ISRAEL'S chief rabbi yesterday asked visiting Pope Benedict XVI to release records of Jewish children given shelter by the Catholic Church during the Second World War and brought up as Catholics, so they can decide whether to return to Judaism.
The request came on the second day of a Holy Land pilgrimage by the German-born Pope, a visit that is being haunted by the Nazi Holocaust and Israeli accusations that the pontiff did not go far enough in condemning it during remarks on Monday.
Ode
d Weiner, an aide to chief rabbi Yona Metzger, said the rabbi had asked the Pope to give an order to all priests and to Vatican archivists to release the names of Jews given shelter by churches, monasteries and Catholic families.
"The idea is that the people in question should be informed that they were Jews so that they will know their roots and decide at their advanced age what it is that they want to do" he said.
Mr Wiener said there were thousands of such cases during the war, but he did not know how many of the people were still alive.
The request is a potentially loaded one, since Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff, is accused by Israel of not having intervened to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked quietly to save Jews.
The Vatican was on the defensive yesterday amid a tide of Israeli criticism over the Pope's remarks at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday, which were seen as lacking an apology or clarity that the killings amounted to mass murder. While Pope John Paul II used the term "murder" during his Yad Vashem speech in a 2000 pilgrimage, Benedict used the term "killing" instead, something that angered his Israelis hosts, in part because of ill-will generated by the Pope's decision this year to lift the excommunication of Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson.
"The Pope spoke like a historian, as somebody observing from the sidelines about things that shouldn't happen. He was part of them," said Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin.
Mr Rivlin was referring to Benedict's participation as a young man in the Hitler Youth, something the Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, acknowledged in a 1997 book. He said at the time that participation was compulsory.
Vatican spokesman the Rev Federico Lombardi yesterday said the Israeli critics were not listening to what the Pope was saying. He insisted Benedict was "never, never, never" in the Hitler Youth. "He did not think that every time he has to repeat in every speech all the points about the tragedy of the Holocaust."
In his 1997 autobiography Salt of the Earth, the then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that he was registered in the Hitler Youth by his seminary and never went back to the group after ending his religious studies there.
He said that along with other seminarians, he was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit, serving from August 1943 to September 1944. Afterwards, following what he called a "relatively harmless" service in the infantry, he was sent home by a sympathetic officer and taken prisoner by American forces.
Palestinian MP Hanan Ashrawi called the Israeli criticisms of the Pope's speech "arrogance", adding: "They should give him leeway."
Ms Ashrawi accused Israeli officials of trying to put the Pope on the defensive over the Holocaust in order to stifle his criticisms of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, where he is due to visit Bethlehem and a refugee camp today.
