Israel's Holocaust museum alters
caption on Pope Pius XII
JERUSALEM, July 1 (AFP) - Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum has altered the wording on a display dealing with the controversial role of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, the museum said on Sunday.
The change in text comes after years of friction between the Vatican and the museum over a panel which accused Pope Pius XII of failing to protest the killing of Jews and signing a treaty with Nazi Germany to protect the Church.
The new panel clarifies that the deal, known as a concordat, was in fact signed by his predecessor Pius XI, and it presents arguments by both critics and defenders of the actions of Pius XII.
In a statement, Yad Vashem insisted that the change was "an update to reflect research that has been done in the recent years, and presents a more complex picture than previously presented.
"This change is not a result of Vatican pressure," the statement said.
The panel has been an issue of simmering tension between Yad Vashem and the Vatican for years, with a former papal nuncio to Israel, Antonio Franco, threatening to boycott a Holocaust commemoration in 2007 over the wording.
Yad Vashem in the past said the panel would only be changed if the Vatican agreed to open its archives to researchers and evidence showed Pius XII's role had been misrepresented.
The Vatican has yet to open those archives fully, though it has made public selected documents. But Yad Vashem said on Sunday that new research "has clarified certain issues, while still leaving many questions open."
[The basic problem in all this controversy about Pius XII is that 'none are more blind than those who refuse to see' - and for some reason, dominant Jewish opinion since the early 1960s bought completely into the Soviet propaganda depicting Pius XII's 'silence' about the Jews during World War II as moral cowardice, even if Jewish leaders, including the first israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, had been praising him for years for what he did for the Jews in World War II. Israel is just as guilty here of reprehensible historic amnesia regarding Pius XII as Bishop Williamson is about the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
For decades now, the anti-Pius campaign has used the non-opening of the Vatican archives pertaining to the papers of the Pius XII Pontificate as a reason for their intransigent hostility - while refusing to consider the tons of documentary proof already available - as if opening the full archive (due in the next two years after it is commpletely catalogued) would somehow bring to light documents showing Pius XII was anti-Semitic all along and had supported everything Hitler did during the war, as unlikely and unrealistic as that may be! And when the full archive is open and none of those documents are found, they will conceivably accuse the Vatican of holding back 'incriminatory' documents. They will never run out of reasons to back down on an untenable position, yet the longer they stick to it, the more ridiculous their position will appear to the rest of the informed world who are not Jewish.
On the other hand, revising the controversial caption now, with less sweeping denunciations of Pius XII, could also be their way of setting the stage for eventually accepting the objective facts about a man who was indeed a 'Righteous among the Nations' thousands of times over, but whom the prevailing Jewish opinion would cast as the true villain of the Holocaust rather than Adolf Hitler.
An old Hebrew Scriptural saying goes: “Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe", and this is the basis for Yad Vashem's list of non-Jewish individuals who have been shown to have rescued Jews during the Second World War, declaring each one 'Righteous among Nations'. By that criterion, Pius XII should lead the list, no less worthy than well-known secular figures like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg.] ]
The old panel displayed at Yad Vashem said Pius XII was "active" in obtaining a treaty with Germany to protect the Church's rights "even if this meant recognising the Nazi racist regime."
It said he scrapped a letter denouncing racism and anti-Semitism, and failed to protest publicly the murder of Jews.
It accused him of declining to sign the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of Jews. And it said he had failed to act to prevent the transport of Jews from Rome to Auschwitz.
The old caption:
Pope Pius XII
In 1933, when he was Secretary of the Vatican State, he was active in obtaining a Concordat with the German regime to preserve the Church's rights in Germany, even if this meant recognizing the Nazi racist regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene. The Pope maintained his neutral position throughout the war, with the exception of appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia towards its end. His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged Churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react.
The new panel attributes the signing of the deal to Pius XI, and it notes that Pius XII made reference to the deaths of hundreds of people during a 1942 radio address, though he did not specifically mention Jews.
"The pope's critics claim that his decision to abstain from condemning the murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany constitutes a moral failure," the panel says.
"The lack of clear guidance left room for many to collaborate with Nazi Germany, reassured by the thought that this did not contradict the Church's moral teachings."
"His defenders maintain that this neutrality prevented harsher measures against the Vatican and the Church's institutions... thus enabling a considerable number of secret rescue activities," it adds.
Here is how Yad Vashem itself presented the change:
Yad Vashem Statement regarding
updated text on the panel
about the Vatican
July 1, 2012
In 2005, Yad Vashem opened its new Holocaust History Museum after more than a decade of work. The texts in the museum were written based on the research available in the early years of the 2000s.
Recently, following the recommendation of the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the panel regarding the wartime activities of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII has been updated. This is an update to reflect research that has been done in the recent years, and presents a more complex picture than previously presented. Contrary to what has been reported, this change is not a result of Vatican pressure.
Over the past few years, new research, in part based on the opening of archival collections such as the Pius XI archive (up until 1939) and on other information, including that which was presented at an international academic workshop “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust - Current State of Research” held at Yad Vashem in 2009, has clarified certain issues, while still leaving many questions open.
Only when all material is available, will a clearer picture emerge. That workshop was initiated by the late Prof. David Bankier, then head of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research. The book that emerged from the academic workshop on the subject will soon be published (in English) by Yad Vashem.
Prof. Bankier offered a draft for an updated text for the Museum panel, and since he passed away, this text has been finalized by researchers of the Institute, led by the current head of the Institute, Prof. Dan Michman.
Yad Vashem looks forward to the day when the Vatican archives will be open to researchers so that a clearer understanding of the events can be arrived at.
The panel noted that the reaction of Pope Pius XII is a matter of controversy. Some visitors to the Museum did not understand the controversy. The panel now presents this controversy in more detail. Of course, no panel in a museum can ever fully explore any topic, and for those interested in learning more, the library and archives at Yad Vashem have a plethora of material.
Yad Vashem researchers and historians continue to research many aspects of Holocaust history. Over the past years, a number of corrections have been made throughout the Museum. Should any other updates be necessary in the Museums, these will take place as well.
Following is the new text:
The Vatican
The Vatican, under Pius XI, Achille Ratti, and represented by the Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, signed a concordat with Nazi Germany in July 1933, in order to preserve the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany.
The reaction of Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, to the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust is a matter of controversy among scholars. From the onset of World War II, the Vatican maintained a policy of neutrality. The Pontiff abstained from signing the Allies' declaration of December 17, 1942 condemning the extermination of the Jews. Yet, in his Christmas radio address of December 24, 1942 he referred to “the hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or ethnic origin (stirpe), have been consigned to death or to a slow decline.” Jews were not explicitly mentioned. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pontiff did not publicly protest. The Holy See appealed separately to the rulers of Slovakia and Hungary on behalf of the Jews.
The Pope’s critics claim that his decision to abstain from condemning the murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany constitutes a moral failure: the lack of clear guidance left room for many to collaborate with Nazi Germany, reassured by the thought that this did not contradict the Church’s moral teachings. It also left the initiative to rescue Jews to individual clerics and laymen.
His defenders maintain that this neutrality prevented harsher measures against the Vatican and the Church's institutions throughout Europe, thus enabling a considerable number of secret rescue activities to take place at different levels of the Church. Moreover, they point to cases in which the Pontiff offered encouragement to activities in which Jews were rescued. Until all relevant material is available to scholars, this topic will remain open to further inquiry.
I will desist for now from fisking the new caption, but this is how the Israeli newspaper Haaretz presents the change - objectively for the most part in comparing the old and the new captions, but ultimately offensive in saying this is a 'warning' to Benedict XVI - as if this Pope could be intimidated. He declared Pius XII Venerable just a month before he visited the Jewish Synagogue in Rome(after he had personally ordered historians of his confidence to review the material in the Vatican Archives about Pius XII) - the Jewish community of Rome did not cancel their invitation because of that.
Pius's role in the Holocaust
deserves more scrutiny
The new captions at Yad Vashem send a clear message to the incumbent Pope:
Do not glamorize Pius XII before the Vatican reviews and publishes
all documents concerning his activities during the Holocaust.
By Tom Segev
July 1, 2012
From the beginning,
the Yad Vashem Museum was created to reflect Israel's official concept regarding the Holocaust, and obviously it serves as a justification of Zionist ideology and of the need to establish the State of Israel and guarantee its security.
Almost sixty years later, the new museum, which opened in 2005 and was inspired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, presents the original political foundations in a new style: less indoctrination and more room for various points of view regarding numerous subjects, some of them sensitive and controversial.
At the entrance the visitor is greeted by an old clip of Jewish children in the Ukraine singing "Hatikva," the national anthem. The visit ends with the establishment of the State of Israel.
Still, one notable difference is that the Arabs are no longer presented as Nazis: the placing of the 1941 photo of Hitler meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is no longer as accentuated as before. The museum has also adopted a neutral stance concerning the Nazi-established "Jewish Councils," otherwise known as Judenrat. The visitors can now draw up their judgment of the councils based on their activities in both the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos.
The impression now is that the Judenrat leaders too, were victims of the Holocaust. Formerly, they were all considered villains.
One of the striking differences concerns the museum's depiction of Rejso, Israel Kestner, one of the leaders of Hungarian Jewry. In 1955, an Israeli court ruled that Kestner had "sold his soul to the devil" after he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator. He was murdered two years later in Tel Aviv.
Now, Kestner's contacts with the Nazis are depicted as praiseworthy actions that saved Jews. The change is due, partially, to the fact that Kestner's friend, Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, served as Yad Vashem's chairman. The wording under Kestner's photograph – as in all other captions in the museum – is formulated in an extremely cautious manner, weighing the meaning of every single word. The English version is slightly more positive than the Hebrew.
Many captions were dictated by diplomatic sensitivity, so as not to cause tension with foreign states. The lines dealing with the question of why the allies didn't bomb Auschwitz are more restrained than the more explicit criticism of the same issue in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The new captions dealing with Pope Pius XII, are 'cleaner,' and reflect a measure of openness and recognition of different opinions. Pius XII now receives a parcel of textual 'discounts': the new wording stresses the fact that the Reichskonkordat with Germany was signed before he was appointed, and deletes the former declaration that the accord was signed "even at the price of recognizing the Nazi regime."
It does not mention that Pius XII shelved the prepared draft of an encyclical condemning racism, colonialism and anti-Semitism, drafted for Pius XI. If the Pope actually shelved such an encyclical, there's no reason to ignore it. The mention of his 1942 Christmas address and his appeals to the leaders of Hungary and Slovakia are relevant. Pius XII actually gains some points due to the detailed controversy surrounding his term.
Still, he isn't portrayed as a righteous man, but the issue calls for more study.
Politically, the new captions send a clear Jewish and Israeli message to the incumbent pope, German-born Benedict XVI: Do not glamorize Pius XII before the Vatican reviews and publishes all documents concerning his activities during the Holocaust. [The Vatican has reviewed all such documents which were considered in Benedict XVI's decision in December 2010 to declare Pius XII's 'heroic virtues', which qualified him for the next step in the process - beatification itself after a miracle attributed to his intercession is certified by scientists and theologians... And by the way, the Church's process of beatification and canonization of individuals whose lives are shining examples of Christian witness is not a 'glamorization' of anyone but a recognition of holiness.]
I find it strange that as of now, 5:51 pm, July 2, in New York, the English service of Vatican Radio does not contain a single line about the Pius XII story, but its 'top story' for the moment is the reaction of a British minister to the Kenya church killings! Since when is the reaction of a British minister more relevant or interesting to RV's Anglophone listeners than a rather significant development regarding a much-maligned Pope? The Italian serive, on the other hand, had this interview with the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel:
Nuncio in Israel thinks caption modification
shows 'intellectual honesty' by Yad Vashem
Translated from the Italian service of
July 2, 2012
"Pius XII and the Holocaust" is the title of the caption that appeared for the first time in 2005 in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Museum commemorating the Holocaust.
In the text - that was modified yesterday - Papa Pacelli was accused of not having defended the Jews by publicly denouncing their persecution. Roberto Gisotti interviewed Archbishop Antonio Franco, the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, who had protested the caption publicly in 2007, bringing the issue to international attention.
MONS. FRANCO: The news came as no surprise to me, because since that protest in 2007, Yad Vashem has carried out some work on the issue, hosting various encounters including a workshop in March 2009 before the Holy Father's visit to the Holy Land. We have had frequent contacts which led to the idea of changing the caption, which was eventually supported by the museum's administrative director, and a few months ago, they began to discuss the changes to be made. So for me, it has been a reaiization of something that has matured over six years.
Then one cannot say there was pressure from the Vatican - which the museum director has explicitly denied - but a work of correct mediation. What then is the significance of the changes made? Can one speak of a correction and of a recovery of the positive role played by Pius XII in World War II?
No. I think one must see this as a first step towards an opening, a view that is more in keeping with the spirit and actions of the Pope and the Holy See.
If you look at the old caption, it is clear there has been a change in approach. Earlier, there were judgments of condemnation that were very explicit, made directly by the Museum leadership. Now we have a presentation of the controversy that continues to exist - because there is now accumulated historiography that has a very negative interpretation according to which Pius XII never said anything in public and especially failed to condemn the persecution of the Jews durinb World War II.
And so, Yad Vashem now acknowledges the controversy between those who see Pius XII negatively and those who say that the Pope and the Holy See did save thousands of Jewish lives even as it was decided that a public condemnation would have provoked more catastrophic actions by the Nazis
[not just against the Jews but against Catholics].
The new caption now refers to the 1942 Christmas message of Pius XII and refers to his actions to help the Jews. So there are positive aspects but there are still critical elements.
And now, they are hoping that opening the Vatican archives on the papers of Pius XII's Pontificate will help clarify the situation more - the argument being that the controversy will only be resolved by studying the original documents in the Archives.
Can we say that this new caption is an act of intellectual honesty by the Museum administration by leaving open the historical verdict on Pius XII?
I have been in contact over the past six years with the Museum directors, and I can say that they are really interested in historical honesty. I don't think they have any ideological prejudices, because not only did they modify the caption, but the very fact that they held the workshop in 2009, and hope to hold more similar encounters, as well as their repeated desire to have their historians study the documents in the Vatican Archives - all this shows a certain intellectual will and honesty,without prejudices and without making an a priori condemnation.
[Which they did for years, however!]
Unfortunately, everything that happened since the publication of the East German play "The Deputy" (in 1963) and the search of a scapegoat for the Holocaust, are also real. However, I do think that the historians of Yad Vashem are being intellectually honest.
[To even consider anyone else but Adolf Hitler as the one primarily responsible for the Holocaust is sick! But by casting Pius XII as their scapegoat, that is exactly what the state of Israel and many Jews have been doing. That is not intellectual nor historical honesty by any standard. Yet Yad Vashem went along with it.
That the state of Israel could have unquestioningly taken as its official position the conclusions of an East German playwright commissioned by the Soviet secret service to do a hatchet job on Pius XII is something irrevocably disgusting and stupid at the same time... Nonetheless, thank God for little blessings, if Mons. Franco has it right.]
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
is not so 'satisfied' as the Nuncio
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Mons. Fouad Twal, released the following statement on the French service of the Patriarchate's website, translated here:
July 2, 2012
The memorial to the Shoah, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, has toned down as of July 1 a text that accuses Pope Pius XII of having been passive to the fate of Jews during the Shoah, exposing in detail the controversy over his atttitude in this regard during the Second World War.
The new text keeps the arguments of Pius XII's critics contained in the old text but it also presents those of his defenders.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem acknowledges the desire of the International Institute of Yad Vashem for Research on the Holocaust to seek the truth. It welcomes the fact that historical research in recent years has been taken into account. But the text modification is insufficient.
For the Patriarchate, the fact that the text was softened shows that Yad Vashem felt all the truth has not been said. One regrets that the image of Pius XII has been disfigured all these years [by the old text] without any apology being made.
One cannot accept only part of a truth which has not yet been fully disclosed. Time will be needed to study the [pertinent documents in the] Vatican archives. Meanwhile, one cannot allow things to be written whose certainty has not been determined.
All opinion is subject to the risk of prejudice, but one must not yield to blackmail:
- That of putting pressure on the Holy See to open the Archives [of the documents of Pius XII's Pontificate in its entirety; [The Vatican already said back in 2007 that it would do that as soon as it completes cataloguing the collection which it expects to do by 2014
- That of seeking to keep the Vatican from beatifying Pius XII by using a partial truth.
The Patriarchate wishes to underscore that no one knows that if Pius XII had spoken more, he would have saved more Jews. And there could have been even more brutal actions against the Jews and those who saved them.
As Yad Vashem acknowsledges that many Christians who saved thousands of Jews, we do not know if the Vatican had in fact encouraged these rescues. Probably so. Let us await the results of historical research. Meanwhile, an accused person is considered innocent until proven guilty.
This is already quite a long post, but I found a document today that we could use for perspective, even if few are even aware that a conmtroversy exists - about the attitude and actions of Franklin D. Roosevelt as US President with regard to the Holocaust. I quote from the introduction to the document because the arguments pro and con are almost identical to the debate over Pius XII's record.[/DIM
Whether Franklin Roosevelt should have or could have done more to rescue European Jews and to stop Hitler’s killing machine is a question that will likely be debated by historians for decades to come.
Some scholars have criticized President Roosevelt for his approach to refugee issues prior to and during World War II, and he is even accused of having pursued misguided policies and of being indifferent to the Holocaust.
Others insist that such assessments fail to account adequately for... military practicalities that for much of the war limited the Allies’ ability to reach Jews trapped deep behind enemy lines.
In 1942, as details of Hitler’s Final Solution reached the Allies, it was difficult for the public and many government officials to grasp the extent and significance of the Nazis’ systematic, mechanized killing...
On December 17, 1942, the United States joined ten other Allied governments in issuing a solemn public declaration condemning Nazi Germany’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews. The American Congress and the British Parliament stood in silence on that date to mourn what was happening to the Jews and pray for the strength needed to defeat the Nazis.
Roosevelt believed that the surest way to stop the killing of innocent civilians was to defeat Hitler’s Germany as quickly and decisively as possible. Critics say that FDR’s “win the war” approach did not address the possibility that significant numbers of Jews could be rescued.
In January 1944, after learning from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. that the State Department was obstructing rescue efforts, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to coordinate governmental and private efforts to rescue those who might still be saved. The Board is credited with saving at least 200,000 Jews. Critics argue that if FDR had acted earlier, and more boldly, even more lives could have been saved.
The documents contained in this selection are from the collections of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and are intended to reflect the many sides of this issue. [I am including only the first two citations as examples.]
“I feel that more might have been done but I am also aware that there were many factors in the rescue situation which were simply beyond the Roosevelt Administration’s control. Not the least of these was Berlin’s determination to liquidate the Jews and the great difficulty of assigning to a modern nation-state a humanitarian mission to rescue a foreign minority for which it had no legal responsibility. It is a moral and humanitarian response we seek from the Roosevelt Administration. Such responses are rare in history and practically nonexistent during wartime.”
Henry L. Feingold
The Politics of Rescue:
The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945
“Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewrwas made public in the United States in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing about the mass murder for fourteen months, then moved only because he was confronted witpolitical pressures he could not avoid and because his administration stood on the brink of a nasty scandal over its rescue policies. . . . Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to so momentous ahistorical event as the systematic annihilation of the European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency."
David S. Wyman
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust (1941-1945)
....
I think the whole point is that in wartime, and especially in a world war, leaders do what they can do, and they have to operate on priorities. It is easy for anyone to take the moral high ground after the fact, and say "This should have been done and it's an unpardonable/inconceivable mistake/catastrophe not to have done so". Really?
Would anyone who thinks that way have acted differently from Pius XII if they were in his place? A religious leader with no material or diplomatic powers to wield, and yet had to think of saving the Vatican (which the Germans could have easily blown up to smithereens any time), of saving the Catholics in all of German-occupied Europe, of saving as many of those who were persecuted and whose very survival was threatened by the Nazis? Which was more heroic and practical - to try and do all that, or provoke the irrational Nazis into God-knows-what with condemnatory speeches that would be totally counter-productive? No words from anyone could have stopped what the Nazis wanted to do, and FDR was right: The only way to stop them was to defeat them...
Besides, The Second World War did not just kill six million Jews. God did not single out the European Jews for destruction. The total death toll of World War II - about 62-78 million - also includes 25 million Soviets (the USSR was the country that suffered the most war dead by far), and Germany itself lost 5.5 million in military dead alone and as many as 3 million civilians, whereas Poland lost 6 million - just to mention the three nations that suffered the greatest losses. The Nazi death camps were Satanic abominations, but the other war dead cannot be considered 'less worthy' than the Holocaust victims, nor their killings less 'systematic' - they may have been chaotic but no less deliberate as the precise programming of the Final Solution. And if a victim of the siege of Leningrad had written a diary as Anne Frank did and it had been published, the world might be more aware of what it meant to be a Russian at the mercy of the Nazis. As a Filipino, I grew up with the most horrid tales of Japanese brutalities during World War II that one can possibly conceive; no soldiers ever used the bayonet in more brutally unimaginable ways than the Japanese conquering soldiers did.
Why do calamities like world wars and tsunamis happen? The best answer that Catholicism as well as Judaism can give is that God has reasons for what He does, but human understanding cannot begin to understand His reason. It doesn't mean we should not learn any lessons we can, nor does it mean that a believer should lose faith in God because of things we do not understand. Most Jews, I believe, despite the Holocaust, have not lost that faith.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/07/2012 17:09]