Jews must admit guilt for collaborating with Bolsheviks and the leading role played in the Communist secret police says Cardinal Glemp

Shouldn’t Jews also admit
their guilt for collaborating
with the Bolsheviks in sending
Poles to Siberia or prison . .
. or for the leading role
played (in post-war Poland) by
the Communist secret police of
Jewish ancestry?– Cardinal
Glemp, in the Niedziela
interviewPolish
Church Apologizes for 1941 Massacre of
Jews

By Rob Strybel

WARSAW (Reuters) —
Poland’s Roman Catholic
Church was taking an important step to improve relations with the Jewish community Sunday by apologizing for the
Poles who took part in a massacre of up to
1,600 Jews during World War
Two.

The 1941 massacre in the town of
Jedwabne came to prominence last year with the publication of “Neighbors,” a book by
émigré scholar Jan
Gross, who alleged that Poles, not occupying Nazi Germans, had brutally murdered Jews and taken their possessions.

“We wish to apologize above all to God, but also to the wronged, on behalf of those Polish citizens who committed evil against citizens of the Mosaic faith,”
Polish Primate Jozef Glemp said in an interview in the Catholic weekly
Niedziela.

An expiation service being held in
Warsaw’s biggest church, near the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, was to include a prayer by Polish-born Pope John
Paul, a champion of Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

But the
service was unlikely to succeed in
bringing Catholics and Jews together
since it coincided with the Shavout, a
major Jewish holiday.

The American-born rabbi of Warsaw and
Lodz, Michael Schudrich, said in a letter to Glemp he could not attend the service because “I cannot be in two temples at once.”

Gross’s book ignited one of the country’s biggest national debates since the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland, a staunchly Roman Catholic country.

Jewish circles expressed satisfaction that the blame was finally being placed where it belonged. But many Poles, accustomed to viewing themselves as war victims and heroes, resent being regarded as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust.

“Neighbors” describes how the Jedwabne
Jews were bludgeoned, beaten and stabbed to death by their Polish neighbors, and how most were herded into a barn and burned alive, but many details of the case remain unclear.

MOTIVES
FOR PROGROM

Historians and journalists have questioned whether the Jedwabne Poles had acted on their own, as Gross maintains, or were forced to cooperate at gunpoint by the Germans.

Jewish
collaboration with the Soviets, who had
occupied the Jedwabne area for nearly
two years prior to Germany’s invasion,
has also been cited as a possible
motive for the pogrom, a point
repeatedly raised by the Church.

“Shouldn’t Jews also admit their guilt for collaborating with the Bolsheviks in sending Poles to Siberia or prison … or for the leading role played (in post-war
Poland) by the Communist secret police of
Jewish ancestry?” Cardinal Glemp asked in the Niedziela interview.

Poland’s National Remembrance Institute (IPN) has started an investigation into the massacre and promised to bring those responsible to justice. Half a century ago, 23 Poles were sentenced for complicity in the massacre.

The IPN, a state body probing war crimes, is now supervising the exhumation of the mass grave in Jedwabne to determine the exact number of victims and how they died.

The Church has often been at loggerheads with Jews over a variety of issues in Poland, including a Catholic nunnery and religious symbols at the
Auschwitz
death camp, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the war.

In the mid-1990s, Pope John Paul had to intervene to remove the nunnery from the vicinity of the Auschwitz camp, viewed by the Jews as their biggest burial ground in the world.