Chief Rabbi of Rome leads
attack on Yad Vashem's
changes to Pius XII caption
by Giacomo Galeazzi
Translated from
VATICAN CITY, July 5 - The spiritual leader of Europe's oldest Jewish community, the Cheif Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, is protesting Yad Vashem's modification of the caption for Pius XII in the Holocaust Museum's photo gallery.
"My historical evaluation of the behavior of Pius XII during the dark years of the persecution remains strongly critical, whereas Yad Vashem has suspended its judgment and sustains that different opinions are possible about the subject. I think it is a solution of convenience, of compromise, aimed to please international public opinion in defiance of historical reality". Di Seni told VATICAN INSIDER.
[How can an intelligent man, who is also a spiritual leader, be so closed as to think that only his opinion is valid, that no other opinions are possible? And what 'historical evaluation' can he make when his mind is already made up? Is he a historian, to begin with, and if he is, how does he measure against the historian-scholars at Yad Vashem, who have been researching this subject since the Holocaust Memorial was begun? Who is he to unilaterally and singly declare that a new caption which leaves the question open is 'in defiance of historical reality'? It is as if he, Riccardo Di Segni, is saying, 'Whatever I believe about Pius XII is historical reality - I don't care what the facts show, or what historians think!']
The new development has stirred up the waters again in relationships between Christians and their 'older brothers'. Even the Jewish community's Rome newspaper
Pagine Ebraiche has been reporting a spectrum of reactions from the community, in some ways diametrically opposed.
The new formulation of Yad Vashem regarding the actions (or inaction) of Pius XII towards the Jews in World War II is less sweepingly negative and more prudent, and does explicitly say that the question remains open.
Di Segni goes on:
The Yad Vashem panel that was critical of Pius XII has been replaced with a longer text which presents two opposing judgments, and avoids coming to a conclusion pending further clarifications a timid allusion to the 2014 opening of the entire Vatican Archive on the papers of Pius XII's Pontificate).
But despite the pathetic denial by Yad Vashem's administration, it is difficult not to doubt that the change was the result of Vatiocan diplomatic pressure. [WHOA! Why is the official denial 'pathetic' just because he disagrees with Yad Vashem. And what diplomatic pressure can the Vatican possibly apply on Israel, where the Church is hostage to the Israeli government for things as simple as getting work visas for priests assigned to Israel? Di Segni is ranting, going along on sheer bile which has seemed to soak through his brain, making him unable to think!]]
By yielding to pressure, it becomes no longer possible for them to criticize the Pope,[And he thinks there is no criticism in the new capation????] but even a defense would have been problematic, so they settled for this strange solution. Which has not satisfied defenders of Pius XII and leaves us bitter in the mouth. [Who is 'us'? All Roman Jews? All Italian Jews? All European Jews? Why can't he simply accept the facts as they are: An international conference was hosted by Yad Vashem in 2009, and based on information presented - duly sifted and checked by Yad Vashem researchers - the Museum decided to change the caption accordingly.]
In a place like Yad Vashem, politics should remain remote and separate. [YEAH? And what was the original extremely offensive caption but supremely and exclusively poltical-ideological? What is the whole Yad Vashem concept except ultimately, dramatizing the Holocaust in order to to underscore the right of Israel to have its own homeland in the lands that were given by the Lord to the ancient patriarchs of Israel?]
It is not acceptable that a group of bureaucrats, diplomats and perhaps even politicians would even have considered the Vatican requests - in exchange for who knows what? [Precisely! What can the Vatican possibly offer Israel other than good will and fraternal wishes?] - more important for Israel than our most painful memories.
[Is Di Segni listening to his words when he says these? To accuse Israel of betraying the Holocaust for his (Di Segni's) imagined 30 silver coins from the Vatican? He is raving mad!]
Just as harsh is Ambassador Sergio Minerbi, a distinguished representative of the Italian Jewish community and considered among
the best experts on Israeli-Vatican relations:
What a shame! All it took was one protest from the Apostolic Nuncio to make Yad Vashem change the caption! [That is, of course, a blatant falsehood. The Nuncio protested it when it opened in 2005 - it has taken seven years for Yad Vashem to make the change - three years after the international conference it hosted to hear researchers on the topic.]
I do not know if it is out of incompetence on the subject or in order to please everyone, nor do we know how much influence the American Gary Krupp had in this - Krupp, so proud of his Vatican decoration, as a Knight of Gregory the Great! [Now he accuses Yad Vashem of incompetence! Now he accuses Yad Vashem of trying to please everyone! It is an insult to the very idea of a Holocaust Museum to think that it could be run for any other reason but to represent the deepest most atavistic feelings of all Jews, Israeli or otherwise, and that it could ever place any foreign interest above that purpose. And if its researchers and scholars also want to serve the whole truth at the same time, why shouldn't they?
As for Gary Krupp, he's Jewish, and a devout one, who totally deserves his papal knighthood, but it is giving him too much credit to think that he could move Yad Vashem in any way - anti-Pius Jews probably condemn him as a traitor to his religion since his mind is made up about Pius XII, as much as Di Segni and Minerbi have done, with the difference that Krupp has personally archived all the pro-Pius XII material he can lay his hands on, and the two Italians are just winging it on sheer prejudice! It is mind-boggling how supposedly intelligent but blindly biased persons can lose all common sense! These are the Jews who, whatever the Vatican Archives will eventually show, will still say, "I don't care what the Archives show. Pius XII was singlehandedly responsible for the Holocaust, and that's that!" Perhaps there is a special circle in Jewish hell for this kind of dishonesty!]
In the new text, Yad Vashem acts as if it were neutral on the subject and limits itself to saying that some critics claim "there was a moral failure". Doesn't the institution have its own opinion on such a sensitive matter? [So Minerbi would reduce history to a matter of opinion! Yad Vashem is supposed to be a historical museum. Even if it has an ideological point of view, it was the most basic historical courtesy for them to revise the caption. although it continues to be tendentious against Pius XII.] Then what's the use of this behemoth institution and what is it teaching its numerous researchers? [They're researchers! They find what facts they can. The Museum can't teach them that! Nor are they there to rubber-stamp whatever the Museum tells them. Then they'd just be mindless clerks, not researchers.]
How is it possible for Yad Vashem to observe that Pius XII's actions in World War II "is an open question among scholars"? [BECAUSE IT IS - at least for the cautious ones who want to wait until they see what's in the Vatican Archives until they declare themselves. But those who have bothered to look through the 12-volume set of Archive documents culled by scholars in the 1960s on orders of Paul VI know there is more than enough material to make the case for Pius XII ten times over. And presumably, much of it was presented by scholars who attended the Yad Vashem conference on Pius XII in 2009. Which eventually led to caption modification.]
It must be remembered in any case that Pius XII never once said the word Jews during the entire World War II - and this, at least, is not an object of controversy. Nor did he react, publicly or behind tghe scenes, to the deportation of Jews from Rome. His diplomatic meetings in those days were limited to the question of keeping Rome an open city or how to ensure food supplies to its citizens. [Surely, those were monumental problems for the city: If the Nazis had stopped treating Rome as an open city, they could have bombed all or parts of it - including the Vatican - to kingdom come, any time they pleased, blowing up everyone, Jews included, not to mention one of mankind's greatest repositories of culture and history! And food supplies for the city in wartime? Were these less important concerns that would not have been jeopardized if the Pope made it his priority to be a public advocate for the Jews instead who were a minority in Rome? He had a moral duty to all Roman citizens, not just the Jews! All his critics today would probably have done exactly as he did if they had been in his place at the time.]
Yad Vashem should follow the example of the Jesuit John Morley, who ended his book on the Shoah with these words: "One must conclude that Vatican diplomacy failed with respect to the Jews during the Holocaust, by not doing everything possible to come to their aid".
[It's sickening to come across another sanctimonious Jesuit. Vatican diplomacy had enough on its hands trying to protect the Catholic communities all over occupied Europe. The anti-Pius Jews all act as though the Pope did not have to worry about Catholics during the war, as if he should have focused his attention only on the Jews.
And who says Hitler would have listened if Pius XII had become the public advocate for the Jews? Hitler decided on the Final Solution (Endloesung) in 1942 - he did not call it the Final Solution, just to roll it back because a man in white who had no army divisions spoke out against it! No one could have stopped the Nazi extermination campaign. The Allies did not even try. Their priority was to win the war, and they did not even get into Europe until after June 4, 1944. Why aren't Churchill and Roosevelt spat upon like the anti-Pius Jews do on the Pope? And weren't there any prominent and powerful Jews outside Europe at the time who could have organized something?
The bias against Pius XII - a historical afterthought inspired by perhaps the most successful Soviet propaganda ploy in history - seems to me a distillation of every anti-Catholic feeling Jews ever had. And people like Di Segni and Minerbi vent themselves the way they do every chance they can precisely to reciprocate every injustice and anti-Jewish feeling ever directed by Catholics against Jews through the centuries.]
A very different perspective is taken by historian Anna Foa, the first Jewish person to write for and contribute regularly to L'Osservatore Romano:
The modification of the caption to the Pius XII panel in Yad Vashem was being planned for some time. But contrary to what the media have concluded, I don't think the new caption represents a softening of the judgment against Pius XII compared to the original which expressed a clear condemnation of Pius XII's inaction in the face of the extermination of the Jews.
What the new caption reflects, in my opinion, is a judgment that is more historical than moral - the awareness that the debate is still open, but to which much new documentation [newly considered by Yad Vashem, that is] has contributed to change, and to which it is expected that the opening of the Pius XII archives will bring other relevant contributions.
I thought that the original caption was the result of an absolute and dogmatic judgment which ignored the existence of a debate on the historiographic level or of new documentation at the level of finding detailed facts. The new caption opens the way for further changes, because history is based on documents and their interpretation, not on political prejudice or common sense. With their courageous gesture, the officials of Yad Vashem have shown of being fully aware of this.
Diplomat and essayist Vittorio Segre comments:
The need for a revision of the caption to the Pius XII panel at Yad Vashem has been considered for some time. The fact that the institute finally changed it shows that we are nearing the completion of new comprehensive accords between Israel and the Vatican which has been a work of decades, and that which may finally be ready for signing.
The battle on the part of those Jews who wish to condemn Pius XII to a permanent and unappealable state of moral condemnation is not sustainable in the long run, from the political point of view and even from the historiographic. But it must be understood that this issue, however you look at it, can only compel limited interest today among those whom the parties to the dispute supposedly represent.
It matters little to Israeli public opinion, and even less to a Catholic world which is more concerned today with the growing violence against Christians in Africa and in the Muslim world. There is a dispute that has to be brought to an end between Israel and the Vatican, and final agreement should take place in the best climate possible, without being conditioned excessively by the wounds that history has left us.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/07/2012 03:42]