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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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6 Jewish takeaways from the midterm elections
(JTA) — The sheer size and geographic scope of the Republican wipeout Tuesday makes it hard to read anything definitive into the results beyond a nationwide repudiation of President Donald Trump (and his candidate selections). But whether or not any other factors were at play in the GOP bloodbath, the fallout will have a range of reverberations. Here are 6 takeaways that point to what comes next.
1. A significantly weakened Donald Trump doesn’t bode well for Netanyahu
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has been a longshot bet that keeps on paying off. It’s hard to overstate how significant Trump’s improbable wins in 2016 and 2024 were in bolstering Netanyahu’s domestic standing and giving him space to advance his regional agenda. Trump also served as a security blanket, leaving Netanyahu and his allies with a sense for many years that they need not worry too much about skyrocketing Democratic and international anger with Israel.
In fact, there was even a hope in Bibi world that The Donald’s support could save Netanyahu from political defeat at home (and, to be fair, his 11th-hour endorsement may have). Whether Netanyahu holds on or chief rival Gadi Eisenkot succeeds in replacing him, Israel is entering uncharted territory. There is little chance that the combination of a weakened Trump and an emboldened Democratic Congress produces similar levels of support for aggressive action against Iran and its proxies, and other policies that a wide spectrum of Israelis see as crucial to their security.
2. Jeffries and Schumer have a massive headache coming their way
With Tuesday night’s Democratic wave, Hakeem Jeffries is on track to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Chuck Schumer will likely get a second shot as U.S. Senate Majority Leader. These New Yorkers have longstanding ties to the pro-Israel community and are among their party’s strongest Israel supporters – putting them at odds with the growing number of congressional Democrats who want their party to take a much harder line against Israel. It won’t be long before members in each caucus are demanding concrete action, including meaningful limits on U.S. military sales.
Both Democratic leaders have ratcheted up their criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government in the wake of its war on Hamas in Gaza, but they have ultimately voted against various legislative attempts to punish Israel. This past April, Schumer was one of only seven Senate Democrats to vote against a pair of resolutions that together would have blocked the sale of D-9 bulldozers, widely used in military operations, and 1,000-pound bombs to Israel. In July, Jeffries voted against ending U.S. military aid to Israel, but the measure was supported by almost half of the Democratic caucus. As leaders of their respective chambers, Jeffries and Schumer will likely face immense pressure for more such votes and face much tougher scrutiny from the party base over continued support for Israel.
3. The impact of the anti-Israel vote was diluted
On the other hand, the massive Democratic victory dilutes the power of the anti-Israel lawmakers in Congress. Their numbers will grow, causing problems for party leaders trying to keep anti-Israel measures off the agenda. But they will remain a relatively small subset within a much larger Democratic majority that includes many moderates and Israel supporters.
Not only will anti-Israel members have less ability to hold Congress hostage, the overall issue of Israel loses some of its potency when the broader political winds indicate that all Democrats were boosted.
4. John Fetterman just lost his juice
Just as the sizable Democratic House majority makes Jeffries less dependent on anti-Israel lawmakers in his caucus, the next Senate Majority Leader won’t need to rely on Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. For years, Fetterman has been driving fellow Democrats crazy with his cozying up to Republicans, with progressives especially upset over his die-hard support for Israel. Fetterman has even said that the one thing that could cause him to leave the Democratic Senate caucus would be his party turning decisively against Israel.
Had things broken differently, with Democrats grabbing a narrow 51-49 majority in the chamber, Fetterman’s influence would have been hypercharged. Now, not so much. The Democrats no longer need him to keep control of the chamber. So Schumer, should he regain the majority leader role, will have to worry much less about keeping the party’s top pro-Israel cheerleader happy. In 2028, he’ll be up for reelection and highly unlikely to survive the Democratic primary.
5. AIPAC has not found a formula for success
A few years back, the leading pro-Israel lobby decided the best way to counter the initial anti-Israel rumblings in Congress was to jump deep into the campaign fundraising business. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, the number of Israel critics in Congress – especially on the Democratic side of the aisle – has grown, with a fresh batch on the way. Moreover, in many races, anti-Israel candidates and AIPAC critics managed to turn the lobby’s backing into a liability.
Meanwhile, Trump’s seemingly impromptu announcement Tuesday that his administration would end aid to Israel after this year suggests that Republican backing for such support is dropping alongside Democrats’. And Tuesday’s results suggest AIPAC’s strong support for the U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran is out of step with the American public and many incoming lawmakers.
All of this indicates that AIPAC has yet to figure out how to manage the anti-Israel turn sweeping through American politics.
6. It was a great night for Jewish presidential hopefuls
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff says he isn’t running for president in 2028. But that won’t stop the speculation from skyrocketing after his impressive reelection in Georgia – Georgia?! – with nearly 60% of the vote. More importantly, he probably just grabbed frontrunner status in the race to become America’s first Jewish president. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also registered a similarly sized reelection victory in a state that Trump won just two years ago, but Ossoff – a fierce Trump antagonist and, increasingly, a critic of Israel’s military actions – cemented his rock star status among Democrats this cycle and has demonstrated an ability to bridge the gap between younger progressives and more traditional liberals.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also cruised to reelection. Meanwhile in Michigan, moderate Elissa Slotkin – another senator and likely presidential hopeful (of course, which senator isn’t a presidential hopeful?) – may have at least propped open the door to some progressive support by campaigning hard for Abdul El-Sayed. All four have been highly critical of Netanyahu, with both Ossoff and Slotkin joining most of their fellow Democratic senators in voting in April for a curb on various weapons sales. Both senators have declined to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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El-Sayed declares victory in Michigan Senate race that left many Jews uneasy
(JTA) — DETROIT – Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has declared victory in the hotly contested race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, capping a campaign that has prompted deep anxieties among Jews in the state and beyond.
With 88% of the ballots counted at around 2:27 a.m. ET, The Associated Press called the race for El-Sayed, who had 52% of the vote compared with 46% for his Republican rival, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.”
In his acceptance speech, El-Sayed thanked supporters whom he said had welcomed him into “your homes, your churches, your synagogues.”
He also referenced his ardently pro-Palestinian views, saying, “They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers without being martyred by our tax dollars… We don’t want our money to be sent to do apartheid or genocidal war.”
During his victory speech, chants of “Free Palestine” were heard throughout the crowd. Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University activist who was detained by the Trump administration, was in attendance.
The race had been viewed as crucial to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the chamber. But for many of Michigan’s estimated 105,000 Jewish voters, the campaign was defined instead by El-Sayed’s tumultuous relationship to the community.
That animosity extended beyond the Democrat’s fierce criticism of Israel to encompass his statements about attacks targeting the state’s Jewish community and his early campaigning with streamer Hasan Piker, who has made several controversial comments about Jewish voters.
His uncompromising stances on Israel have also made him a target among pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, which has spent heavily against him in both the primary and general election. AIPAC’s rare entry into a general election race was in support of Rogers.
One of El-Sayed’s positions on Israel — to end all U.S. military aid — was once thought a far-left pipe dream. But that has changed. On Election Day morning, Trump announced that, under his watch, nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel would wind down by the end of the year. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in agreement with the need to end aid and deny Democratic critics a point of attack.
El-Sayed’s campaign has galvanized young voters and a range of other constituencies, and he pulled ahead in the polls in the race’s final stretch. But his questioning of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and whether it or Iran posed a greater threat to the United States, as well as his prior associations with figures such as Hasan Piker, the streamer who has spread extreme rhetoric about American Jews, have sparked concern among Jewish Michiganders.
So, too, did comments the candidate made following the March terror attack on Temple Israel, a major synagogue in the state, in which El-Sayed appeared to link the attack to Israel’s war in Lebanon after reports that the attacker lost family in an Israeli strike. Hostile behavior from some of El-Sayed’s supporters toward pro-Israel Democrats, most prominently on display at the state party’s spring convention, has also alarmed Jews. El-Sayed has pledged to stand up to antisemitism.
Some Jews who had long considered themselves Democrats, including several local Jewish leaders, have cited such controversies in pledging to vote for Rogers. In some Michigan Jewish neighborhoods, yard signs proclaim that a vote for Rogers is a vote “against antisemitism.”
The post El-Sayed declares victory in Michigan Senate race that left many Jews uneasy appeared first on The Forward.
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Moskowitz wins Florida seat in race between two pro-Israel candidates
(JTA) — Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz beat Republican Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton, in a battle between two staunchly pro-Israel politicians in a redrawn district.
The redrawn district covers a stretch of Florida shoreline north of Miami and includes large Jewish communities in areas including Boca and Fort Lauderdale, and is seen as leaning slightly Democratic.
Moskowitz, who was endorsed by the lobbying group AIPAC, has touted himself as “the most pro-Israel Jewish Democrat in Congress.” Singer, meanwhile, was endorsed by President Donald Trump and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Moskowitz has said there is an “ostracizing” associated with being staunchly pro-Israel in a Democratic Party that is increasingly including anti-Zionist voices. Singer seized on that sentiment, saying during a synagogue candidates’ forum that Moskowitz will be drowned out by the Democrats’ anti-Israel wing if he is reelected.
The candidates themselves have largely been aligned on the issue of Israel. Both have condemned accusations that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. They each oppose any effort to condition or cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. Both supported Israel’s strikes on Iranian facilities in 2025, though Moskowitz has since called for the U.S. to end its war with Iran, whereas Singer said during a forum that the U.S. needs “to ensure victory here.”
Both candidates have also emphasized combating antisemitism in their campaigns, and say they would push to expand the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to increase funding for security at Jewish schools, synagogues and other institutions. They also are both in favor of codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into federal law; critics say the definition wrongly lumps in some criticism of Israel.
In a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, Moskowitz pulled from the story of his family, some of whom — including his great-grandparents — were killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” Moskowitz said in the ad.
The post Moskowitz wins Florida seat in race between two pro-Israel candidates appeared first on The Forward.
