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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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FIFA Takes No Action Against Israeli West Bank Settlement Soccer Clubs but Fines IFA for ‘Discrimination’
Soccer Football – FIFA Club World Cup – Group D – Esperance de Tunis v Chelsea – Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US – June 24, 2025, General view of the FIFA logo before the match. Photo: REUTERS/Lee Smith
FIFA has rejected formal complaints by the Palestinian soccer federation to suspend its Israeli counterpart but has fined the Israel Football Association (IFA) on disciplinary charges related to “discrimination,” “offensive behavior,” and “violations of fair play,” the international governing body of soccer announced on Thursday.
At the 74th FIFA Congress in Bangkok in May 2024, the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) presented a proposal to sanction Israel’s soccer teams, including its national team, because of what they claimed were international law violations committed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. The proposal also called on FIFA to take action against Israeli soccer clubs that the PFA claimed were based in Palestinian territory, particularly settlements in the West Bank.
The PFA further said that FIFA should address what it claimed was IFA’s failure in taking decisive action against alleged discrimination and racism. The Palestinian fedeation has claimed for years that Israel violates FIFA rules by allowing teams from settlements in the West Bank to play in its national league.
FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee ruled on Thursday that it will not take action against Israeli soccer clubs in West Bank settlements because of the “unresolved” legal status of the West Bank under international law.
“FIFA should take no action given that, in the context of the interpretation of the relevant provisions of the FIFA Statutes, the final legal status of the West Bank remains an unresolved and highly complex matter under public international law,” the committee said in a statement. “FIFA should continue to promote dialogue and offer mediation between the Palestine Football Association and the Israel Football Association at an operational level. In this context, FIFA will continue to facilitate structured engagement and monitor developments.”
However, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee has fined the IFA 150,000 Swiss francs – which is almost $190,000, – for committing “grave and systematic violations of FIFA’s core principles.” The IFA is being sanctioned for “offensive behavior and violations of the principles of fair play” as well as “discrimination and racist abuse.” The fine was issued following FIFA’s investigation into complaints about the IFA’s handling of discrimination and racism in soccer. FIFA said the Israeli association had not taken enough action against repeated racist behavior by supporters of certain Israeli soccer clubs, including Beitar Jerusalem, and offensive and politicized public statements by Israeli soccer officials and clubs.
“The committee finds that IFA’s conduct has created a perception of impunity and selective enforcement, which is incompatible with the principles of fairness and universality that underpin the sport,” the panel announced. “In particular, by failing to condemn or remediate discriminatory practices and exclusionary policies — particularly those affecting Palestinians — the IFA has become institutionally complicit in a system that violates the core values of the game.”
One-third of the fine must be used to implement “a comprehensive plan to ensure action against discrimination and to prevent repeated incidents,” with a focus on certain areas including monitoring and educational campaigns. The IFA must also display a “significant and highly visible banner,” approved by FIFA, that says “Football Unites the World – No to Discrimination” alongside the IFA’s logo at its next three A‑level FIFA competition home matches.
The committee said it “cannot remain indifferent to the broader human context in which football operates,” and that the sport “must remain a platform for peace, dialogue, and mutual respect.”
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Move over Thomas Edison, this deli savant is the Garden State’s newest inventor
First, in 1876, Thomas Edison opened up his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Then, in 1941, Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Labs moved its headquarters to Murray Hill at the northern end of the state.
In 2021, another wide-eyed tinkerer set up shop in Jersey City, though his inventions would be molded out of rye, wheat and cured beef, not aluminum and tungsten.
The maverick’s name is Jason Stahl, a 48-year-old father with a career in publishing. He operates his food business under the name Hank Schwartz’s Delicatessen and Appetizing, cooking out of a ghost kitchen in Jersey City. And he does things with smoked fish that would make your bubbe blush.
Take his “Smoked Salmon Tartare,” for example. He mixes up capers, lemon, dill,and Dijon mustard so their breezy tartness lightens the Baltic smoke of nova. The pink concoction is a revelation, balancing out the fish’s brininess so that a diner would be tempted to eat an entire half-pound of the stuff in one sitting.
I speak from experience. I first tried Stahl’s cooking at Jersey City’s Riverview Farmer’s Market last fall, where he slings mind-bending, Jew-ish sandwiches, tartare, whitefish salad, olives, and various other noshes on a biweekly basis.
On a sunny day at the Farmer’s Market, a steady stream of customers poured in. One customer, a middle-aged man, asked about Stahl’s brisket sandwiches — Stahl had made shredded brisket and mixed it with horseradish mayonnaise to make a pulled meat sandwich, then layered it with caramelized onion jam.
Stahl was sold out. “Curse you,” the customer exclaimed.
From home cook to deli master
At the market, Stahl spoke softly to the people who came to his booth, greeting customers by their first names and chatting with boys about their favorite sports teams. His gentle cadence and warm smile bely what he says is an anxious disposition that his wife, and his cooking, help to temper.
Stahl says that, until recently, he had been more of a weekend warrior than a professional cook. “I’m not going to pretend I have this amazing culinary background, right?” he said. “I came into this more with a passion, and I’m learning.”
Still, he has hovered close to the restaurant world for a while. He has worked in media for decades, sometimes in food-adjacent roles (most recently as Food Editor at 1-800-Flowers.com). Stahl’s wife, Theresa Gambacourt, manages restaurants and writes cookbooks for a living.
Stahl learned to cook in part from studying cookbooks he got for free as a media professional. In his early days out of college, “I was always experimenting,” he recalled. “I messed up a whole bunch.”
Theresa showed him the tricks she picked up in restaurants, like using infused fats to make a confit. He uses that technique in his zaatar olives, which are submerged in a citrus garlic confit that adds a layer of refreshing depth to the Mediterranean staple.
Over time, his cooking became more and more elaborate. His wife asked the chef at Del Posto, a since-closed Italian fine dining stalwart, if Stahl could stage there; the chef agreed, and Stahl spent every Sunday evening for a year learning the ins-and-outs of the kitchen — including how to cure gravlax and slice meat.
Italy figures heavily in Stahl’s modern deli. His chopped liver, for example, is made with chopped capers and braised with red wine (he makes a mushroom version for those who fear chicken parts).
In around 2019, Theresa gave him Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli for his birthday, and the book planted an idea in his head: “What if we did this?” Stahl asked Theresa about the deli business.
What, she replied, would an amateur cook be able to contribute to such an endeavor?
“I can clean,” he recalls replying. “I’m really good at cleaning.”
Several years later, after the COVID-19 pandemic, he started selling pickles at Riggs Company Provisions, a vendor at the farmer’s market, and Riverview Wines, a nearby wine shop. Today, his pickles encompass classic dill pickles brightened with dried mint, spicy pickles spiked with habanero and Aleppo peppers (the latter a nod to Jewish communities in the Middle East), and sour green tomatoes with dill and celery seeds.
In 2023, the farmer’s market invited him to become a vendor, and he’s been selling there ever since. His repertoire has expanded beyond pickles to include such dishes as chopped liver, homemade sodas, and cured meat and fish sandwiches — all tweaked with the flair of a mad scientist.
Hank Schwartz’s gets its name from fictional characters that Stahl and Gambacourt made up years ago: Hank and Margaret Schwartz, two herrings who escape from a deli and go on adventures around New York City. In this imaginary world, Hank and Margaret hang out with their herring friends, like Charlie Goldberg, a bus driver, and the Crances, a bumbling couple.
A gallivanting, social fish is the perfect mascot for a cook whose relationships and wanderlust drive his cooking.
Take, for example, Stahl’s smoked salmon candy. Though readers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest might be familiar with the salty-sweet treat, it has not yet taken off in the Northeast. In the Alaskan version, chunks of salmon are brined in brown sugar and salt before being smoked and glazed. Stahl has added dill to his in the past, and the week I tried it, he had rubbed in pastrami spices. The pink chunks were solid and slightly chewy — like firm gumdrops — and redolent of peppercorns, brown sugar and smoke: the type of addictive candy that the children of hipsters might clamor for in a 21st century deli.
‘This is a true story’
Stahl grew up on Staten Island eating sandwiches at both Jewish and Italian delis.
When I asked him how far a dish can veer from Jewish tradition while still being considered “Jewish,” he compared Hank Schwartz’s to the TV show Fargo, which starts with the line “This is a true story.”
Stahl once interviewed the series’ showrunner, Noah Hawley, who told him that in each episode, a single detail is pulled from a true story — for example, a news article about a dramatic car crash.
“In a way, like, I’m doing the same thing,” Stahl said — one Jewish element anchors each dish on his menu; the rest is up for his own interpretation.
During Super Bowl weekend, when the Seattle Seahawks played the New England Patriots, Stahl came up with a sandwich for each team. “The Seattle” consisted of citrus-cured gravlax (a Scandinavian relative of Jewish lox), scallion cream cheese and pickled cucumbers on pumpernickel with a teriyaki glaze, the latter a nod to Seattle’s Japanese community and its role in popularizing teriyaki sauce. “The New England” was Stahl’s take on a lobster roll — swapping in whitefish for treyf.
Stahl now holds a residency two days a week at the Cliff, a cafe in the same Jersey Heights neighborhood he has been plying with smoked fish and meats for the past few years. The pop-up helps him try out running a brick-and-mortar restaurant while he looks for investors and business partners to help him do just that. Surrounded by exposed brick and artwork, he slaps together irreverent sandwich combinations in front of customers. I tried the Schwartzøbrød, a cousin of the everyman Danish brown bread sandwich. Stahl makes his with a butter infused with lime, lemon and orange zest that glides through the heady flavor of cured salmon.
If there’s one element of the Jewish deli that Stahl seeks to maintain, it’s the deli’s status as a community hub. “In these times that we’re living in, people need more comfort. I feel like a Jewish deli is really needed,” he told me, as is “the warmth of a bowl of matzo ball soup. People just find comfort, they find nostalgia.” He recalled with fondness how the week before, the restaurant buzzed with customers enjoying his food and locked in conversation, rarely looking at their phones.
Stahl’s tight-knit community might be the perfect place for Jewish culinary innovation, for the same reasons that Menlo Park and Murray Hill served Edison and the company of Graham Bell. Proximity to New York affords you rare privileges — ethnic diversity and access to the titans of the Jewish-American deli, in Stahl’s case. But so, too, does distance. The sprawling brick buildings and saltbox houses of Jersey City offer cooks a little more room to breathe and try new things.
“Here, it’s less about the luxury” or “pretentiousness,” Stahl said. “It’s more about the care and the presentation of the food, right? They want to just offer the best dishes possible.”
The post Move over Thomas Edison, this deli savant is the Garden State’s newest inventor appeared first on The Forward.
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Czechs Investigate Fire After Reports of Anti-Israel Group Claiming Responsibility
Police officers and firefighters stand in front of a burned production hall at an industrial area in Pardubice, Czech Republic, March 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/David W Cerny
Czech investigators are probing an overnight fire at an industrial complex as potentially being a deliberate attack, officials said on Friday, following media reports that a group protesting against Israeli weapons claimed responsibility.
Firefighters said on X that they had responded to a fire at a storage hall in a complex in Pardubice, 120 km (75 miles) east of Prague. No one was injured in the fire, which spread to another building.
Czech news website Aktualne.cz reported that a protest group said it had set fire to a “key manufacturing hub” for Israeli weapons in Pardubice to end its role in the “genocide in Gaza.”
Czech defence firm LPP Holding in a statement on its website said it had confirmed that a fire broke out at one of its facilities on Friday and it was cooperating with authorities.
The company, with a location in the complex, announced plans in 2023 to cooperate with Israeli company Elbit Systems on drone production.
“At this time, we will not speculate on the causes or circumstances of the incident and will await the official conclusions of the investigation,” LPP said.
Police initially said they were investigating whether the fire was intentional and checking public claims of a “concrete group,” without naming it.
They later said investigators with security services were probing the incident under a section of the criminal code dealing with terrorism.
“Based on what we know so far, it is likely the incident may be related to a terrorist attack,” Interior Minister Lubomir Metnar said.