One could not be unmoved when a group of young clerics from the local Catholic seminary sang a popular Israeli song in Hebrew, “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” (“We Brought Peace”), during a Catholic service in a small (and in January very sleepy) town in southeastern Poland. The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Zvi Rav Ner, could be seen singing along with a smile. And this was the second song sung in Hebrew by the young men; the first was a beautiful performance of Shema Yisrael.
What was even more remarkable was the fact that the service was taking place in the Sandomierz Cathedral, known in Poland and the West more for its notorious 18th-century painting depicting Jews killing Christian children than for its historical beauty and unique medieval frescoes. The service by the local bishop with other prominent church dignitaries, was the culmination of the Day of Judaism, observed each year by the Catholic Church in Poland with the aim of fostering a dialogue with Judaism and the Jewish community. Among the goals of the day, celebrated in Poland since 1997, is to “propagate exposition” of biblical texts, “which in the past may have been interpreted in an anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic way” in the spirit of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council and Nostra Aetate, “to explain to the faithful the tragedy of the Jewish extermination,” and “to present anti-Semitism as a sin.”
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