In response to a request by the Yad L’Achim organization, the Vatican says it will consider asking its church members to “reveal to Holocaust orphans their Jewish past and provide them with accurate information concerning their families.”This is the first time that Vatican officials have related to this matter publicly, Yad L’Achim says.
Rabbi Shalom David Lifshitz, founder and chairman of the anti-missionary and anti-assimilation Yad L’Achim organization, wrote to Pope Benedict shortly before his visit to Israel two months ago.
The rabbi asked the pontiff to take action to reveal the “hidden Jewish children” of the Holocaust – if not to the world, then at least to the “children” themselves.
It is estimated that thousands of Jewish children were left with Christian monasteries or families by their Jewish parents during the Holocaust, in the hope that they would thus survive the war.
However, untold hundreds of these children – Yad L’Achim says the number is approximately 2,000 - were never claimed, returned or told of their Jewish background.
A letter from Pope Pius XII to his representative in Paris on November 20, 1946 shows that he ordered Jewish babies that were baptized during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents.
The recipient of the letter, Angelo Roncalli, who was later to become Pope John XXIII, often disobeyed these instructions.
The official Vatican response to Rabbi Lifshitz stated, “The matter of the children of Jewish families during II World War is a very delicate and a very complex one. I know that there has been action taken by the Holy See, but at this moment I cannot be accurate in my information. I assure you that I will try to provide more precise information and see if an appeal like the one you propose could be made [emphasis added].”
The letter is signed by Archbishop Antonio Franco, of the high Vatican rank of Apostolic Nuncio. Similar letters of support for the cause of locating the Jewish “children” have been sent to Yad L’Achim from the President of France and the monarchs of Britain and Holland.
Rabbi Lifshitz said this week that his organization and the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) have begun working closely on this matter, and that a joint office to deal with it will be established in the coming days.
ERC Director Rabbi Aryeh Goldberg said, “Yad L’Achim tells us that there are more than 1,000 such lost Jews, another 600 in France, and hundreds more in Belgium and Italy. The faster we act, the more names we will be able to find.”
“There is no doubt,” Rabbi Lifshitz says, “that the holy parents and grandparents of those orphans, most of whom do not know anything about their Jewishness, cannot rest in peace before their descendants return to their forefathers’ religion and homeland.”
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