Tale Retold to Show Pope’s Feeling for Jews

Amid the mixed feelings that Jews have about Pope John Paul II, an Encino rabbi retells a little-known story about a newly ordained Polish priest who years ago declined to baptize a Jewish child orphaned by the Holocaust.

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, in remarks he is preparing for a sermon Friday at Valley Beth Shalom, said he believes the Pope was ill-advised to meet last June with controversial Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.

But Schulweis said this is the same Pope who furthered Catholic-Jewish relations with his unprecedented visit to a Rome synagogue in 1986 and with statements about the continuing distinctiveness of Judaism, emphasizing that God’s covenant with the Jews “was never retracted by God.”

‘Ecumenical Progress’

“The Waldheim event, for all its sadness, must not be allowed to frustrate the ecumenical progress of the new era,” Schulweis said. Schulweis is founding chairman of the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians, a group aiding Gentiles who helped Jews during the Nazi years in Europe. The foundation recently became an agency of the Anti-Defamation League.

An incident early in the priestly life of Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland, bears on the integrity and “understanding of interreligious relationships” by the man who become John Paul II in 1978, said Schulweis, who cited an account in Yaffa Eliach’s “Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust” (Oxford University Press).

When the murder of Jews was at its peak in 1942, Helen and Moses Hiller, confined to the Krakow ghetto with other Jews, finally contacted and persuaded a childless couple who were Catholic to take care of their son, Shachne. At the risk of their own lives, Joseph Yachowitch and his wife raised the boy in the small town of Dombrowa. Not long afterward, the Hillers met the tragic fate of most Krakow Jews.

Asked to Have Boy Baptized

In 1946, Mrs. Yachowitch, a devoted Catholic, decided to have young Shachne baptized and approached a newly ordained priest. She revealed the Jewish identity of Shachne to Father Wojtyla, who in turn asked what the parents’ wishes were.

Informed that the Hillers wanted the child to be told of his Jewish origins and returned to his people in the event of his parents’ death, the young priest said it would be unfair to baptize the child. He would not perform the ceremony.

The boy was sent to live with relatives in Canada. Renamed Stanley Berger, the man is now a business executive in Montreal, Schulweis said.

The time is propitious to retell that story and to recall “his earlier declaration to Jewish leaders which expressed a common determination to reject all forms of anti-Semitism and discrimination,” Schulweis said.