October 17: The reason why Pius XII...

People with an axe to grind are unfairly singling out the Vatican under the late Pope Pius XII for its supposed silence regarding the Holocaust.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
letters 88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
letters 88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The reason why Pius XII... Sir, - Re "Pope vigorously defends Pius XII over his behavior during Holocaust" (October 10): People with an axe to grind are unfairly singling out the Vatican under the late Pope Pius XII for its supposed silence regarding the Holocaust. It is not generally known that the Nazis were as anti-Christian as they were anti-Semitic. Hitler called Christianity "a Jewish sickness," which he planned to uproot and replace with Norse paganism when Nazi Germany won the war. Hundreds of Christian clergymen were murdered in Hitler's death camps. Had the Pope launched a crusade over Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler's legions would have besieged the Vatican, burnt it to the ground and liquidated as many Catholic clergy as possible. Was it wrong of the pope to try to protect his Church with his alleged silence? Nevertheless, this great man was far less silent about the Holocaust than was America's Jewish community. Whereas the pope encouraged his clergy to save almost all of Italy's Jews from the Nazis, American Jews, blindly misled by president Roosevelt and his anti-Semitic State Department, maintained a thunderous silence about the fate of their co-religionists in Nazi-dominated Europe. They did not protest against Roosevelt's rejection of a Swedish proposal in 1939 that Sweden and America jointly rescue 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and resettle them in America. To this day, America's Jews have not been sufficiently vigorous or successful in urging the administration to ban racist and violently anti-Semitic groups like the American Nazi Party, Louis Farrakhan's Temple of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan. ROY RUNDS Tel Aviv ...behaved as he did Sir, - Judging Pius XII is not as difficult as the Church and some Jews would like to pretend. The pope faced two threats to the Church and to civilization simultaneously: Bolshevism/Communism one the one hand, Nazism/Fascism on the other. There is no question which he preferred. He saw the Communists as the threat and the Fascists as the bulwark against them. He supported every Catholic Fascist dictator from Franco to Fr. Tiso, the Slovak priest who destroyed over 70% of Slovakian Jewry before he was halted. The Church never ceased railing against the Communists, but always found excuses to ignore Nazi and Fascist atrocities. Mealy-mouthed statements about innocent suffering could be applied both to the slaughtered Jews and the Germans who died in the Allied bombings. Fear of harming Catholics in Fascist countries prevented speaking out clearly, according to the pope's apologists - an issue that never bothered him when Catholics in Communist countries were oppressed. In Croatia, the murderous Franciscan fathers slaughtered Jews in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. There was no serious reaction from the Church or the pope to their atrocities. True, he never prevented Catholics from saving Jews, and saved a few himself as insurance. The Carmelites stand out as perhaps the most compassionate of the Catholic religious orders. But the pope did stand by as the Nazis marched the Jews under his windows to their deaths. He feared that the Allies might drop a bomb on his Holy head. JOSEF GILBOA Sickening views Sir, - I'm not surprised that Linda Grant's book The Clothes on Their Backs is short-listed for the 2008 Booker prize. The British establishment is only too keen to promote another vehicle that reinforces new forms of anti-Jewish sentiment by an ex-journalist of the Guardian. In the interview ("The nature of suffering," UpFront, October 10), Ms. Grant calmly asks: "How could the Jews who went through the Holocaust behave like that towards the Palestinians?" - another example of the all-toocommon, horrendous slander that links the treatment of Palestinians by Jews with the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust. The "new anti-Semitism" is currently raging through Europe and no Israeli newspaper should lend credence to it. Ms. Grant needed to be challenged on her sickening views. LYNETTE ORDMAN Netanya Fixing the world Sir, - While we wish Adam L'Adam much success with its Tikkun Olam project, it is not so unique as your October 10 article suggested ("New humanitarian group aims to train Jewish leaders to 'fix world'"). Young Judaea's Year Course in Israel, sponsored by Hadassah, is the largest gap-year program in Israel, with 540 students. In 2009 we are launching our own Tikkun Olam project with three months in Israel developing leadership skills and learning how to be a volunteer in the third world; three months in Ghana, and then three months back in Israel volunteering. While in Ghana the students will volunteer in educational and health-related fields. And since we are Zionists, we will also spend time with the fledgling Ghana Jewish community bringing Israeli songs, dance, music and language to the community. For more information contact www.yearcourse.org KEITH BERMAN Program Director Jerusalem Dismal weather Sir, - I used to think prominent economists resembled generals, out to win financial wars. Increasingly, though, they sound more like weather forecasters. No power to interfere. Just predictions, and often wrong ("US government moves again to unclog credit lines," October 15). M.M. VAN ZUIDEN Jerusalem