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Pope Benedict XVI, who went from Hitler Youth to advancing Catholic-Jewish relations, dies at 95
(JTA) — Jewish groups are among those marking the death of Benedict XVI, the Catholic pontiff who died Saturday at 95, a decade after shocking the world by becoming the first pope since the Middle Ages to resign.
“It is with great sadness that I learned today that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has passed away,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement issued Saturday. “He was a towering figure of the Roman Catholic Church, both as pope and before that as the cardinal who gave the Catholic-Jewish relationship solid theological underpinning and enhanced understanding.”
During his eight years as pope, Benedict took many steps to advance Catholic-Jewish relations. visiting synagogues and Israel and condemning antisemitism on multiple occasions.
But he also reintroduced liturgy praying for the conversion of Jews, accepted back into the church an excommunicated priest who denied the Holocaust and never completely satisfied some who wished to see him more fully denounce his own Nazi past.
Born Joseph Ratzinger in Germany in 1927, Benedict spent a portion of his teenage years in the Hitler Youth organization, something that was mandatory for boys in Germany at the time and that he explained as necessary to obtain a tuition discount at his seminary. Those who knew him at the time attested after his election as pope in 2005 that his participation was reluctant, and Jewish groups who worked with him after the war said he had long worked to rectify the association.
“Though as a teenager he was a member of the Hitler Youth, all his life Cardinal Ratzinger has atoned for the fact,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement after his election as pope.
As priest and professor of theology in the 1960s, Ratzinger took part in the Second Vatican Council, a policy meeting of church leaders, as a theological advisor. It was at that council that the church’s leadership rejected centuries of Catholic dogma and declared that the Jewish people should not be blamed for the death of Jesus. Their 1965 declaration, known as Nostra Aetate, recast the church’s relations with the Jewish community.
Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, is remembered as the first pope to visit a synagogue and, upon his ascension to the papacy, Benedict continued that tradition, making a habit of visiting with local Jewish communities on several of his international trips.
Pope Benedict XVI greets guests beside Rabbi Arthur Schneier (R) during a visit to the Park East Synagogue, April 18, 2008, in New York City. (Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2008, on a papal visit to the United States, Benedict visited New York’s Park East Synagogue on the eve of Passover, in the first visit by a pope to an American synagogue.
“Shalom! It is with joy that I come here, just a few hours before the celebration of your Pesach, to express my respect and esteem for the Jewish community in New York City,” the pope said to the congregation, according to the church’s records. “I find it moving to recall that Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this.”
The next year, Benedict visited Israel, in a trip that was largely focused around the common roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Related: Timeline of Pope Benedict XVI and the Jews (2013)
Upon Benedict’s resignation in 2013, he was praised by Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi. “During his period there were the best relations ever between the church and the chief rabbinate, and we hope that this trend will continue,” said the rabbi, Yona Metzger. “I think he deserves a lot of credit for advancing inter-religious links the world.”
Despite the praise, Benedict’s papacy ignited multiple episodes of criticism from Jews alarmed by the effects of his religious conservatism.
Early in his papacy, Benedict allowed for the expanded use of the Tridentine Mass — the pre-Vatican II Catholic liturgy also known as the Latin Mass — which includes a Good Friday prayer that many view as antisemitic because it prays for the conversion of Jews to Christianity. (Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has curtailed the use of the Latin Mass, though not specifically because of its language about Jews.)
The ADL’s then-leader, Abraham Foxman, was among many Jewish leaders to condemn Benedict’s move.
‘We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday mass, it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted,’ Foxman said. “’It is the wrong decision at the wrong time. It appears the Vatican has chosen to satisfy a right-wing faction in the church that rejects change and reconciliation.”
In response to the criticism, Benedict altered the Good Friday liturgy to drop a reference to the “blindness” of the Jews, but he maintained language praying for Jews to convert to Christianity.
Benedict also drew criticism for his refusal to acknowledge the Catholic church’s role in the Holocaust, and in particular, the role of the pope at the time, Pius XII — whose path to sainthood Benedict approved in 2009.
Pope Benedict XVI talks to Italian Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni in Rome’s main synagogue, Jan. 17, 2010. In his remarks there, Benedict said the Roman Catholic Church provided “often hidden and discreet” support for Jews during the Holocaust. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)
Pius has long been accused by Jewish groups of at best remaining silent, and at worst, being “Hitler’s pope” as the Holocaust raged across Europe. While Catholics were involved in many cases of rescue across the continent, initiatives coming from the Vatican itself often applied only to practicing Catholics of Jewish descent, or required Jews to convert to Catholicism.
After the war, Pius’ Vatican sheltered Ante Pavelic, the exiled leader of the Ustaše regime in the former Independent State of Croatia, a Catholic supremacist movement and Nazi puppet state that implemented the Holocaust in Western Yugoslavia. Jasenovac, the third-largest concentration camp in Europe, was built under the Ustaše rule and was the site of death for at least 100,000 people, including between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews.
The Vatican has long maintained that Pius worked to save Jews. Pius, Benedict said in 2008, “acted in a secret and silent way because, given the realities of that complex historical moment, he realized that it was only in this way that he could avoid the worst and save the greatest possible number of Jews.”
Benedict faced the decision of whether to declare Pius “venerable,” a crucial step in the path to sainthood. After initially deferring, he made the declaration in 2009. Now, the decision about whether Pius will be beatified, or declared a saint, could hinge on the contents of an archive that the Vatican is in the process of opening that includes materials about Pius’ handling of the Holocaust.
“The Pope at War,” a recent book by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kertzer, the son of a rabbi, draws on these new archives to make the case that Pius largely ignored pleas from Jews (while keeping a secret back channel to Hitler); Pius’ advisor used antisemitic language in urging him not to act on behalf of the Jews and the pope personally intervened to prevent Jewish children and their parents from being reunited, Kertzer concluded.
Benedict, who had access to the archive, worked to heal friction with the International Society of Saint Pius XII, a conservative faction within the Vatican that named itself after the wartime pope and added the “Saint” even though he lacked the title.
In early 2009, Benedict removed the excommunication of four priests from the society. Among them was Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, who claimed the Nazis’ use of gas chambers to be a lie.
German Jewish leaders called Benedict’s decision “a slap in the face for the Jewish community.”
“The result of this move is very simple: to give credence to a man who is a Holocaust denier, which means that the sensitivity to us as Jews is not what it should be,” Elie Wiesel said at the time.
“The Vatican has done far more than set back Vatican-Jewish relations,” the scholar (and current U.S. antisemitism monitor) Deborah Lipstadt wrote at the time. “It has made itself look like it is living in the darkest of ages.”
Benedict said he had not known about Williamson’s views and pressed him to recant them, but Williamson did not; the pope later said he had mishandled the situation.
Months later, during his visit to Israel, Benedict spoke outside of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum. Though he denounced antisemitism in his remarks, he did not mention the words Germany or Nazi, nor did he reference any church involvement or his own experience in the Hitler Youth, or refer to the deaths of Europe’s Jews as murder.
Benedict ultimately refused to enter the museum, due to its negative depiction of Pope Pius XII.
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How Dealing with Difficult Challenges Leads to Spiritual Growth and Leadership
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
They say that “the devil is in the details,” and nowhere has that been more evident than in the corruption scandal currently shaking Ukraine — even as the deadly war with Russia continues to rage.
Over the past couple of weeks, Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators have been drip-feeding the world with information: wiretaps, redacted court testimony, and sordid specifics of a large bribery saga. The cast of villains includes prominent businessmen and contractors pressured for hefty “commissions,” high-ranking ministers abruptly resigning, and one of President Zelensky’s former business partners fleeing the country just hours before the police raided his home.
The entire scheme exploited a wartime loophole — a rule under martial law preventing contractors from collecting debts in court from companies providing essential services. Energoatom fits that definition perfectly, as it supplies more than half of Ukraine’s electricity.
But more fascinating than the scandal itself is the sheer level of detail — the way this scheme evolved from small to big to overwhelming, unfolding slowly, piece by piece, person by person, until you finally step back and see the broad contours of the entire sprawling disaster.
And oddly enough, all of this brings me straight into the heart of Parshat Vayeitzei, which was my late father’s bar mitzvah parsha. He would always say — with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye — that Vayeitzei was “the most important parsha in the Torah.” We’d nod and smile, convinced he was just having a laugh.
I mean, yes — Vayeitzei certainly has its blockbuster moments: Jacob’s ladder stretching toward heaven, the extraordinary promises God makes to him, his first encounter with Rachel at the well — one of the great love stories in Jewish history — followed by his marriages and the birth of 11 children who would become the founders of the tribes that became the Jewish people. All of these events are unquestionably consequential, to say the least.
But then you hit the middle of the parsha — the part everyone secretly hopes the baal koreh will speed through. It’s long, it’s intricate, and it’s bewilderingly detailed: the astonishing saga of Jacob’s business dealings with Lavan.
Wage agreements — and disagreements. Livestock negotiations. Contract revisions. Endless sheep rearing. Sheep with spots, sheep without spots, sheep with speckles, stripes, dark patches — every possible permutation of sheep coloration you can imagine. It’s the Torah’s version of a regulatory audit: too many technical notes, too many procedural details, and far too much information.
Most of us, understandably, wonder what all this sheep drama is doing in a sacred text. Why did the Torah — normally so concise — zoom in on this business relationship from hell? Why give us this level of detail? And whatever the answer might be, surely this story doesn’t belong in “the most important parsha in the Torah.”
But my father always insisted that Vayeitzei’s business section wasn’t a pointless, transitional interruption in the narrative — it was the narrative. And perhaps, as the revelations from Kyiv remind us, the line between spiritual greatness and moral disaster is drawn not in grand theological enterprises like ladders reaching heavenward or celestial dream sequences, but in the slow, grinding, unglamorous world of day-to-day commerce: negotiations, promises, deals, and the quiet ethical temptations that shadow every decision we make.
If you think about it, this strange middle section of Vayeitzei is the Torah’s earliest and most elaborate case study in business ethics — or, more accurately, business un-ethics. Lavan is the Biblical version of a man who smiles broadly to your face while his hand is quietly stealing your wallet.
He is charming, generous-sounding, and utterly unscrupulous. He cheats at negotiations. He alters contracts retroactively. He weaponizes hospitality. He manipulates family loyalty. If there were a Biblical Consumer Protection Bureau, Lavan would be its full-time subject of interest.
And Jacob — the bookish, scholarly son of Isaac — finds himself thrown into a years-long masterclass with one of the greatest Machiavellian businessmen of the ancient Near East. The holy patriarch of the Jewish nation, the spiritual heir to Abraham and Isaac, sits across the table from a crook arguing over sheep markings.
But that’s precisely the point. Spirituality is easy when you live a monastic life of solitude and separation. Show me how spiritual you are when you need to negotiate with a scoundrel — that’s when your character is truly revealed.
Judaism doesn’t believe in the mystique of the cloister. Our greatest spiritual heroes aren’t monks; they’re shepherds, merchants, craftsmen, farmers — even warriors and kings. Jacob’s true greatness emerges in the trenches of real life, in the dense and morally dangerous world where money, power, opportunity, resentment, and desperation mingle with our aspirations to become the people God wants us to be.
What Vayeitzei shows, in deliberately excruciating detail, is that Jacob absolutely refuses to become Lavan. Yes, he negotiates, he strategizes, he outsmarts. But he does not become Lavan. He maintains his integrity.
And here’s the deeper insight — the one my father, with his mischievous grin, seemed instinctively to understand: the Jewish mission from the very outset was never to escape the world; it was to elevate it — from the inside out.
If Jacob had spent 20 years in a desert cave meditating on the divine, he might have produced beautiful insights — but there would have been no tribes, no family, no nation, and no legacy. Instead, Jacob becomes the spiritual father of Israel the nation even as he ran a household, raised children, and navigated a business partnership with a morally bankrupt relative.
And that is precisely why the Torah dwells on the sheep. Because the sheep are not a distraction — they are the arena. They are the battlefield where Jacob’s greatness is forged. They are the proof that holiness is not found in what we avoid, but in how we behave when we can’t avoid what we would much prefer to have nothing to do with.
And as it turns out, in the final analysis Jacob was not transformed by his dream of angels — he was transformed by his years in business with Lavan. What we learn from Jacob and the sheep is that building a family, maintaining integrity in business, and dealing with difficult people are not obstacles to spiritual growth; they are spiritual growth.
Which only goes to prove that my father’s twinkling assertion wasn’t a joke at all. He understood something the rest of us tend to overlook. Maybe Vayeitzei really is the most important parsha in the Torah — not despite the details, but because of them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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The Dangerous Legacy of the 1840 ‘Damascus Affair’ Blood Libel (PART TWO)
Smoke rises from a building after strikes at Syria’s defense ministry in Damascus, Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Part One of this article appeared here.
Worldwide Reaction and Coordinated Jewish Response
Western Jews in Europe and America were incensed at what was happening in Damascus. Europeans and American Jews lobbied their governments to intercede on behalf of the Jews in Damascus. In what was then an entirely novel approach, 15,000 Jews in six American cities gathered and protested on behalf of their fellow Jews in Syria.
In response to the advocacy, government leaders condemned the libel and attempted to intervene on behalf of the accused Jews. Among them were Queen Victoria, Lord Henry Palmerston, US Secretary of State John Forsyth, and, as previously mentioned, Klemens von Metternich of Austria.
Among the Jews who were advocating on behalf of the Damascus Jews, Sir Moses Montefiore stood out.
He, along with French lawyer and future French Justice Minister Adolphe Cremieux, Louis Loewe, and Solomon Munk, traveled as a delegation to Egypt to appeal to Muhammad Ali. They requested that the investigation be transferred to Egyptian or European judges to consider the case. Their request was denied, but as a result, Muhammad Ali decided instead to have the Jews released without acquitting them. The liberation order was issued on August 28, 1840. The prisoners who had survived the investigation were freed.
Seeing that the charges would not be dropped and the libel would continue, Montefiore and Cremieux chose to turn to Sultan Abdul Mejid of the Ottoman Empire, since he was the actual leader over the region, albeit largely powerless. They asked the Sultan to issue a decree proclaiming blood libels as false and prohibiting prosecuting Jews based on such accusations.
The Sultan acquiesced and issued his ruling on November 6, 1840. In a noteworthy act, he condemned the blood libel, stating clearly that it was utterly false and that “Muslim theologians had examined Jewish religious books and found that the Jews are strongly prohibited not only from using human blood but even from consuming that of animals. It therefore follows that the charges made against them, and their religion, are nothing but pure calumny.”
Nevertheless, for years to come, and on antisemitic websites until today, the Catholics of Damascus would continue to tell the story of the friar murdered by Jews for his blood, and that the Jews had only been let free due to the influence of powerful Jews from other countries.
What was France Thinking?
In the aftermath of the Damascus Affair, numerous questions arose. How could France, a country that gave civil equality to the Jews in 1791 and gave its Jewish population the most legal rights, openly support the patently false blood libel accusation and even allow torture to be used to extort confessions?
Most historians conclude that the answer was national self-interest. France’s leaders saw it as beneficial to maintain their foothold in Syria, and felt that supporting the accusers against the Jews would work for them. By the same token, countries hostile to France seized the opportunity to denounce France for its actions, as they sought to increase their control in the Middle East and diminish French influence there. So, Metternich, not known to be a friend of the Jews, denounced the blood libel charges, as did the leaders of Great Britain.
The Damascus Blood Libel, which might otherwise have passed unnoticed in Europe, garnered international attention because of the rivalry of Europe’s great powers in the Middle East.
The Jewish Reaction
The Damascus Affair has been described as a turning point in modern Jewish history, particularly for French Jews, who were among the most vocal supporters that traditional Jewish nationalism was a thing of the past. They were patriotic citizens for whom religion was a private matter, if it was relevant at all.
Yet, when they were exposed to the antisemitism that France displayed in the Damascus Affair, French Jews were completely shaken up. In fact, all of world Jewry was shocked that the blood libel accusation — a throwback to the antisemitism of the Dark Ages — was initially accepted as fact by almost the entire press in Europe. How could it be that educated citizens and modern leaders could believe and support this baseless and ridiculous accusation? No reassuring answer was forthcoming.
In an act that would reverberate for the next two centuries, in 1846, a two-volume book was published in Paris, written by Achille Laurent (a pseudonym), Relation historique des affaires de Syrie depuis 1840 jusqu’en 1842. It claimed to document the complete protocols of the investigation in Damascus, yet completely omitted any mention of the extensive use of torture and only focused on the Jews as murderers, and that the blood libel was a proven fact.
These protocols were published in German, Italian, Arabic, and Russian in the years and decades to come. This book allowed antisemites to “prove” that the murder accusation had been proven and documented, but that the Jews were released despite their guilt.
In fact, Russian coverage of the Damascus Affair in the media is seen as one of the causes that led to the pogroms of the 1890s. Unfortunately, these protocols continue to be published and publicized, particularly in the Arab-language media.
One of the end results of the Damascus Affair was its awakening of Jewish awareness for the need to cooperate to address Jewish needs and respond to charges and attacks towards Jews around the world. In the following decades, for the first time in modern history, multiple such organizations would form to address these concerns.
One Nation
The subsequent blood libel that made international news was that of Menachem Mendel Beilis in Russia in 1911. The lawyer who headed the defense team, the legendary Oscar Gruzenberg, was sure that the prosecution’s attack would take quotes out of context from the Talmud and use them to accuse the Jews. He had Rabbi Mazeh, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, head a rabbinic advisory team for the defense and prepare answers to the inevitable questions. As Gruzenberg had predicted, at the trial the prosecution quoted the Talmudic statement in Tractate Yevamos 61a, “You (the Jewish people) are called “Adam” (Man), and the other nations are not called “Adam” (Man).”
The prosecutors demanded, “How could the Jews claim only they are called man, and the other nations are not called man?! It must mean that they view non-Jews as subhuman!”
The defense had an answer prepared, provided by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, who was already renowned as a brilliant and eloquent leader of Polish Jewry. He explained that the quote reflects an essential characteristic of the Jews and was not intended an insult to the other nations.
Rabbi Shapiro explained that the Talmud (Shavous 39) teaches that “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh,” meaning all Jews are responsible for one another. He elaborated that in the court, the fate of a single Jew — Mendel Beilis — was being decided, yet the judgment touched Jewish people all over the world.
Rabbi Shapiro directed the defense team to ask the judge, “If an Italian citizen was arrested in Poland or a Frenchman in Germany, would all of Italy or all of France be praying on his behalf and advocating for his acquittal? Would Italians or Frenchmen all over the world be constantly worried about him and awaiting news of his release? Of course not. Yet, when one Jew in Russia is falsely accused of murder, the entire Jewish nation stands with him, because we are truly one. The Talmud says Jews are called “Adam,” because “Adam” shows the unity of the Jewish nation. We are one, a single unit, just as Adam was one man. The word “Adam” in Hebrew has no plural, and that is why it represents the Jewish people, who are one, and this pronoun is not used to identify other nations, as the Talmud stated.”
This answer was understood, even by the accusers. This message continues to serve as a beacon of light for the connection Jews share with one another. In good times and bad, the Jewish People are one.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA from 2007 – 2020. He is a popular speaker and has written for numerous publications. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org. A version of this article was first published at: https://aish.com/the-damascus-affair/
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Seven IDF Soldiers Wounded in Counterterrorism Operation in Syria
A damaged site, following an Israeli raid on Friday, according to Syrian state media, in Beit Jinn, Syria, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Ahmed al-Najjar
i24 News — Seven Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers were wounded during exchange of fire with Syrian jihadists as arrests were conducted of wanted suspects; two Syrian terrorists were killed.
The incident took place in the village of Beit Jinn in Southern Syria — 8 km from the Israeli border and Mount Hermon, an area where the IDF operates frequently (north of the Druze village of Hader).
The event began around 2 am during an operation to apprehend two wanted members of the terrorist organization Jamaa al-Islamiya at their home. A reserve paratrooper force from the 55th Brigade entered the structure, apprehended the terrorists, and began exiting the building in order to bring them in for questioning.
As the force left the building, it came under short-range fire, wounding seven soldiers — three seriously and four moderately to lightly. The soldiers returned fire and eliminated two additional fighters in the area. The Air Force was also dispatched, but could not engage due to the close proximity between the force and the militants.
Despite the exchange of fire, the operation was successful. The two wanted suspects from Jamaa al-Islamiya (whom intelligence had been monitoring for a long time prior to the operation) were transferred to security interrogation in Israel.
This is not the first time the IDF has carried out an arrest operation in the village: on June 12, soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade captured a Hamas terrorist cell of six operatives who had planned to attack IDF forces in Syria and had based themselves in Beit Jinn. Numerous weapons were found with them.