Every year, thousands of Israeli high school pupils travel to Poland to gain a better understanding of pre-Holocaust Jewish life and an appreciation for the enormity of the loss brought about by the Nazi death machine. Their visits pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Polish economy.
Last week, a group of concerned Jews including myself turned to Israel’s High Court of Justice, asking it to order the Education Ministry to suspend the allocations that help sponsor these visits to the Nazi death camps in Poland.
As one who has been involved in Holocaust education, I recognize the importance of such visits. A sense of the immeasurable loss sustained by the Jewish people hits home when pupils visit the sites where the horrors took place.
Still, there comes a point where one must weigh those positives against a more overwhelming negative — the funneling of millions of dollars of Jewish money into Poland at a time when the Polish government continues to allow the violation of Jewish memory at death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During the battle to free Soviet Jewry, activists recognized the importance of linking human rights to trade. The message then was clear. Economic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were dependent upon the freedom of Soviet Jews. It was a policy that worked.
We should adopt the same approach here. Today, not only has a forest of crosses been erected at Auschwitz, but the large 8-meter cross still stands at the old convent building at Auschwitz.
The most flagrant violation is the Birkenau church, which is located in the SS commandant’s headquarters. A parish church operates at Birkenau, where more than one million Jews were murdered. The church is even more disturbing than the Auschwitz convent.
According to an official of the Auschwitz Museum, Jewish women prisoners were executed there. In 1983, a church was established on the site and today it is fully functioning. It is topped by two large crosses; a 7-meter-high cross stands in front.
The church violates the 1987 Geneva Agreement, signed by four European cardinals and several Jewish leaders, which calls for “no permanent Catholic place of worship on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.”
It also violates the 1972 U.N. Convention on Protection of World Cultural and National Heritage. That agreement was designed to preserve intact sites of outstanding cultural and national importance. Auschwitz, including the church at Birkenau, falls within this list.
I have deep respect for people of all religions, and respect their right to maintain their places of worship and display symbols of their faith. But a cross, convent or church on the grounds of Auschwitz, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, is a desecration of the memory of the 6 million. It is as inappropriate as a Star of David or a synagogue would be near the largest Catholic cemetery.
With the camps decaying, years from now, all that will remain at those sites will be Christian, largely Catholic symbols and houses of worship. People call then assume that the Holocaust, the systematic effort to murder all of Europe’s Jews, was not an overwhelmingly Jewish tragedy, but rather a process of mass killing that focused, at least in Poland, on Catholics.
The existence of Catholic churches at the death camps that were set up primarily to kill Jews may also lead people, both now and in future decades, to conclude that Vatican policy was to protect Jews during the Holocaust.
The truth is, despite the heroism of many individual Catholics in Poland and elsewhere, not only did the Vatican largely fail to help Jews, but after the war, the Vatican was openly involved in helping Nazis escape to South America and elsewhere. Holocaust revisionism is unacceptable.
Our disagreement has never been with the Catholic grassroots clergy or laity. It has been with the Vatican, the Polish Church and the Polish government, which have the power to ensure that the 1987 Geneva Agreement and the 1972 U.N. Convention be honored, and that Polish nationalist extremists responsible for this incitement at Auschwitz be strongly repudiated.
Our children will learn more from taking a principled stand against Holocaust desecration than by continuing to visit a country that refuses to deal with the residue of its ugly past.
The time has come for Israel to flex its economic and moral muscle to effect a resolution to this ongoing affront to Holocaust victims.