Blessed John
Paul II is well remembered for the efforts he made towards solidarity with his “elder brothers” in the Jewish community. Much of his respect
for the Jewish people came from his living and growing with Jewish friends
throughout his childhood in Poland. Gian Franco Svidercoshi explored the Holy
Father’s history and its impact
on his push for positive Christian-Jewish relations:
In Crossing
the Threshold of Hope, the Pope wrote: “Behind the words of the Council
declaration there is the hope of many men, both Jews and Christians. There is
also my own personal experience from the early stages of my life in my hometown.”
Here it is: it must therefore signify something - on the providential plan and
not only on that of the plan of coincidence - that the author of the turning of
this dialogue of the Catholic Church with its brothers of Israel was a Pope for
whom, as an adolescent and a boy, the cohabitation with Jews was part of every
day life.
Wadowice,
where Karol Wojtyla was born and lived until he was 18 years old, was a town of
ten thousand inhabitants, of which three thousands were Jews. And they lived,
Catholics and Jews, in a serene climate, without conflict. Karol lived in a
house, whose proprietor, Balamut, was Jewish. Also Jewish was Ginka Beer, older
by some years, who lived on the floor above, and who, was the first to bring
him into the theater. Many of his friends from school were also Jewish, like
Jerzy Kluger, a great friend still today; and Zygmunt Selinger, Leopold Zwieg;
and Poldek Goldberger, who played goalie, like Wojtyla when they played soccer.
So,
the future Pope knew Judaism from the inside. Through the day-to-day of
friendship, of total esteem and reciprocal tolerance. Through the acquaintance
of many people. But also on the religious and spiritual level. In the parish,
during the evening services, he was always struck by the Psalm 147, that of the
invitation to Jerusalem to glorify the lord because it strengthened the pillars
of his door, it blessed his children. Many years later, the Pope, would
remember: “Both religious groups, Catholics and Jews, were united, I believe,
by the knowledge of praying to the same God. Notwithstanding the diversity of
language, the prayers in the Church and the Synagogue were based on the considerable
measure of the same texts.”
There
is then a second aspect, to explain those which we could call the Jewish
«roots» of John Paul II. And it is here by the light of his own personal
history, in particular in his younger years. And it is having lived close, even
without being able to know the true reality and the true dimensions of the
great tragedy of the Jewish people, the Holocaust. At the origin of that there
was the horrible design of Hitler. The “final solution” as was called the plan
to make disappear, into nothingness, the Jewish race on the entire European
continent.
The Pope recalled, still in Crossing
the Threshold of Hope: “Then came the Second World War, with its
concentration camps and programmed extermination. In the first place, it was
the sons and daughters of the Jewish nation which suffered, just because they
were Jewish. Whoever lived then in Poland, became, even if only indirectly, in
contact with this reality. This was then, even my own personal experience, an
experience which I have brought in me even today.”
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John Paul II as we prepare for his canonization.
