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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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Italy’s New Jewish Community Leader Sounds Alarm on Rising Antisemitism, Targeted Violence
A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
The newly elected president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) has warned that Jews across Italy are facing a deepening climate of hostility, fear, and targeted violence, sounding the alarm over what she described as a growing antisemitic threat.
During her first press conference on Monday as the newly appointed head of UCEI, the main representative body of Italian Jews, Livia Ottolenghi laid out the priorities of her mandate, highlighting efforts to strengthen Jewish communal life and tackle antisemitism that, she warned, “affects the entire society.”
“My commitment will be focused on consolidating the UCEI’s role as a point of reference for Italian Jewish communities and as an authoritative voice on the national and international scene,” she said. “It is essential that we work together to ensure the continuity, cohesion, and future of Italian Judaism.”
“In Italy, Jews don’t live well,” she continued. “Or rather, we live well only thanks to the police. Schools have bars on the windows, students must be escorted whenever they leave, and from kindergarten to university, we face serious challenges even in the simple practice of our Judaism.”
Ottolenghi added, “It’s far from a peaceful situation. Yet we continue to live our religious and civic lives fully, without fear.”
Previously a professor of Dentistry at Sapienza University of Rome, the 63-year-old Jewish leader warned that the alarming rise of antisemitism in Italian society and the surge in attacks “demands everyone’s attention,” urging both authorities and citizens to take immediate action to protect the community.
During the press conference in Rome, Ottolenghi also praised the Italian Senate’s recent approval of a bill aimed at combating antisemitism, calling it a crucial step for the community and emphasizing the need for continued legislative and societal efforts to combat hatred and protect Jewish life.
“It’s an important law, and we welcome its approval, as we believe it addresses a genuine and pressing need,” she said.
The legislation, which adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, also lays the groundwork for a national strategy against antisemitism, according to the European Jewish Congress. The three-year plan will focus on improving the monitoring of antisemitic incidents, strengthening security for Jewish communities, and promoting educational initiatives in schools.
The strategy further calls for training programs for public officials, the military, and law enforcement, and includes measures both to counter antisemitic hate speech online and to promote awareness of Jewish history and culture.
“Antisemitism is not a concern solely for Jews. It is a structural poison in our society, a direct threat to democratic principles and civil coexistence,” Ottolenghi continued. “The Senate’s consensus — though not as broad as hoped — sends a strong and unequivocal signal: combating anti-Jewish hatred is a shared national priority.”
Addressing growing regional tensions in the Middle East and the war against Iran, Ottolenghi described the situation as “worrying and fraught with unpredictable consequences that we all fear.”
Like most countries across the Western world, Italy has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Across the country, Jewish individuals have been facing a surge in hostility and targeted attacks, including vandalism of murals and businesses, as well as physical assaults. Community leaders have warned that such incidents become more frequent amid tensions related to the war in Gaza.
In November, a pro-Palestinian individual brutally attacked a group of Orthodox Jewish American tourists at Milan’s Central Station, allegedly chasing one of the victims, punching and kicking him, and striking him in the head with a blunt metal ring.
During the attack, the assailant reportedly shouted antisemitic insults and threats, including “dirty Jews” and “you kill children in Palestine, and I’ll kill you.”
In September, a Jewish couple was walking through Venice in traditional Orthodox clothing when three assailants confronted them, shouted “Free Palestine,” and physically attacked them, slapping both.
This incident followed another attack on a Jewish couple in Venice the month before, when a man and his pregnant wife were harassed near the city center by three unknown individuals.
The attackers approached the couple, shouting antisemitic insults and calling the husband a “dirty Jew,” while physically assaulting them by throwing water and spitting on them.
One of the assailants later set his dog on the couple in an attempt to intimidate them before the group stole their phones.
Last month, the Milan-based CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) confirmed that antisemitic incidents in Italy almost reached four digits for the first time last year, spiking to record levels.
Of 1,492 reports submitted through official monitoring channels, the CDEC formally classified a record high 963 cases as antisemitic, according to the European Jewish Congress and UCEI.
By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022.
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One Arrested in Norway Following Car Chase Near Trondheim Synagogue
An armed police officer guards the main entrance to the Norwegian parliament in Oslo, Norway April 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Gwladys Fouche
Norwegian police have arrested one person following an armed operation after a high-speed car chase near the Trondheim synagogue on Thursday evening, in an incident that sparked fear and emergency responses across the area.
Local authorities in Trondheim, a city in central Norway, say the exact circumstances of the incident remain unclear.
According to police reports, the incident began when officers tried to stop a vehicle near the city’s synagogue, but a passenger suddenly jumped out and fled on foot carrying what may have been a bag, while the stolen car sped away.
As the driver fled, a half-hour police chase unfolded, ending near Svorkmo, a village in central Norway, where officers used a spike strip to force the vehicle to stop.
Local media reported that the driver was taken into custody, though authorities have not released further details.
Police continue to search for a second suspect, maintaining a heavy presence around the synagogue with drones, while officers have reportedly been seen wearing bulletproof vests and carrying rifles and protective shields.
As of now, police have started lifting the cordons and scaling back security around the synagogue, which had been secured earlier ahead of a scheduled event.
Officials have confirmed that there is no immediate threat to the public in central Trondheim.
“Everything indicates that no connection can be made between the threat against the synagogue and this incident,” incident commander Karl Småland said.
This latest development comes amid an increasingly hostile climate for Jews and Israelis in Europe, with several Jewish institutions facing targeted attacks as regional tensions in the Middle East escalate and the war with Iran intensifies.
In Norway, police had stepped up security around synagogues and Jewish institutions following the March 8 attack on the US embassy in Oslo.
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Trump Endorses Congressional Candidate Who Made Light of Holocaust, Nazis
Brandon Herrera, a Republican congressional candidate in Texas endorsed by US President Donald Trump. Photo: Screenshot
US President Donald Trump has endorsed Republican congressional candidate Brandon Herrera in Texas, a move drawing renewed attention to controversial past videos in which the firearms influencer discussed owning Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic manifesto Mein Kampf and participated in satirical skits referencing Nazi imagery.
Trump announced his support for Herrera as the Republican nominee in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, praising him as an “America First” candidate aligned with conservative priorities such as gun rights and border security.
The endorsement comes as Herrera, a 30-year-old firearms manufacturer and YouTube personality known online as “The AK Guy,” faces criticism over resurfaced clips circulated by a Democratic super PAC. In one podcast segment, Herrera said he owned a 1939 English-language edition of Mein Kampf, remarking that he found it surprising that the book was difficult to purchase online while works like The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital were readily available.
“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said in the clip, which has circulated widely on social media.
“I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you can buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital,”he continued.
Other videos highlighted by critics show Herrera and collaborators parodying scenes from the film Inglourious Basterds, making Holocaust-related puns while shooting firearms, and marching to the German song “Erika,” which dates to the Nazi era.
Herrera has rejected accusations that the material reflects sympathy for Nazi ideology. In public comments responding to the backlash, he said the clips were intended as satire mocking Nazis and argued that critics were taking jokes out of context.
The controversy comes at a particularly sensitive time for Jewish communities and supporters of Israel, as antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust distortion remain persistent concerns. Jewish organizations have long warned that casual or comedic references to Nazi symbolism risk trivializing the genocidal ideology responsible for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
Herrera became the presumptive Republican nominee for the border district after incumbent Rep. Tony Gonzales withdrew from the race amid an ethics investigation into allegations that he had a relationship with a staffer who later died by suicide. Gonzales previously repudiated Herrera as a “known neo-Nazi.”
Texas’s 23rd District stretches hundreds of miles along the US–Mexico border and has historically been competitive, though Republicans have held the seat in recent years. Herrera is expected to face Democratic nominee Katy Padilla Stout in the general election this fall. Controversies surrounding Herrera’s past comments have rendered him vulnerable in the district, according to polls. A Democratic PPP poll revealed that 58 percent of respondents indicated concern over Herrera’s ownership of Mein Kampf. The survey results also show Herrera maintaining a narrow lead, 42 percent to 40 percent, over his presumptive opponent.
Trump’s endorsement ensures the race will draw national attention, while the controversy surrounding Herrera’s past content is likely to remain a focal point in the campaign, particularly as Jewish leaders and pro-Israel advocates have criticized rising antisemitism within the Republican Party.