Polish Paper Calls Protest at Auschwitz a ‘Provocation’

Poland’s government newspaper Saturday described a protest by a group of Jews against a Roman Catholic convent at the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz as an “organized provocation” that terrified the convent’s nuns.

The newspaper Rzeczpospolita did not report that the seven American Jewish protesters, led by Rabbi Avraham Weiss of New York, were attacked and dragged away Friday by six Polish workers as police, priests and residents looked on.

“How harmful religious fanaticism can be seems to be evidenced by this unusual incident,” the newspaper said.

It called the protesters the aggressors. “The attackers demanded, with specially prepared placards and hostile shouts, that the Carmelite nuns leave the convent,” it said. They were guilty of an “organized provocation,” it added.

A report by the news agency PAP in other newspapers also ignored the violence against the protesters and accused them of shouting at the nuns in a hostile manner.

Poland’s new chief rabbi, Pinhas Menahem Joskovich, who arrived from Israel a few weeks ago, was not available for comment on the incident.

It was the first violence in a dispute between the Roman Catholic Church and Jews outside Poland over the convent, established beside the former outer wall of the Auschwitz camp in 1984.

Jews say the convent is an intrusion because most camp victims were Jewish and Auschwitz is the most symbolic site of the Nazi Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed. An estimated 2 million of the victims at Auschwitz were Jewish. Many of the others killed were Christians.

The Catholic Church agreed in 1986 to remove the nuns by last Feb. 22, but no action has been taken.

Friday’s protest ended after a few hours, but the account in Rzeczpospolita described the nuns as being under siege from attackers who entered their grounds by climbing a seven-foot fence.

“The Carmelite nuns are terrified by this turn of events, as they are cut off from the world and food supplies and mail are not reaching them,” the newspaper said.