Jewish Protesters at Auschwitz Attacked

Workers at a Roman Catholic convent on the edge of the Auschwitz concentration camp punched, kicked and dragged out an American rabbi and six students who occupied the grounds Friday and demanded that the nuns leave.

About 20 people, including uniformed and plainclothes police, watched as the workers ripped up the demonstrators’ signs and assaulted them.

Rabbi Avraham Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, located in the Bronx section of New York, said members of his group suffered bruises, scrapes, bleeding noses and lips. Their clothes were torn and they were forced to leave the convent grounds.

Weiss said that the nuns watched from a window and did not try to stop the workers. Reporters could see women inside watching, but they were not dressed in habits and appeared not to be nuns.

“It’s extraordinary that in Auschwitz 50 years later, something like this could happen,” said Weiss. “I demand an apology from these nuns.”

The incident occurred five hours after the protesters climbed a 7-foot wrought-iron fence and occupied a porch of the convent, located in a former Nazi warehouse on the perimeter of the camp where 4 million people died from 1940 to 1945, an estimated 2.5 million of them Jews. Many of the others killed at the camp were Christians.

Weiss’ group called the convent a “desecration” of the Jews’ memory and protested the failure of Catholic authorities to meet a February deadline to relocate it.

The group went to Krakow, about 30 miles to the east, but said they would return Sunday.

“What occurred today is going to strengthen our resolve all the more now,” said Weiss. “People should understand what peaceful nonviolent protest is all about. I cannot accept that the nuns would be looking through the window and not help us.”

Under a 1987 Geneva accord, signed by 18 Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders, the cardinal was to transfer the 14 Carmelite nuns to an interfaith prayer and education center to be built farther from the camp.

The controversy surrounding the convent has become more emotional since the deadline for moving the nuns passed on Feb. 22.

The cloister is a few feet from the barbed wire fence and guard towers of the death camp. The convent lawn is a former gravel pit where political prisoners were gunned down by Nazi executioners in 1940 and 1941.