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Israel Holocaust memorial amends text on Vatican
Published Sunday 01/07/2012 (updated) 02/07/2012 19:50
The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem (MaanImages/File)
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- Israel's national Holocaust memorial has amended its account of Pope Pius XII's actions during World War Two, after the original text upset the Vatican by implying he did too little to try to rescue Jews from the Nazis.

Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial in Jerusalem, said on Sunday its new display acknowledged that the pope's defenders say his neutrality in the war gave church members more freedom and allowed them to carry out some secret rescue activities.

But it said the text mentioned that critics still saw Pius as guilty of doing too little, calling it a "moral failure".

The panel in the museum now also quotes from the pope's Christmas radio address in 1942 in which he refers to "hundreds of thousands of persons who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or ethnic origin" were killed. But it notes he did not explicitly name the Jews.

A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said the display was amended due to new research findings and that it now "better shows the complexity of the issue."

The original text at Yad Vashem was a terse chronicle of the opportunities Pius missed to confront or speak out against the Nazis and mentioned his role before becoming pope in 1939 in the church reaching an agreement with the German government. These elements remain in the new text.

The history of the wartime pontiff has long been a point of contention between Catholics and Jews. Defenders of the pope have said he did everything possible to help Jews, while critics have portrayed him as being indifferent and even complicit in the deaths of six million Jews across Europe.

Yad Vashem, which contains the largest archive of data on the Holocaust, also urged the Vatican to open its archives "so that a clearer understanding of the events can be arrived at."
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1 ) Yehuda Solomon / Israel
01/07/2012 21:37
All I can say for now is we will continue to honestly rectify, amend and clarify Pope Pius XII's positions and statements in this horrific period of our history while fully keeping everything in perspective. Let it be crystal clear we fully understand that, despite his supreme position in the Roman Catholic Church, the enormous religious and personal stress he was under (as were all other clerics) during this time in daring to risk his very life in overt or covert opposition to Hitler's (cont.)
2 ) ian / australia
02/07/2012 09:49
Of course the idea of Yad Vashem being involved in objective historical research (about Pius XII or anything else) is a bit of a howler for people serious about the field. The museum is a transparent tool of state propaganda, disseminating the national myths...especially that moment of almost Wagnerian drama, when visitors exit the zig-zagging displays and are confronted with the awe-inspiring panorama of Eretz Yisrael, the Abrahamic inheritance AKA someone else's country!
3 ) Yehuda Solomon / Israel
02/07/2012 17:31
Nazis and Mussolini's Fascists. We will continue to do this independently from anyone else's work or with or without cooperation from the Vatican. If there are errors or misperceptions, we will correct them. We do not seek to condemn Pope Pius XII for any shortcomings, real or perceived. We do not seek moral retribution against those whom we damn well know were under the lethal boot of Hitler and Mussolini at that time. What we do seek is honest portrayal in the context of history.
4 ) Yehuda Solomon / Israel
02/07/2012 19:39
@ 2) Ian/Australia, Howling instead of objective historical research ??? ... That's about as insane as you can get. Tell me ... have you been there ? ... and if so, anyone with any damn decency who would have would say your claim of Yad Vashem as a tool for state propaganda is camel shit. We established that for the memorial preservation of the Holocaust in and of itself, PERIOD. It's the height of lunacy to think there were other ulterior motives involved. Yad Vashem has already (cont.)
5 ) Yehuda Solomon / Israel
02/07/2012 19:55
been cited by several independent evaluators as exemplary for its work. Of course anyone can understand the panoramic view of Israel that's there ... so what's your point ? ... that we're abusing the memorial meaning of this genocide with a play for sympathy for establishing Israel ??? ... I admit that, yes, that would make sense and communicate such a feeling but if it pisses you off that badly know damn well we never established Israel because we wanted ANYBODY to "PAY" for The Holocaust.
6 ) ian / australia
03/07/2012 16:27
#4-5 Yehuda, the museum is clearly set up as a justification for the creation of Israel. That's the underlying thrust of the story, the take-home message, the feel-good ending after all the horrors. But the creation of Israel is controversial, as you well know, being based on the seizure of Arab land and the subjugation of a people who had every right to expect self-determination in a their own state after the end of the Mandate. So the museum functions as state propaganda making the case that
7 ) ian / australia
03/07/2012 16:28
(contd.) the end result, the Jewish State, justifies the violent means employed to achieve it. And this controversy and the whole question of the legitimacy of a state founded by violence AFTER the principals established at Nuremberg is so plainly something the museum would never address, that Yad Vashem, by definition, is not interested in "objective historical research".
8 ) Mel / USA
03/07/2012 17:53
#@:ian/australia:Very true! Yad Vashem is just a Zionist tool,or double-standard 'theme park'to enable political/ideological Zionism by coating it as Judaism! It,like all the other "memorials", was built using misappropriated Jewish restitution monies,from Europe.It was BILKED by Zionists,for the Zionist cause,but should've been restored to ALL JEWISH survivors of the Nazi holocaust,everywhere,individually.That's like Wahhabism bilking monies meant for all Muslims! Oh?That's right,they DO!
9 ) Amira / Canada
03/07/2012 19:04
What is needed is a Palestine Holocaust Memorial to recount all Israel atrocities committed against Palestinians since 1948.
10 ) William Hague / UK
03/07/2012 19:15
6/7) Your argument fails the test of history. Israel is the product of the 1922 San Rhemo agreement, as are all Arab states in the region, with the exception of Jordan, illegally created as a Palestinian state after Arabs reneged on their agreement to Jews having their homeland. The violence employed was perpetrated by Arabs to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. You are obviously a Nazi, indulging in revisionist history. It doesn't work anymore in these days of Internet and Wikipedia.
11 ) ian / australia
04/07/2012 01:16
#10 "You are obviously a Nazi, indulging in revisionist history." Interesting William. You sort of demonstrate what I was saying about the impossibility of disinterested, objective scholarship at Yad Vashem, that views other than the officially sanctioned ones would be howled down in the most aggressive and abusive terms, like you've done here.
12 ) ian / australia
04/07/2012 04:30
#10 San Remo??? Are you one of those steam punk guys William...you know, living in the past? San Remo is a relic, a last gasp of Empire, the last big get-together of the Colonial powers when Europeans thought carving up lands inhabited only by "wogs" was an expression of the natural order of things! Is that what you're sticking up for? Surely Nuremberg and Geneva and UDHR and dozens of UN resolutions and rulings have rendered San Remo null and void. And of course San Remo says nothing about
13 ) ian / australia
04/07/2012 04:32
(contd.) about a Jewish State. It echoes Lord Balfour's memo about a "national home", within Palestine, not a sovereign state in ALL of Palestine and only so long as the rights of the existing non-Jewish population (AKA "the wogs") are respected…so, a bit late for that...but all this has all been covered here over and over again.
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