A top German cardinal has criticized insensitive comments from a group of German bishops who seem to be men of Godwin, rather than men of G-d.
Germany’s top Roman Catholic official has said that a controversial comparison made by a group of German Bishops between conditions in the West Bank and the Holocaust was “not appropriate.”
The comments, made in a letter by Cardinal Karl Lehmann to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, came one day after Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority blasted the German comparison between the Palestinian-controlled West Bank cities and the Warsaw Ghetto as “political exploitation and demagoguery.”
The German Cardinal wrote to the Yad Vashem director that the “oppressive situation” in the West Bank, “in the shade of security fences and walls in Bethlehem,” was “reflected in some harsh statements, of which some‚Ķwere certainly not appropriate,” according to an English translation of the March 7 letter released Thursday by Yad Vashem.
Lehmann wrote that it was important for such statements to “stay sensitive to the complexity of a situation, and must not hurt the feelings of others, especially in regard to past suffering.”
He added that “completely independent of the situation, one cannot connect in any way current problems or situations of injustice with the national socialist mass murder of the Jews.
“For this reason, I can well comprehend that a statement, which referred to the Warsaw Ghetto in the face of Palestinian suffering, caused irritation and objection.”
The German bishops’ bitterly contentious comparisons stunned Yad Vashem officials, who had hosted the senior Christian leaders just hours earlier on a tour of the Holocaust Museum, where they had talked about guilt, joint liability and remaining shame.
“Photos of the inhuman Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem in the morning, in the evening we go to the ghetto in Ramallah – that blows your lid off,” Eichstaett Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke reportedly said.
Actually, Ramallah is a great place to have your lid blown off… but it helps if you are Jewish.
