Jesuit Kaddish

Jesuits, Jews, and Holocaust Remembrance

James Bernauer, S.J.

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268107031
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

While much has been written about the Catholic Church and the Holocaust, little has been published about the hostile role of priests, in particular Jesuits, toward Jews and Judaism. Jesuit Kaddish is a long overdue study that examines Jesuit hostility toward Judaism before the Shoah and the development of a new understanding of the Catholic Church's relation to Judaism that culminated with Vatican II's landmark decree Nostra aetate. James Bernauer undertakes a self-examination as a member of the Jesuit order and writes this story in the hopes that it will contribute to interreligious reconciliation. Jesuit Kaddish demonstrates the way Jesuit hostility operated, examining Jesuit moral theology's dualistic approach to sexuality and, in the case of Nazi Germany, the articulation of an unholy alliance between a sexualizing and a Judaizing of German culture. Bernauer then identifies an influential group of Jesuits whose thought and action contributed to the developments in Catholic teaching about Judaism that eventually led to the watershed moment of Nostra aetate. This book concludes with a proposed statement of repentance from the Jesuits and an appendix presenting the fifteen Jesuits who have been honored as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Center. Jesuit Kaddish offers a crucial contribution to the fields of Catholicism and Nazism, Catholic-Jewish relations, Jesuit history, and the history of anti-Semitism in Europe.

NOTES

PERSONAL PRELUDE

1. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2008), 34. See also the catalogue from the 2007 exhibit of his work: The Mass Shooting of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944: The Holocaust by Bullets (Paris: Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, 2006).

2. Elaine Sciolino, “One Story at a Time: A Priest Reveals Ukranian Jews’ Fate,” New York Times, October 6, 2007, A4.

3. The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations: France, ed. Israel Gutman and Lucien Lazare (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 108. A gathering of the Jesuit biographies in this reference work is contained in this volume’s “Appendix: The Yad Vashem Jesuits.”

4. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2012), 1.

5. Stanislaw Obirek, “The Jewish Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel as a Challenge for Catholic Theology,” in Friends on the Way: Jesuits Encounter Contemporary Judaism, ed. Thomas Michel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 71.

6. John K. Roth, Holocaust Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 196. This intimate connection between the Kaddish and the Shoah found itself in the title of an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt: “Und keiner hat für uns Kaddisch gesagt . . .” [And no one said Kaddish for us . . .”]: Deportationen aus Frankfurt am Main, 1941 bis 1945 (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2004).

7. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 581.

8. Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 113, 131. In the memoir Friedländer identifies the priest only as Father L. As I learned from some research, his name was Pierre Lorigiola (1915–1989) and he had been a teacher of French in several Jesuit colleges. The second volume of Friedländer’s memoir tells of future, more critical, academic engagements with Jesuits: Where Memory Leads: My Life (New York: Other Press, 2016).

9. Cited in Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 31.

10. These sentences are from the video in the Fortunoff Video Archive, which can be accessed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/course?list=ECE129969D102584DD.

11. Karl Rahner, I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 51.

12. Günter Grass, Crabwalk (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).

13. Steven Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983: Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).

14. Alfred Delp, The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 166, 99. I was pleasantly surprised a few years ago to discover that Delp’s mother’s maiden name was Bernauer.

15. Michael R. Marrus, “Pius XI and Racial Laws: Discussant’s Comments,” in Pius XI and America, ed. C. Gallagher, D. Kertzer, and A. Meloni (Zurich: LIT, 2012), 429. The supersessionist theology to which Marrus makes reference generally holds that Jesus Christ has established a New Covenant and that it has replaced the Old Covenant, which holds that the Jews are God’s Chosen People.

16. Rupert Mayer, Leben im Widerspruch, in Ultimate Price: Testimonies of Christians Who Resisted the Third Reich, ed. Annemarie Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 174.

17. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 1933–1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 184, entry of August 16, 1936.

18. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1964) 296.

19. See Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 1–29. See also Jennifer Lind, Sorry States: Apologies in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), esp. 101–158.

20. Karl Meyer, “How Sorry Can You Get? Pretty Sorry,” New York Times, November 29, 1997, A19.

21. “Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto,” in The Günter Grass Reader, ed. Helmut Frielinghaus (New York: Harcourt Books, 2004), 245. Willy Brandt would later look back on his life and claim that his career’s greatest accomplishment had been working to ensure that the name of Germany and the concept of peace could be spoken together. (From an interview in a video at the permanent exhibition “Willy Brandt: A Political Life” in the Berlin Forum Willy Brandt).

22. Richard von Weizsäcker, “Speech by Richard von Weizsäcker,” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 262–273, here 273 and 264–265.

23. A striking example of this individual repentance was the 2007 trip to and apology made in Namibia by the descendants of the colonial military leader responsible for the genocide there in 1904. (“General’s Descendants Apologize for ‘Germany’s First Genocide,’” Spiegel Online, October 8, 2007). As far as other voices are concerned, von Weizsäckers’s speech has become a frequent target of neo-Fascists as, for example, in the German political leader Björn Höcke’s denunciation of the address as a “speech against his own people, and not for his own people” (Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “In Germany, Politician Stirs Nationalism, and Alarm,” New York Times, January 19, 2017, A4).

24. Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). The reference to the “tower of Babel” is on page 257.

25. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in The Power of the Powerless Citizens against the State in Central–Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), 60.

26. Lech Walesa, “It’s Good That Gorbachev Was a Weak Politician: Spiegel Online Interview with L. Walesa,” November 6, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,659752,00.html.

27. Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514 A–521 B.

28. Walesa, “It’s Good That Gorbachev Was a Weak Politician.”

29. Timothy Garton Ash, We the People: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Cambridge, UK: Granta Books, 1990), 133.

30. “The Mission That Failed, A Polish Courier Who Tried to Help the Jews: An Interview with Jan Karski,” Dissent, Summer 1987, 334.

31. Decree 5: “Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue,” General Congregation 34, in Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees of the 31st–35th General Congregations, ed. John Padberg (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009), 553.

32. Friends on the Way: Jesuits Encounter Contemporary Judaism, ed. Thomas Michel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

33. A selection of papers from this conference was published in 2014 as “The Tragic Couple”: Encounters between Jews and Jesuits, ed. James Bernauer and Robert Maryks (Boston: Brill).

34. The meeting took place at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem from June 29 to July 2. The major Jewish speakers were Daniel Boyarin, Tamar Appelbaum, and David Neuhaus. The most recent meeting of Jesuits engaged in dialogue with Jews took place July 1–4, 2019, in Paris.

35. With respect to the latter, there is the text by James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (New York: Harper One, 2012). O...