to speak out so that more Jews were not killed, or that he speak out?"
he said and added that Pius XII ordered the Church to hide many Jews in the convents of Rome and other Italian cities, that he sheltered Jews in the papal summer residence south of Rome and that 42 children of Jews and other refugees were born in his apartments there.



Francis added that he breaks out in an “existential rash” when he hears people speak against Pius and the church’s wartime record while ignoring inaction by the Allies fighting against Nazi Germany or forgetting the responsibility of the great wartime powers.
“Did you know that they knew perfectly well the rail network used by the Nazis to take the Jews to the concentration camps? They had photographs,”
 “But they did not bomb these rail lines. Why? It would be nice if we spoke a little bit about everything.”
Already in the 1930ies English and Americans did know about certain plans of the Germans, but they did not find it appropriate to react then, when there was still time to prtect further escalation.


Last month, Francis visited the Yad Vashem memorial to Holocaust victims in Jerusalem. The Yad Vashem's website, addressing the issue of the allies' activity during the war, says:

 "In practice, no military initiatives were taken to prevent or delay the extermination."
While some historians have argued those train lines should have been bombed, other historians note the allies were losing planes and airmen at such a high rate, and the lasting effects of the bombing of those train lines would have been so slight, that bombing them made no military or humanitarian sense.


Jewish groups have asked Francis and his predecessors to freeze the process that could lead to sainthood for Pius until the all the World War Two era archives are opened to historians, saying Catholic-Jewish relations could be harmed if the process moved ahead.

Speaking to reporters on the plane returning from Jerusalem last month, Francis said the sainthood cause for Pius was stalled because he had not been credited with performing a miracle, which Church rules require, suggesting it was not stalled because of any outside pressure.

Francis also used that interview to condemn anti-Semitism. He reportedly said it is a continuing problem that was primarily seen in right-wing European political parties which still continue to try to bring a screen in front of the people by ignoring the facts of history like the holocaust.

Francis confirmed that he intends to open the Vatican archives wartime collection.

"They will shed a lot of light,"

 the Pope said.


During Friday’s interview with the Barcelona daily, Francis was also asked about his own security, saying he refused to travel in a bulletproof “sardine can” vehicle because he wants to mingle with ordinary people.
“It is true that anything can happen, but let’s face it, at my age I have nothing to lose,”
the 77-year-old pontiff said. The way he can  now be in contact with young and old is much more important. Such a personal contact can do the Catholic Church some good to reboost it again.