L.A. Jewish Group Puts On Pressure to Remove Convent

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the scrappy Los Angeles-based Jewish organization dedicated to preserving public awareness of the Nazi Holocaust, is putting pressure on both the Vatican and the Polish government to remove a convent bordering the Auschwitz concentration camp, where millions of Jews were put to death during World War II.

The sensitive issue has smoldered between Catholics and Jews ever since the Carmelite convent was established near Auschwitz five years ago. It has assumed international proportions in recent weeks with the passing of a previously negotiated deadline for removing the 17 nuns to another site and an announcement by a Polish cardinal last week that the nuns would stay until further notice.

The Wiesenthal Center, the nation’s largest institution studying the Holocaust and its human rights implications, called the Polish Catholic Church’s action “a tragic error which threatens the 40-year dialogue between our two faith communities.”

In a letter to be sent next week, the center is urging its 370,000 member families to write Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski, threatening that Jews will curtail travel to Poland unless the convent is removed. Jewish travel to Poland is considerable because Holocaust survivors and tour groups regularly visit the death camp sites.

“At Auschwitz the (Catholic) Church is staking exclusive claim to a symbol that is not hers, a uniquely Jewish symbol soaked in Jewish blood and martyrdom,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said this week. “At Auschwitz, the church is trespassing on the greatest Jewish cemetery in all of Jewish history.”

About 2.5 million Jews were among the 4 million people--including a million Polish Catholics--who were killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz. The convent, established as a place of prayer for Auschwitz victims, is a former Nazi warehouse where poison gas used to kill prisoners was stored.

Pope John Paul II has tried to distance himself from the dispute, which threatens to damage the hard-fought progress and fragile relationships between world Jewry and the Vatican that have been painstakingly built up since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The council, called to reform and modernize the Catholic Church, approved a document soundly condemning anti-Semitism.

While several Jewish leaders have proposed a complete freeze on all official relations between Jews and Catholics because of the current dispute, other groups, while condemning the Polish Catholic Church stance, are taking a softer line. Senior Catholic officials are also divided over the matter.

Following several Jewish demonstrations outside the convent last month--one involving a physical attack by Polish workmen on seven U.S. Jews--Cardinal Franciszek Macharski of Krakow declared that a 1987 agreement to move the nuns to a yet unbuilt interfaith prayer center half a mile from the death camp would not be honored. The agreement stipulated that the nuns were to have been moved by Feb. 22.

Macharski said “a violent campaign of accusations and slanders” by “some Western Jewish groups” made it impossible “to continue to construct the center.”

But several days after Macharski’s statement, French Cardinals Albert Decourtray of Lyon and Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, both signers of the 1987 agreement, declared that “an accord obliges those who sign. . . .”

“We will continue to do everything possible so that the dialogue inaugurated with the Geneva accord is pursued,” they said.

Eugene Fisher of Washington, head of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations, said he was unsure how to interpret the apparent contradiction between the statements by the Polish cardinal and the French prelates.

Meanwhile, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York has called for resolving “whatever obstacles have delayed” the nuns’ removal, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry has done the same.

Both Fisher and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, head of international relations for the American Jewish Committee in New York, said they believe that the convent will be moved but not before next year at the earliest.

That is not soon enough for the Wiesenthal Center or the World Jewish Congress, which are both taking a hard line on the issue. The congress has coordinated European efforts to move the convent, and its officers also signed the 1987 agreement.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, predicted “massive demonstrations” at Auschwitz if the impasse is not resolved soon.

“We want to keep pressure on at all levels,” he said.

This is not the first time the center has been at the forefront of protest against what it perceives as Vatican insensitivity to Jewish concerns.

Ired by John Paul’s 1987 Vatican meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has been accused of Nazi war crimes, Wiesenthal rabbis Hier and Cooper boycotted the Pope’s interfaith meeting with 400 religious leaders in Los Angeles during his pastoral tour of the United States that September.

During a meeting at the Vatican last month with a senior representative of the Vatican secretary of state, Hier and Cooper were told the Pope “had withdrawn from any personal involvement in this issue and was leaving it to local (Polish) church authorities,” Hier said.

Before becoming Pope, John Paul was archbishop of Krakow, the archdiocese that includes Auschwitz.

Further, the rabbis added, the senior Vatican official, Msgr. Luigi Gatti, “admitted that plans to construct a new center” to house the nuns “were years away.”

Lending some credence to the accusation that the Polish Catholic Church never intended to meet the February moving deadline, Rabbi Henry E. Kraus of Westwood, a chaplain at the City of Hope in Duarte, told The Times that he recently saw construction materials and carpenters at work inside the convent.

Kraus, a survivor of Auschwitz, said he persuaded the convent’s mother superior to allow him in the building when he returned to Auschwitz on a pilgrimage last month. Two wings have been add to the small original building, he said, and a 23-foot cross has been erected outside.

Macharski’s explanation that Jewish protests had derailed plans to relocate the nuns was “dishonest,” Cooper charged.

“The decision had already been made,” he said.

The Wiesenthal Center rabbis said the issue goes beyond apparent broken promises. They are worried about a “de-Judaizing” of the death camp.

“We are seeing a kind of revisionism in history,” Hier said. “There are other fields to claim for Christ, but this is not one of them.”

Hier compared his feelings about the Auschwitz convent to how he thinks Catholics would feel if “a 50-foot Star of David and a Torah scroll were housed in a synagogue to be erected on the border line of the Vatican. . . .”

“Many Roman Catholics and Vatican officials would be offended--and I say rightly so, because we would be provoking them. . . . The nuns have a right to pray but should they force their prayers right up to the fence of Auschwitz?” he said.

Tanenbaum, a key leader in Catholic-Jewish dialogues, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that last month’s confrontation between New York Rabbi Avraham Weiss and six of his students with Polish construction workers had set off “a cycle of reciprocal hostility.”

Weiss’ group broke through the fence, occupied the convent porch and demanded that the nuns leave, Tanenbaum said. The workman then poured water and paint on the protesters and “roughed them up pretty badly.”

Weiss, who according to Tanenbaum acted on his own, was “taken as representative of the whole Jewish community. . . .”

“There was a furious reaction on the part of traditionalist Polish Catholics who now demand that Cardinal Macharski not yield, and that the nuns must remain,” he said.

Tanenbaum, who said the American Jewish Committee does not approve of a boycott of Jewish travel to Poland, urged “patience and wisdom on all sides. . . . Auschwitz in its barbarism . . . (is) a sign and a warning of what can happen when hatred runs amok.”