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Polish-born Israeli Yosef Binenstock, 85, a survivor of Nazi death camps, gestures as he sits in his house in the costal town of Netanya, Israel, Sunday April 3, 2005. Binenstock was a schoolmate of the late Pope John Paul II. The picture seen is Binenstock and the Pope during the Pope's visit in Israel in March 2000. (AP)
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| By Associated Press April 3, 2005 |
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| Pope John Paul II at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Then PM ehud Barak appears at his side. (AP file) |
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In an outpouring of affection, Israelis on Sunday remembered Pope John Paul II as a true friend who helped mend ties between Christians and Jews, embraced Holocaust survivors with simple acts of kindness and kept in touch with Jewish childhood friends.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon paid tribute at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting, saying the Polish-born pontiff's contribution to religious tolerance "will be with us for many years." Israeli newspapers devoted front pages to the pope's death, and TV and radio newscasts led with reports on worldwide mourning.
Many Israelis formed their first impression of the pope during his 2000 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. They were heartened by his apology for Jewish suffering at the hand of Christians, delivered in a note he slipped into a crack in the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest shrine.
On Sunday, elderly Holocaust survivors reminisced about growing up with Karol Wojtyla in the small Polish town of Wadowice and encounters with the young seminary student toward the end of World War II.
One survivor, Idit Tzirer, said she was an emaciated 13-year-old in 1945, had just been released from a Nazi labor camp and was sitting on a street corner in the snow, too weak to walk, when Wojtyla approached.
"Suddenly he appeared, like an angel from heaven, when nobody else was taking any notice of me," she said on Israel TV. "He brought me a cup of hot tea and two huge slices of bread and cheese ... After a while he asked me if I want to get away from that place and I told him I wanted to get to Krakow, but I couldn't walk, so he hoisted me on his back, like a sack of flour, and carried me, four or five kilometers."
Polish-born Yosef Binenstock, 85, a survivor of Nazi death camps, wrote a touching tribute in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot about his friend from elementary school. Binenstock said he sometimes copied homework from Wojtyla and that the Binenstocks would help out the Wojtylas with food and other basics.
The two shared a classroom for four years and then continued to be neighborhood friends until 1939, when Binenstock and other Jews were taken to German camps.
Shortly after becoming pope in 1978, John Paul had a marble tombstone placed on the grave of Binenstock's brother, who had returned to Wadowice after World War II and died a short time later. Most of Binenstock's relatives perished in the Holocaust.
Binenstock said he last spoke to the pope during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land five years ago. Since then, the two had kept in touch, exchanging letters and holiday greetings.
"I am sad today. Sad over the death of a pope who had great respect and sympathy for the Jewish nation. And especially I am sad now about your death, Karol, my friend from the first grade," Binenstock wrote in Yediot.
Israel's former chief rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, also a Holocaust survivor, met the pope five times. At one meeting, the aging pontiff told Lau he remembered the rabbi's grandfather going to synagogue every Saturday with masses of grandchildren around him.
"He asked me 'How many survived the Holocaust?"' Lau told Israel Radio. "Just five, 42 were killed. And then he (the pope) looked at the ceiling and said 'In all my travels, I visited 120 countries, I see anti-Semitism and I emphasize our obligation, the obligation of all humanity, to ensure the continued existence and the future of our older brother, the Jewish nation."'
The pope's childhood ties with Jews and his experience of the Holocaust shaped his views, said Rabbi David Rosen, head of the American Jewish Committee's Interreligious Affairs Department. "He had a profound emotional commitment to Catholic-Jewish reconciliation, and he understood what Israel means to Jews. It's not likely that his successor would have that same sensitivity," Rosen said.
Nathan Lishitz, 55, a Jerusalem resident who filmed the pope for National Geographic when he visited the Sea of Galilee, noted that the pontiff was widely criticized for taking hard-line positions on some issues.
"I am a little confused about how to feel about this pope. On the one hand he was very liberal and good to Jews," Lishitz said. "But on the other hand he was too conservative about issues like abortion."
There were sore points between Israel and the Vatican, the papacy of Pius XII among them. Although John Paul expressed remorse for the failure of some Christians to protect Jews during World War II, he beatified wartime pontiff Pius XII, who many Jews say didn't act forcefully enough against the Holocaust.
Palestinian Muslims also mourned the Pope, but with more skepticism. Bernard Sabella, an official in the Middle East Council of Church, who met the pontiff several times, said the Pope was concerned about Palestinian suffering, leading him to visit a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem during his 2000 trip.
But the top Palestinian Muslim cleric, Ikrema Sabri, said the Pope was unsuccessful in changing the Western world's negative view of Islam.
"The Western perspective of the Islamic world is one of aggression," Sabri said. "He was unable to stop that."
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