Jewish Groups Seek Meeting With Pope : U.S. Leaders Want Explanation of Waldheim’s Papal Audience

Leaders of a broad spectrum of major American Jewish organizations conferred privately in New York on Friday, then called upon Pope John Paul II to meet with them to discuss the controversial audience he has granted to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.

The Pope’s decision to receive Waldheim also sparked a call by the leaders of the dozen Jewish groups present for a broad examination of Vatican-Jewish relations and of the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward Israel.

“Clearly, now, the planned ceremonial meeting with the Pope scheduled for Miami in September is an inappropriate forum to discuss this and other urgent issues of Catholic-Jewish relations,” the leaders said in a statement.

“In light of these circumstances, we urge that an early meeting with the Pope take place to discuss substantive issues of Catholic-Jewish relations and to clarify for us, and all of those who share our dismay, the motivation for imparting the honor of a papal audience to Kurt Waldheim.”

Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, past president of the Synagogue Council of America, summed up the sentiment of the attending organizations. Seated at a table in front of half a dozen microphones while 14 other leaders looked on, he warned: “We have serious reservations about going to Miami.

“We have made a statement which invites a new reaction from the Pope,” Waxman said. “The ball is in his court. . . . We expect an explanation, especially in light of the fact that the U.S. government has seen fit to ban Waldheim from its shores.”

“It dismays us that the Pope, a moral authority, would agree to see Waldheim,” Waxman added. “We hope the Pope will consider the matter very seriously.”

Waldheim, who has been barred from the United States because of his Nazi association, is scheduled to be received Thursday by the Pope in the Vatican. The Austrian president and former U.N. secretary general, who is Catholic, has been accused by Jewish groups of aiding and abetting in Nazi war crimes while he was an intelligence officer in the German army. He is also accused of concealing these activities.

“We disapprove of the meeting with Waldheim,” Waxman said. “We feel that the meeting calls attention to the issues that divide us.”

Some Jewish leaders have privately expressed concern that the Pope’s visit to the United States could also divide American Jews and that some Jewish representatives might meet with the Pope while others picket him. In addition, they see potential problems concerning how to treat an exhibition of Judaica from the Vatican that will be shown in U.S. cities to commemorate the pontiff’s visit.

May Change Position

One of the groups represented at Friday’s meeting was the American Jewish Congress, which had announced Thursday that, because of his granting an audience to Waldheim, it would not meet with the Pope on Sept. 11 in Miami, the first stop on his nine-city visit to the United States. However, the organization’s representatives indicated at Friday’s strategy session that the group might change its position if an earlier meeting with the Pope takes place.

“We felt all along the September 11 meeting was largely ceremonial,” said Israel E. Levine, director of communications for the American Jewish Congress, a civil rights group based in New York. “We are not severing ties with the Vatican. We would like an opportunity to have a substantive discussion with the Pope before that . . . meeting. . . . We have come out clearly and said we would withdraw if there is not an earlier meeting.”

Meanwhile, Rabbi Paul Dubin, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, said the group’s executive committee would meet Tuesday to discuss withdrawing from an interfaith meeting with the Pope in Los Angeles on Sept. 16.

“It’s too early to make a definitive statement on whether we will or won’t go. . . . A lot depends on how Waldheim is accepted by the Pope, and on what each (man) says,” Dubin said Friday. “Until then, we’re putting it on hold.”

But Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles have already said that because of “the intolerable action on the part of the Vatican” in granting the audience to Waldheim, they will not attend the largely ceremonial meeting in the Japanese Cultural Center.

Hier announced Friday that the Wiesenthal Center will convene an all-night candlelight vigil Wednesday in Washington in front of the residence of Archbishop Pio Laghi, the papal pro-nuncio to the United States, “to express our public outrage” over the Waldheim meeting.

John Paul’s granting of a private audience to Waldheim is the latest in a series of issues that have strained relations between the Vatican and American Jewish leaders. In 1982, there were deep expressions of anger when the Pope met with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat. The Vatican’s continued refusal to grant full diplomatic status to Israel is a sore point, as is the church’s official position on the status and future of Jerusalem.

The leaders who met in the Manhattan offices of the Synagogue Council of America spanned the spectrum of Judaism. Joining in the statement were the Rabbinical Assembly, the United Synagogue of America, the Rabbinical Council of America, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Congress and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

Also contributing to this story were Times religion writer Russell Chandler in Los Angeles and Times researcher Eileen V. Quigley in New York.