Jewish Leader’s Killing Could Be Political

Belgian police were investigating the possibility Wednesday that a prominent Jewish leader, active in the recent controversy over the Carmelite convent at the old Auschwitz death camp in Poland, was shot to death by a political assassin.

Dr. Joseph Wybran, 48, secular leader of Belgian Jews and an internationally recognized immunologist, was shot Tuesday night in the parking lot of a suburban hospital where he worked. He died Wednesday morning.

Wybran recently took part in demonstrations outside the Vatican’s diplomatic offices in Brussels, protesting against the continued presence of the convent at Auschwitz, the Nazi German camp where about 4 million people, including more than 2.5 million Jews, were put to death during World War II. He also led a Belgian delegation to Poland to meet with Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the Polish primate.

“Given the nature of Dr. Wybran’s activities,” Belgian police authorities said in a statement Wednesday afternoon, “a political assassination, or at least one springing from an ideological or philosophical opposition, cannot be excluded.”

The police said there are no witnesses to the shooting, which occurred between 6:30 and 7 p.m. Tuesday as Wybran was getting into his car in the parking lot of Erasmus Hospital, just outside Brussels. He was shot once in the head at close range with a 7.65-millimeter pistol.

The police statement said, “Everything leads one to the conclusion that one or more of the killers were lying in wait for the victim.”

Wybran’s killing shocked the Belgian Jewish community of 30,000. He was chairman of the Coordination Committee of Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group for 30 Jewish organizations in Belgium.

“Professor Wybran was a world-known physician in immunology,” said a friend, Maurice Konopnicki, director of the Israel Information Center in Brussels. “He was . . . not an extremist.”

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Wybran was chief of the immunology, hematology and transfusion division of Erasmus Hospital. He was active in cancer research and in efforts to find a cure for AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He was also a professor of medicine at the University of Brussels. He was married but had no children.

Konopnicki blamed the killing on “some extreme-right organization who would exploit this conflict for their own purposes.”

Shimon Samuels, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office in Paris, noted that the killing comes at a time of “rising right-wing prejudice, particularly in Belgium.”

The Israeli ambassador to Belgium, Avi Primor, speculated that the killer or killers may have come from the country’s small but active neo-Nazi fringe.

“They have a lot of reason to be angry with Prof. Wybran,” Primor told the Associated Press. “He was one of the initiators to remove the Carmelite monastery from Auschwitz.”

The movement to remove the 14 Polish and German Roman Catholic nuns from the site began in Belgium, in 1985, after a right-wing Catholic organization published an appeal for donations to the convent in an issue of a small magazine, “Aid to the Church in Distress.”

The language of the appeal, particularly a phrase that said the nuns “would pray for wayward souls” at Auschwitz, outraged many Belgian Jews, some of whom felt it was an attempt at posthumous baptism.

Shortly afterward, a delegation of four Belgian Jews led by Wybran’s predecessor as chairman of the Coordination Committee, Markus Parves, visited Poland and met with Catholic leaders to request that the convent be moved.

The killing came at a time when tension has eased between Roman Catholics and Jews over the Auschwitz issue. In September, the Vatican decided that the convent should be moved and offered to pay some of the cost.