At the dawn of the new millennium, Pope John Paul II visited Israel in March 2000.
He visited the Western Wall and participated in the tradition of leaving a note — his was printed and embossed with the seal of the Vatican.
The pope prayed in the name of Abraham, the common patriarch of Jews and Christians. He asked for forgiveness for those who caused the Jewish people to suffer "in the course of history."
The pontiff — whose boyhood friends in Krakow were engulfed in the Holocaust — recommitted the church to "genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."
Much of this promise and premise is anchored in the profoundly serious reckoning of the Roman Catholic Church and its relationship with Judaism.
Nostra Aetate (In our Time) — promulgated 50 years ago, as part of the progeny of Vatican II deliberations of the church — declared among other things: 1) Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus; 2) anti-Semitism was a sin against God; and 3) the Jewish Covenantal relationship with God remained intact.
Nostra Aetate and similar Protestant declarations are fundamental to the wonderful rediscovery and celebration of kinship between Christians and Jews, particularly in North America and Europe.
For all of this progress, though, part of this recognition and appreciation of difficult history means coming to grips with the salient sociological facts of the Holocaust.
Motivated by the teachings of Nostra Aetate, Father Patrick Desbois — a French Catholic priest and author of "The Holocaust by Bullets: A priest's journey to uncover the truth behind the murder of 1.5 million Jews" — has become an internationally recognized historian literally unearthing some of the most shocking aspects of the Shoah (Holocaust) whose details were little known before his seminal discoveries.
International Holocuast Remberance Day is Jan. 27. To mark that occasion the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas is bringing Desbois to the Twin Cities for a program at Beth El Synagogue Thursday.
Before and during the operation of the death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland, units of the Einsatzgruppen with the integral assistance of native collaborators shot about 1.5 million Jews primarily in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans after June 22, 1941.
Despite the massive scale of the murders, Desbois initially could find little evidence of it and few people who would talk about it. The signs of Jewish civilization, including synagogues, towns, and cemeteries in the Baltic states, Belorussia, and Ukraine, had vanished.
After Desbois and his team — using modern forensics and GPS mapping — began discovering and mapping the killing fields of the Shoah, he vowed: "We cannot give a posthumous victory to Nazism. We cannot leave the Jews buried like animals. We cannot accept this state of affairs and allow our continent to be built on the obliterated memory of the victims of the Reich."
And with gentle and non-judgmental suasion, Desbois and his team became expert at coaxing horrific recollections from eyewitnesses to the massacres now in their 80s and 90s, providing a painful gift to history and expiation to sometimes tortured consciences amid the beautiful and pastoral countrysides.
Among the awful truths which emerged is the gut-wrenching reality — according to Desbois — that the "Germans assassinated the Jews in the middle of towns, in full view and with the knowledge of everyone." Townspeople often dug the burial pits and then extracted the gold teeth from the murdered Jews.
From that time and place — in the phrase of historian Lucy Dawidowicz — Desbois reminds us the Holocaust happened "in the very heart of Europe, one of the oldest civilizations of the world that had been shaped for centuries by Christian religious thinking and by the Enlightenment."
On this eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 50 years of Nostra Aetate is a blink in history but a sea-change in attitude.
We welcome Father Desbois — who in the most loving Christian tradition has ministered to the dying in Calcutta and lepers in Africa — to our community to teach us to confront our shared history and then to grasp with all our hearts and all our souls and all our might our collective Abrahamic destinies as brothers and sisters.
Steve Hunegs is the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Father Patrick Desbois will speak at Beth El Synagogue on Thursday, Jan. 26, at 7:00 p.m. Free and open to the public. RSVP at: www.minndakjcrc.org.
