Jewish official to be anointed papal knight

rome (jta) | Pope Benedict XVI is honoring a Jewish official as a papal knight. Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international director of interreligious affairs, will formally receive the honor later this week.

Rosen, who heads the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, is a former chief rabbi of Ireland and a longtime activist in Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

There have been seven other Jewish papal knights, including a Conservative rabbi, the late Mordechai Waxman, and a Reform rabbi, Walter Jacob.

Extremist rally in Germany cut short

berlin (jta) | More than 3,000 people demonstrated against a neo-Nazi march in Germany.

This week’s counterprotest in Gottingen forced some 350 members of the extremist National Democratic Party to cut short their event. Local churches and mainstream politicians had urged citizens to demonstrate against the extremists.

Some 600 counterprotesters set fire to garbage containers, blocking the neo-Nazis’ route.

Student’s Hitler poem worries U.K. Jews

london (jta) | British Jews expressed concern that an anti-Semitic poem written to reflect Hitler’s perspective was included in an anthology of children’s works.

“Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger,” reads the poem by Gideon Taylor, 14. It appears in “Great Minds,” a book with a print run of just 450 copies for schoolchildren and their families.

The publisher, Forward Press, said the poem was a condemnation of Nazism. The Holocaust Educational Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews expressed concerns about the poem, but officials acknowledged that they had not seen it in context.