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Reviewed by:
  • Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans, and Reconciliation
  • John S. Conway
Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans, and Reconciliation, Mordecai Paldiel (Jersey City, New Jersey: KTAV, 2006). 443 pp., $39.50.

In 1953 the Israeli government established Yad Vashem as a memorial to the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Ten years later commemoration was extended to non-Jews who had rescued or assisted Jews to escape from death at the hands of the Nazis or their associates. Over the years some twenty-one thousand of these "Righteous Gentiles" have been identified after careful scrutiny of depositions on their behalf. Each was honored with a tree in the stately Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles and a plaque giving the individual's name and country of origin.

Mordecai Paldiel, director of the program, has selected for publication the stories of some three hundred Christian clerics, both male and female, from a variety of denominations across the European continent. (Their names are listed by country in a useful appendix). While much of this material is already known, Paldiel's convenient and comparative summary is welcome. His aim is to show that, despite the long history of Christian intolerance, there were Christian clerics who acted with humanity and generosity towards Jews in their hour of peril. In so doing, he claims, they paved the way for the striking change in Christian attitudes in the 1960s, particularly after the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II and his memorable visit of repentance to Jerusalem in 2000 set the seal on this reconciliation and opened the way for a new era in Christian-Jewish relations.

The narratives, organized by nationality, are designed to offset the feelings many Jews share that Christian antisemitism is ineradicable. Paldiel seeks to show that during the Holocaust there were clergy who had shed such views, or who acted despite them. "The overwhelming motivation of clergy rescuers of Jews was compassion for their sufferings coupled with a Christian duty to help others in need, motivations powerful enough to overcome the traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudice" ( p. 225). In Poland, for instance, where Catholic antisemitism was widespread, Christian rescuers faced danger not only from the brutal German occupiers but also their own antisemitic kinsmen. Their heroic deeds deserve particular honor, for "Polish rescuers occupy an elevated position of selfless devotion and great courage, unmatched in any other country" (ibid.).

Motivations are difficult to pin down. And Christian rescuers would naturally express themselves in terms of compassion and mercy. But there can be no [End Page 488] question that they were in a minority, and often without support from their superiors, which makes their risk-taking all the more notable. In Germany, even leading figures of the Protestant Confessing Church such as Martin Niemöller, who opposed the Nazis openly, still held to the traditional Christian delegitimization of Jews. Paldiel includes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this category, since he seems not to have repudiated his 1933 public enunciation of a divine curse upon the Jews. Attempts to have him declared a Righteous Gentile because of his involvement in a rescue attempt during the war have been repeatedly rebuffed by Paldiel's office. So too leading German Catholic bishops—such as Galen of Münster—even if opposed to some Nazi policies, did not take a stand for the Jews. Bernhard Lichtenberg, Provost of the Cathedral of Berlin, was the only leading Catholic clergyman to pray publicly for the Jews, and was imprisoned for his daring, dying on his way to Dachau. The Protestant pastor Hermann Maas was equally isolated, but survived to give courageous testimony after the war. Paldiel recounts the names and stories of lesser-known German rescuers.

In describing events in countries across the continent, Paldiel adopts a convenient pattern. He first surveys the situation of each Jewish community before and during the German occupation, followed by a section on the responses of the churches in general, which were all too often negative, demonstrating the majority's indifference or at least inaction. Then he gives details of the church rescuers, drawn principally from the files accumulated in Jerusalem and supplemented...

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