What important bonds of friendship were formed in six decades of Jewish-Christian interfaith activity? Judging from last weekend, probably none.
Silence, more than anything else, moved Christians and Jews closer in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Church leaders, coming to grips with the enormity and bestiality of Hitler's Final Solution, had to deal with guilt. They understood the role that church-inspired anti-Semitism played in the centuries before the Holocaust, and they felt some long-distance guilt. Greater, local guilt came from their own silence. They had watched Hitler promise to exterminate the Jews, and observed each step toward the crematoria of Auschwitz. They spoke up in horror only when it was too late—after six million had been murdered.
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