On the 29th of April there was in Jerusalem a conference on the figure of Pope Roncalli. Gariwo interviewed Danny Rainer, of IRWF Jerusalem, about the results of this conference and the candidacy of John XXIII as a Righteous among the Nations.

Could you tell me something about this conference, about the reaction after it?

The conference on the figure of Pope Angelo Roncalli took place on the 29th of April. There were some important people from the Vatican, scholars from universities, people from different NGOs. The conference was dedicated to Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, and to his action during and before his papacy, for example what he did when he was Apostolic Delegate in Istanbul and in Paris. This conference commemorates the 50th anniversary of his passing – he was born in 1963 – and had different panels: the first one dealt with Roncalli and the Shoah, and it analyzed the role of Roncalli in order to save Jews, the second one was chaired by Baruch Tenembaum – from IRWF – and was about Roncalli and the Establishment of the State of Israel; the third section dealt with Nostra Aetate and the Vatican Council II; and the fourth one was about the legacy of Roncalli.

There were many attendance from the Vatican, there was the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal and the Custodian of the Holy Land Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa.

The conference was very interesting, had a lot of echoes because there were many journalists from different newspapers and Mr Tenembaum was interviewed by them. During the conference we also handed over the Papa Roncalli dossier which we submitted to Yad Vashem in 2001 to promote the candidacy of Pope Roncalli as Righteous among the Nations.

Did you get any reply from Yad Vashem about this candidacy?

There was not any official reply from Yad Vashem, but in principle I believe that the opposition stayed in the fact that, according to Yad Vashem, Roncalli did not go against his superior, and this is one of the criteria that Yad Vashem applies when considering the candidacy of diplomats. And despite he was a very high profile figure who became pope, there is the issue of how Yad Vashem sees his superior Pius XII. Yad Vashem was very critical about this question. These are some considerations, but at least we didn’t get an official reply from them.

Professor Yehuda Bauer took part as speaker in the first Panel. What did he say in his speech? He talked about Roncalli’s role in the Shoah?

He made a very interesting discourse, but he did not speak about Roncalli. His intervention was about the example of several Catholics who, during the Shoah, saved Jews, and he analyzed the issue of how many Christians rescued Jews.

Instead Dina Porat, Chief historian from Yad Vashem, presented a very structured lecture of what Roncalli did during the Shoah.

Finally, what do you think is the legacy of Pope Roncalli, especially for Catholics-Jewish relation?

I think that Roncalli during his life showed he was a very good friend of the Jewish world. He saved Jews, we have no doubt about that, and he had a very important role when he was nuncio, by helping the Jewish leadership, before the establishment of the State of Israel, to find a way to establish their State. He helped Moshe Sneh – the Jewish Agency representative – to go to the Vatican and try to convince the Pope not to force the Latin American countries to vote against the United Nation partition plan.

Sneh contacted Roncalli and he arranged an audience with the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Tardini, and convinced him that the Vatican should make pressure on the American countries on this issue, and eventually most of the Latin American countries voted in favor of the Resolution about the partition of Palestine. In addiction, we know what he did with Nostra Aetate, the document that removed one sentence that can be offensive – talking about the perfidious Jews – and that came from the traditional blame of “deicide” directed to the Jewish people.

This revolutionary document opened a new era in relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people after centuries of prejudice and persecution.
We have the feeling that his legacy is very important, and that Pope Francesco will follow it, trying to set better relationship between Christians and Jews and between Christians and any other religion.

8:45 – 9:15 Gathering, registration, light refreshments

9:15 – 10:00 Opening Session

Chair: Mr. Yair Tzaban, Former Minister and MK – Opening remarks

Greetings:

Mr. Michael Mertes, State Secretary (ret.), Director Israel Office of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
H.B. Patriarch Fouad Twal, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
Rabbi She’ar Yashuv Cohen, Chief Rabbi Emeritus of Haifa
Ms. Colette Avital, Chairperson, Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel

Recorded greetings from the President of the State of Israel, Mr. Shimon Peres

Screening of excerpt from “I Am Joseph Your Brother”

10:00 – 11:30 Session I : Roncalli and the Shoah

Chair: Prof. Dan Michman, Yad Vashem and Bar Ilan University

Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Prof. Dina Porat, Kantor Center, Tel Aviv University; Chief Historian, Yad Vashem

11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break

12:00 – 13:00 Session II: Roncalli and the Establishment of the State of Israel

Chair: Mr. Baruch Tenembaum, The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

Mr. Yair Tzaban, Former Minister & MK
Prof. Uri Bialer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Paolo Zanini, University of Milan

13:00 – 14:00 Light lunch

14:00 – 16:00 Session III: John XXIII, Vatican II and Nostra Aetate

Chair: H.E. Cardinal Peter Turkson, Pontifical Council for Justice & Peace, Vatican

Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Custos of the Holy Land
Prof. Alberto Melloni, FSCIRE
Ms. Claire Maligot, Paris IV University
Ms. Yisca Harani, Independent scholar, Expert on Christianity and Christian-Jewish relations

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee break555

16:30 – 17:30 Session IV : The Legacy of John XXIII for Catholic-Jewish Relations – Europe & the World

Chair: Mr. Oded Wiener, Director-General, Chief Rabbinate of Israel

H.E. Cardinal Kurt Koch, Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry, Vatican
Prof. Amos Luzzatto, Venice

17:30 – 18:00 Concluding Presentation

Rabbi Dr. David Rosen, International Director of Interreligious Affairs, AJC

Simultaneous translation Hebrew-English-Hebrew was provided throughout the conference.

As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”

The man who invented the word “genocide”— Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

But to Turks, what happened in 1915 was, at most, just one more messy piece of a very messy war that spelled the end of a once-powerful empire. They reject the conclusions of historians and the term genocide, saying there was no premeditation in the deaths, no systematic attempt to destroy a people. Indeed, in Turkey today it remains a crime — “insulting Turkishness” — to even raise the issue of what happened to the Armenians.

In the United States, a powerful Armenian community centered in Los Angeles has been pressing for years for Congress to condemn the Armenian genocide. Turkey, which cut military ties to France over a similar action, has reacted with angry threats. A bill to that effect nearly passed in the fall of 2007, gaining a majority of co-sponsors and passing a committee vote. But the Bush administration, noting that Turkey is a critical ally — more than 70 per cent of the military air supplies for Iraq go through the Incirlik airbase there — pressed for the bill to be withdrawn, and it was.

The roots of the genocide lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The empire’s ruler was also the caliph, or leader of the Islamic community. Minority religious communities, like the Christian Armenians, were allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal structures, but were often subject to extra taxes or other measures.

Concentrated largely in eastern Anatolia, many of them merchants and industrialists, Armenians, historians say, appeared markedly better off in many ways than their Turkish neighbors, largely small peasants or ill-paid government functionaries and soldiers.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the once far-flung Ottoman empire was crumbling at the edges, beset by revolts among Christian subjects to the north — vast swaths of territory were lost in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 — and the subject of coffee house grumbling among Arab nationalist intellectuals in Damascus and elsewhere.

The Young Turk movement of ambitious, discontented junior army officers seized power in 1908, determined to modernize, strengthen and “Turkify” the empire. They were led by what became an all-powerful triumvirate sometimes referred to as the Three Pashas.

In March of 1914, the Young Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany. They attacked to the east, hoping to capture the city of Baku in what would be a disastrous campaign against Russian forces in the Caucuses. They were soundly defeated at the battle of Sarikemish.

Armenians in the area were blamed for siding with the Russians and the Young Turks began a campaign to portray the Armenians as a kind of fifth column, a threat to the state. Indeed, there were Armenian nationalists who acted as guerrillas and cooperated with the Russians. They briefly seized the city of Van in the spring of 1915.

Armenians mark the date April 24, 1915, when several hundred Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed as the start of the Armenian genocide and it is generally said to have extended to 1917. However, there were also massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, 1909, and a reprise between 1920 and 1923.

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has compiled figures by province and district that show there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800 by 1922.

Writing at the time of the early series of massacres, The New York Times suggested there was already a “policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor.”

The Young Turks, who called themselves the Committee of Unity and Progress, launched a set of measures against the Armenians, including a law authorizing the military and government to deport anyone they “sensed” was a security threat.

A later law allowed the confiscation of abandoned Armenian property. Armenians were ordered to turn in any weapons that they owned to the authorities. Those in the army were disarmed and transferred into labor battalions where they were either killed or worked to death.

There were executions into mass graves, and death marches of men, women and children across the Syrian desert to concentration camps with many dying along the way of exhaustion, exposure and starvation.

Much of this was quite well documented at the time by Western diplomats, missionaries and others, creating widespread wartime outrage against the Turks in the West. Although its ally, Germany, was silent at the time, in later years documents have surfaced from ranking German diplomats and military officers expressing horror at what was going on.

Some historians, however, while acknowledging the widespread deaths, say what happened does not technically fit the definition of genocide largely because they do not feel there is evidence that it was well-planned in advance.

The New York Times covered the issue extensively — 145 articles in 1915 alone by one count — with headlines like “Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres.” The Times described the actions against the Armenians as “systematic,” “authorized, and “organized by the government.”

The American ambassador, Henry Morganthau Sr., was also outspoken. In his memoirs, the ambassador would write: “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

Following the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Three Pashas fled to Germany, where they were given protection. But the Armenian underground formed a group called Operation Nemesis to hunt them down. On March 15, 1921, one of the pashas was shot dead on a street in Berlin in broad daylight in front of witnesses. The gunman pled temporary insanity brought on by the mass killings and a jury took only a little over an hour to acquit him. It was the defense evidence at this trial that drew the interest of Mr. Lemkin, the coiner of “genocide.”

The foundation is named after Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Budapest who saved thousands of European Jews during World War II and mysteriously disappeared in 1945 after being arrested by Russian police. The IRWF is offering a reward of up to US$ 500,000 to anyone who provides relevant information about Wallenbergs last days and the possible place of his remains.)

The two IRWF leaders visited Bratislava and were accompanied by the representatives of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia to a meeting with Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič. Tenembaum and Eurnekian presented Slovak head of state with the Centennial Raoul Wallenberg Medal, mark the anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s birth. The medal was given in symbolic recognition of Slovaks who during World War II helped to save their Jewish neighbors from the Holocaust.

Honorary Consul of the Carolinas Mr Magnus Natt och Dag welcomed the quests and captured some of the historical milestones in the life of Raoul Wallenberg. He thanked the sponsors and introduced the special guests.

Mr Edward O Woolner survived the incomprehensible events in Budapest and survived due to the actions taken by Raoul Wallenberg. Mr Peter Aranyi represented his mother, who also survived and shared her story with us. These presentations touched our hearts deeply and made us proud to honor someone who despite the dangers did everything humanly possible to protect as many lives as he could. Sweden houses will forever be in our memories.

As a result of the event, a significant contribution was made to the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Watch the video

The 2013 Wallenberg Prize was contributed by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Friends of Tel Aviv University.

Prof. Dina Porat, Head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry chaired the event.

All the speakers, Prof. Porat, Prof. Rein, Ambassador Hammarskjold and Danny Rainer, stressed the symbolism of this award, and the importance of raising awareness to Raoul Wallenberg, the role model and the victim.

The three recipients of the 2013 Wallenberg Prize are Dr. Guntehr Jikeli, Ms. Natalie Davidson and Ms. Oren Feina.

Two of the prize recipients, Dr. Gunterh Jikeli and Ms. Natalie Davidson, made a brief presentation of their dissertations, dealing with the perceptions of the Holocaust among Moslem Communities in Europe and Understanding political violence in the shadow of transnational tort human rights litigation.

At the end of the ceremony, the prize recipients received their awards from the hands of Ambassador Hammarskjold and Mr. Danny Rainer.

Thursday, January 17, 2013, 10:00 AM
Itzhak Alfred Guttmann Administration Building, Room 308 (3rd floor)
Tel Aviv University

Program:
Greetings:

o H.E. Elinor Hammarskjöld, The Swedish Ambassador
o Mr. Danny Reiner, Head of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, Israel
o Prof. Raanan Rein, Vice President, Tel Aviv University

Research Presentations by the 2013 Recipients of the Raoul Wallenberg Prize:

Dr. Gunther Jikeli, Fellow, Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry
Perceptions of the Holocaust among Moslem Communities in Europe

Ms. Natalie Davidson, PhD Candidate, Buchmann Faculty of Law
Understanding Political Violence in the Shadow of Transnational Tort Human Rights Litigation

Mr. Oren Feina, M.A. Student, Jewish Studies

Rabbi Zvi Koretz of Salonika as reflected in Memoirs and Historical Research

Chairperson: Prof. Dina Porat, Head, Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry

Sweden will honor its World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg with an annual commemoration day in recognition of his achievements in saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary.

Wallenberg, who would have turned 100 this year, was on a diplomatic mission in Hungary when detained by Soviet authorities in 1945. He is believed to have died in captivity, though the time and circumstances of his death remain a mystery.

Wallenberg is credited for saving at least 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents, or moving them to safe houses.

He was also instrumental in dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of Budapest’s ghetto.

Swedish Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth said Friday that the country will earmark August 27 as an official Wallenberg day.

The ceremony took place at the Eshkol Pais, Bat Yam, with the participation of 250 pupils, parents, school staff and high ranking officials of the Municipality of Bat Yam, including the Mayor, Shlomi Lachiany and his Deputy, Ester Peron.

The keynote speakers were Mayor Lachiany, Deputy Mayor Ester Peron, Danny Rainer and Eli Yossef.

Mayor Lachiany recalled how as a child he had first learned the awe-inspiring story of Raoul Wallenberg, thanks to his teacher.

Ms. Peron stressed the importance of the recognition of goodness.

Mr. Rainer pointed-out the excellent cooperation of the authorities of Bat Yam, which enabled these youngster to participate in such an important venture.

Mr. Yossef gave a 30 minute lecture in which he highlighted Wallenberg’s legacy and how his compassion and empathy had made him act as a hero.

One of the pupils read aloud her composition about Wallenberg, a fictional letter written by Wallenberg’s mother, while other works were also exposed.

The ceremony also included the moving performances of two young troupes, one of singers, Kol Hayam, and one of dancers, “Ballet Bravo”.

Principals, teachers and pupils from the three schools, Hachasmonayim, Shazar and Darka, went up to the stage to receive the prizes from Danny Rainer and Mayor Lachiany.