Founded in 1860, the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) did everything in its power to come to the aid of Jewish communities under attack around the world. The Alliance was created in particular in reaction to the ritual-murder accusations of which the Jews of Damascus were victims, and was active in the humanitarian assistance provided to Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. To achieve its ends, the AIU worked in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris and with its diplomatic missions abroad. Its educational network, spread across the entire Mediterranean basin and throughout Europe, allowed it to maintain contacts with the various political powers that might limit the suffering and injustices of which Jews were victims abroad.1
This tradition of rescue action continued into the twentieth century, with the failure we all know of at the end of the 1930s and during the Second World War.
Later, and in a different context, it was the fate of Soviet Jews that concentrated the energy and attention of numerous Jewish organizations in Europe and the United States. The diaspora, powerless during the trials surrounding the “Doctors’ plot” — made public in January 1953, in which doctors, almost all of them Jewish, were accused of having sought to poison Kremlin leaders2 — was very active in the 1970s and 1980s on behalf of the Refuseniks, the Russian Jews barred from emigrating to Israel and persecuted by Moscow. The Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, the CRIF, organized many public demonstrations during this period in order to obtain from Western capitals pressure on the Soviet Union to cease its persecutions of the Jews and to allow the “Prisoners of Zion” (whose central figure was Anatoly Sharansky) to leave freely for Israel. It is, moreover, no accident that French President François Mitterrand decided, in June 1984, to include Théo Klein in the delegation he led on his official trip to Moscow. The aim there was to show his Russian interlocutors the importance the question of the refuseniks held for France.3
From the Jewish community of Damascus to the Jews of the USSR, a single guiding thread directs the diplomacy of the Jewish organizations, the CRIF as well as the AIU: the protection of the Jews.
The aim of this article is to analyze the role of the CRIF in the affair of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. This episode is specific in that it does not concern the physical integrity or the rights of living persons. In 1985, there were barely a few thousand Jews in Poland, and it was not their fate that mobilized the CRIF. Through the negotiations to obtain the evacuation of the Catholic place of worship from the death camp, the CRIF inaugurated a diplomacy of memory, unique of its kind, whose goal was to safeguard the neutrality of the Auschwitz extermination camp, a central site in the memory of the Shoah. The location of this site outside France, in a country belonging to the Soviet bloc, only reinforced the specificity of the event. Finally, this episode was heavy with consequences for Jewish-Catholic relations and for the affirmation of the CRIF as an actor in international affairs.
The CRIF at the start of the 1980s
Today an important actor in French society, the CRIF at the beginning of the 1980s was only just emerging from anonymity. Created clandestinely in the winter of 1943-1944, the CRIF was then the Conseil Représentatif des Israélites de France.4 It was the fruit of the union of the Consistory and of the various immigrant Jewish groups: the Zionists of the Fédération des sociétés juives de France, the Communists of the Union juive pour la résistance et l’entraide, and the Socialists of the Bund.5
This gathering, which changed its name as early as 1944 to Conseil représentatif des Juifs de France, had a fragile and chaotic existence throughout its first years.
In the 1950s, it mirrored French Jewry: very discreet and concerned with the reconstruction and full reintegration of Jews into French society. Without resources or influence, it was an almost inaudible actor when, in May and June 1967, the Jews of France publicly demonstrated, as Jews, their attachment to the State of Israel. It was only with its refounding, under the presidency of Ady Steg from 1970 to 1974, that the CRIF gained influence and a hearing, both within the organized Jewish community and with the public authorities. In 1972 it took on its current name, the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France. The adoption of a charter in 1977, which defined the broad lines of its policy — support for Israel, the fight against antisemitism, the defense of human rights, and engagement with the public authorities in order to encourage a “more balanced” French foreign policy in the Middle East — gave it greater visibility. A modification of its statutes in 1982 freed it from the tutelage of the Consistory. The President of the CRIF gained legitimacy because he was now elected by the General Assembly composed of representatives of the member associations. It was thus that the Franco-Israeli lawyer Théo Klein took the helm of this institution from 1983 on.
Poland and the Jews after 1945
More than six million Poles died between 1939 and 1945, among them three million Jews. Decimated by 90 percent, the Polish Jewish community was now no more than a shadow of itself: “of the 3,250,000 Jews who in 1939 had constituted the most numerous and most dynamic Jewish community of the Ashkenazi world, barely 35,000 to 80,000, depending on the estimates, survived the ghettos and the camps, and 154,000 were repatriated from the USSR where they had taken refuge or found themselves displaced.”6 Most of the survivors emigrated to Israel and the United States, while antisemitic violence continued once the war was over, as the pogroms attest — such as that of Kraków in August 1945 and that of Kielce, perpetrated in July 1946.
Without detailing the various phases of Communist Poland from 1945 on, state antisemitism harshly affected the few thousand Jews still present in the country. In 1949, the Jewish political parties and the Zionist organizations were banned. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jews often bore the brunt of internal power struggles in which each clan attempted to instrumentalize antisemitism to its own advantage.
Like the other countries of the socialist bloc, with the exception of Romania, Poland broke off its diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 following the Six-Day War. Press campaigns presented as struggles against “Zionism,” “imperialism,” and “cosmopolitanism” were violently antisemitic and drove a portion of the few thousand Jews still present on Polish soil to leave for Western Europe, the United States, or Israel. The repression of the political movement of the spring of 1968 marked the apotheosis of this state antisemitism. The near-absence of Jews in Poland in no way prevented the persistence of deep antisemitic sentiments. It is “antisemitism without Jews” that the sociologist Michel Wieviorka observed during a field study in 1983.7
The specifically Polish political situation: relations between the regime and the Catholic Church
When the affair broke out, Poland’s political situation was that of an authoritarian political regime forced to confront a growing internal democratic challenge. Since the autumn of 1980, the opposition of the trade-union movement Solidarność (Solidarity), led by Lech Wałęsa, had been standing up to the power in place in Warsaw. The Church was one of Solidarność’s supports.
The Church, as a force of opposition to the regime, also had its own interests and political agenda. As the affair shows, Auschwitz, as a powerful symbolic site, could increase the visibility of the Church and bear witness to its power in maintaining a national consciousness very closely tied to Catholicism. Two pitfalls must, however, be avoided in the political analysis of the Auschwitz Carmel affair. It would be misleading to attempt to analyze the affair solely through the lens of the condition of the Jews in the Soviet countries, given the weakness of the Jewish presence in Poland. Moreover, the Polish Catholic Church had always enjoyed an autonomy that did not make its action dependent on each political development in Warsaw. The Church was never banned under the Communist regime, unlike the situation in the other people’s republics. The Auschwitz Carmel affair is above all a Jewish-Catholic event in which the Polish government is almost entirely absent.
The state of Jewish-Christian relations
On paper, Jewish-Christian relations had in theory been pacified since the Second Vatican Council, initiated by John XXIII in 1962 and concluded in 1965 under Paul VI. It was more particularly with the adoption of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Church and the Non-Christian Religions, in December 1965, that the Catholic Church profoundly changed its discourse with regard to the Jews. In this text published in 1965, the Catholic Church denounced the old doctrine accusing the Jewish people of yesterday and today of being responsible for the death of Jesus. The Jewish people was therefore no longer regarded as deicidal. Antisemitism no longer had any theological explanation validated by the Catholic authorities. The Jewish religion was no longer presented as inferior to Catholicism, which recognized in this declaration “elements of truth” in the other monotheistic faiths. Even so, relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews remained marked by mistrust. The Vatican’s silence on the Second World War weighed heavily on the timid attempts at Jewish-Christian dialogue.
Auschwitz in Polish memory and the attempts to Christianize the Shoah
Polish memory exercised, until well into the 1980s, a complete hegemony at Auschwitz and at the other camps located in the country. Jews were almost never mentioned in the war memorials or during the commemorations linked to the Second World War. Although 90 percent of the victims in the Auschwitz camp were Jewish, no mention was made of this specificity in the museum installed by the Communist authorities.8
It is important to specify that, while the official discourse of Communist Poland concealed the specificity of the fate of the Jews, subsumed under “Polish martyrdom,” certain literary works and articles in the 1980s did address Polish responsibility in the massacre of their Jewish fellow citizens.9
The installation of a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz in 1984 was not an isolated initiative: other buildings had been taken over by the Church. In 1983, when Monsignor Glemp was named cardinal, the former SS Kommandantur of Birkenau was transformed into a church. While the Carmel affair was the most significant, the attempts by Polish Catholicism to appropriate the memory of the Shoah were numerous. This memorial appropriation was also the reflection of a certain form of division of labor between the Communist political authorities and the Church: to the regime, the struggle against Nazism within the framework of anti-fascism; to the Church, the martyrology. In both cases, all the initiatives linked to the Second World War aimed at erasing any Jewish specificity.
The sisters said they were settling in order to “bring God back to Auschwitz” and to pray for the souls of the “victims and executioners.”10
While the Western world discovered the installation of the convent of Discalced Carmelites at the end of 1985, it was in January 1983 that the decision was taken to found a convent at Auschwitz. The first sisters moved in during the year 1984.
The first reactions
The first information concerning the installation of a Carmelite convent and of sisters on the grounds of the camp appeared in the Belgian press at the end of 1985.11 In a communiqué dated 5 December of that same year, Father Bernard Dupuy, secretary of the Episcopal Commission for relations with Judaism, declared that this information was “at first sight profoundly disconcerting,” and added: “we are conscious of the inadequacy of moral reflection on the Shoah. We have an imperative obligation to set ourselves to this task. We call on Christians to take the measure of the debate that ought to be opened, which makes still more urgent the relationship, at the deepest level, with the Jews.” The next day, Cardinal Decourtray, archbishop of Lyon, on the airwaves of Radio-France, warned against an attack on the “dignity of the [Jewish] martyrs” and “hoped that these rumors were not founded.”12
On 6 March 1986, the president of the Consistory, Jean-Paul Elkann, published a first communiqué denouncing the installation of the Carmelites. A few days later, the press reported that Pope John Paul II planned to visit, on 13 April, the synagogue of Rome. This visit was a first. Previously, no Pope had ever gone to a synagogue. The Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France seized the occasion of this announcement and published a short and unambiguous communiqué:
“The French Jewish community firmly expresses the hope that, on the occasion of a visit he wishes to be historic to the synagogue of Rome on 13 April, the Pope will indicate that it is fitting to renounce the opening of a convent at Auschwitz.”13
On the side of the Polish political authorities and of the Church of Poland, the positions seemed particularly intransigent. On 8 April, a spokesman for the Polish government made the following declaration:
“The authorities do not intend to involve themselves in a dispute between two religious communities… the authorities had no reason to refuse the Church the right to create a convent in the vicinity of the camp enclosure.”
The Polish Church seemed no more inclined to negotiate or disposed to reconsider the installation that was causing scandal, and on 17 April 1986, Cardinal Glemp, visiting Paris, asserted that “the antisemitism of Poland is a myth” and refused to consider the relocation of the sisters and of the convent.
For all the Jewish associations the world over, the presence of a Catholic convent at Auschwitz was experienced as a deliberate attempt at annexation, at appropriation by Catholics of the symbolism of Auschwitz.14 Jews around the world saw in it a will to erase the memory of the Shoah, to obscure the fact that Auschwitz had been the site of the extermination of the Jews. The will of the Jewish communities is captured in the formula pronounced by Ady Steg during a speech on 17 April 1986 at the Memorial to the Jewish Martyr: on the grounds of Auschwitz there must be “neither synagogue, nor church, nor temple, nor convent — only silence.”
On the side of the French religious authorities, the unease was palpable. Beyond the condemnation of the provocative attitude of the Polish sisters, the various French ecclesiastical figures, in particular Jean-Marie Lustiger and Albert Decourtray, wished to seize this occasion to initiate a Jewish-Christian dialogue that would make it possible to consolidate, in fact, the will toward rapprochement begun after Vatican II.
The negotiations
At the end of April 1986, the president of the CRIF, Théo Klein, met with Jean-Marie Lustiger, cardinal of Paris. The latter gave him to understand that the presence of the Carmelites posed a real problem for the Church of France and that it would be good to find a negotiated solution to this question. Théo Klein declared himself in favor of direct negotiations between two delegations. After preliminary contacts with his Polish counterparts, Jean-Marie Lustiger obtained their agreement. It was decided to hold negotiations, far from the media, in Switzerland, a country known for its long diplomatic tradition and whose neutrality was supposed to ensure the serenity of the discussions. Thanks to the goodwill of a Swiss federal councillor for foreign affairs, Pierre Aubert, the Swiss government also committed to providing a security service whose mission was to ensure the discretion and protection of these out-of-the-ordinary meetings.
And so, a few weeks later, the two delegations came face to face. The Catholic delegation brought together Frenchmen, Poles, and one Belgian. It was composed of Father Albert Decourtray, archbishop of Lyon; Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris; Godfried Danneels, archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, primate of Belgium; on the Polish side were the archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, Father Stanisław Musiał, and Jerzy Turowicz. The European Jewish delegation was led by Théo Klein, the president of the CRIF. He was accompanied by the Chief Rabbi of France René Samuel Sirat, by Ady Steg, then president of the Alliance israélite universelle, by Markus Pardes, president of the CCOJB (Comité de coordination des organisations juives de Belgique), and by Tullia Zevi, president of the UCJI (the Union of Italian Jewish Communities). The composition of the Jewish delegation was a skillful balancing act responding to several political imperatives. Ady Steg, of the AIU, was present as much because of his long friendship with Théo Klein as to show the organized French Jewish community that the president of the CRIF wished to associate other Jewish institutions, in particular those with a long tradition of diplomatic negotiations such as the Alliance. The Chief Rabbi of France was invited because, although the CRIF preferred to keep the discussions at the political level and not to enter into theological quarrels (Théo Klein defined his role in these negotiations as that of “a small contractor”15 charged with settling a dispute between two parties and not a problem of a theological order), the presence of the central figure of French religious Judaism was crucial in the face-to-face with the cardinals. Finally, it was a clever way of countering the numerous criticisms emanating from the Consistory. The participation of the representatives of the Jewish communities of Belgium and Italy was explained by reasons connected to the specificities of the affair. Since the Belgian press had been the first to reveal the presence of the sisters on the site, the Jewish community of Belgium was particularly involved. It was therefore natural to have Markus Pardes take part in the negotiations. Because of the role of the Vatican in certain stages of the negotiation, the CRIF also considered it necessary to associate the Italian Jewish communities.
Théo Klein knew that his autocratic manner and the composition of his delegation had not won unanimous approval: “No Poles, no former deportees, none of the families of thought from the galaxy of European Jews. I take responsibility for that; we had to move forward and not lose ourselves in endless quarrels.”16
How was it decided that the CRIF, through the person of Théo Klein, would lead the negotiations? “I instituted myself head of the delegation,” he recalls. “It was a gamble I took. If I had waited to have everyone’s opinion, we would never have done anything. At bottom, no one believed in the possibility of a genuine dialogue with the Catholics. Neither the American Jewish organizations nor the Israeli officials.” This seems to confirm the image of a CRIF whose functioning is very far from democratic.
Returning to the doubts and criticisms of various parties, the former president of the CRIF takes pleasure in explaining why this affair required a radically different approach: “I thought it was necessary to go beyond a simple attitude of protest and to break with a certain ghetto tradition, not to content ourselves with castigating the attitude of the Church only, in the end, to submit, grumbling, to what we consider to be its bad manners (…) What mattered in this case was to deal, as partners, with a concrete dispute.”17
The negotiations and the agreements between the two delegations form an absolute first in the long history of relations between Jews and Christians and in the short history of Jewish-Catholic dialogue: the Church, through the voice of the cardinals, agreed to deal as equals with representatives of the Jewish institutions and, above all, prepared to give its word by signing a common agreement.
Geneva I, in July 1986
The first meeting between the two delegations took place on 22 July 1986 on the shores of Lake Geneva. The day of negotiations had been prepared in advance by regular contacts between the two delegations. Two other important developments had certainly facilitated the change in the Polish party’s state of mind. On 14 April, Pope John Paul II went to the great synagogue of Rome, an event historic in itself since it was the first time a Pope had gone to a synagogue. In his speech he spoke of the Jews as his “beloved brothers” and the “elder brothers” of Catholics. While the Jewish communities had expected from him a condemnation of the installation of the sisters at Auschwitz — all the more so since the Holy Father had been, until his election in 1978, the bishop of Kraków — his gesture and his positive words toward Judaism made it possible to gauge his will to strengthen Jewish-Catholic dialogue.
Then, in June, Cardinal Macharski went, at the suggestion of Cardinal Lustiger, to Yad Vashem, the Shoah museum in Jerusalem. He was received there by the curator, himself of Polish origin. According to the accounts reported to Théo Klein, the Polish cardinal was profoundly shaken by his visit to the museum. The presence of the names of many Poles at the foot of the trees of the “forest of the Righteous” was likewise not a matter of indifference to him.
This first day of negotiations led to the declaration of 22 July 1986, called “Zakhor, remember” or “Geneva I.” While this text stipulated nothing precise regarding the immediate future of the sisters present in the camp, it was already considered a victory for the Jewish delegation.
Indeed, it reads:
“To the men and women of our time to those of times to come Zakhor, remember! The isolated sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau are recognized today as the symbolic places of the final solution in the name of which the Nazis carried out the extermination, ‘SHOAH,’ of SIX MILLION JEWS, of whom ONE AND A HALF MILLION CHILDREN, solely because they were Jews. They died in the abandonment and indifference of the world. LET US GATHER IN THE MEMORY OF THE SHOAH AND IN THE SILENCE OF OUR HEARTS.”18
The use of the word Shoah19 marked a turning point in Polish public discourse. It was a further recognition of the specificity of the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War.
While no concrete agreement was obtained at the close of the first meeting, Cardinal Macharski, archbishop of the diocese of Kraków, where the Auschwitz site is located, proposed the interruption of the convent’s works. He declared, “In the current state of the dialogue, nothing will be changed in what currently exists,” and evoked the “provisional character” of the installation of the Carmelite sisters. The process allowing the Jewish delegation to obtain a negotiated evacuation of the convent was set in motion. Yet this positive outcome of the meeting very nearly failed. Indeed, a last-minute event reveals how little enthusiasm the Polish delegation had. Sabine Roitman, in charge of press and communication at the CRIF, recalls:
“as the meeting was ending and the participants were signing the joint declaration, I realized that Cardinal Macharski, the principal figure in this affair, was leaving without having signed. I ran after him as he was getting into his car. I spoke to him in Polish — my parents are from Poland and a large part of my family was murdered during the Shoah — and I managed to get him to sign in extremis. He was furious. You have to understand that he had barely spoken of these negotiations in Poland; that is probably why he had sought to avoid signing.”20
Geneva II, in February 1987
The second session of negotiations between the delegations gave rise to a new declaration, called “Geneva II.” The most important element of this text is the following sentence: “There will therefore be no permanent Catholic place of worship on the territories of the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Everyone may gather there according to his heart, his religion, and his faith.”
This compromise text satisfied both parties. The Polish delegation could assert that it had not capitulated on an important point, the recognition of the specificity of Polish losses during the Second World War, since the text evokes “the Hitlerian tragedy which so harshly struck the peoples of Europe and, particularly, the Polish people.” The Jewish delegation had obtained that there be set down on paper the responses it expected to the two apples of discord: the commitment to a relocation of the sisters from the camp and the assurance that no other place of worship would be installed there in the future; the recognition by the Polish Church of the uniqueness of the extermination of the Jews of Europe and the particular place of the camp. Indeed, the text underscores “that Auschwitz would remain eternally the symbolic site of the Shoah, which proceeded from the Nazi will to destroy the Jewish people in an undertaking unique, unthinkable, and unspeakable.”21
New negotiations then began for the rehousing of the sisters, in a space outside the limits of the extermination camp.
The legitimacy of the CRIF strengthened
This episode was the occasion for the CRIF, through the action of its President, to establish its legitimacy and to mute the challenges emanating from the Consistory, always very reluctant to accept the hegemony of the CRIF in the political domain.
Jean Kahn, Théo Klein’s successor, warmly thanked him once the convent had been completely evacuated in 1993:
“At the moment when the long, painful, and delicate affair of the Auschwitz Carmel finally reaches a happy conclusion, I want to tell you, in the name of the Community, of your colleagues and friends at the CRIF, how grateful we are to you. At the head of a Jewish delegation that included eminent personalities, you worked tirelessly, with infinite patience, much imagination, intelligence, and finesse, alternating, in the face of incessant difficulties, firm positions and the conduct of a seasoned diplomat. The task was hard. A few of us took a modest part in it, but it is in all sincerity that I say to you again that you were the surest architect of a success that will remain in the annals, that will profoundly mark Jewish-Christian dialogue, and that will leave your trace in history.22”
Beyond French borders, the success of these long negotiations and the very high exposure of Théo Klein assured the legitimacy of the CRIF to speak out on questions that did not directly concern political issues linked to the Jews of France alone. The lack of interest displayed in the early days by the American Jewish associations as well as by the Israeli government, who thought that a sustained dialogue with the Catholic religious authorities, and the Polish ones in particular, was a vain illusion, only reinforced the place of the CRIF all the more once the agreements had been signed and applied on the ground.
The diplomatic consequences of an ordeal
The twists and obstacles were numerous before the complete application of the signed agreements and the total evacuation of the Carmelites from the camp during the year 1993. From 1989 to 1993, tensions between different branches of the Polish Church slowed the application of the agreements and raised fears of a pure and simple annulment of the agreements signed in 1986 and 1987. The ambiguous attitude of Pope John Paul II also dragged the affair out, and it was only with the decision of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Religious of 3 April 1993 and the Pope’s letter of 15 April 1993 that the transfer of the sisters could be brought about.
The various resurgences from 1993 to 1998 of a will to Christianize the Auschwitz camp and its memory — such as the affair of the crosses, less resounding but just as significant — were above all the reflection of the struggles for influence within the Polish Church itself and of the new political landscape resulting from the end of the Communist regime. This cannot make us forget the long-term consequences of the conclusion of the Carmel affair on Jewish-Christian relations. As far as France is concerned, the close cooperation, indeed the complicity, that came to be established between members of the Jewish institutions, such as Théo Klein, and the cardinals Jean-Marie Lustiger and Albert Decourtray made possible the development of a solid dialogue between Jews and Christians.23 Without the bridges established during the difficult resolution of the affair, one may wonder whether the French Catholic Church would have had the courage and the assurance necessary to carry out its historical introspection, which made possible the repentance of the bishops. The declaration of repentance made at Drancy on 30 September 1997 was the culmination of the process set in motion with Vatican II and reinforced by the resolution of the delicate Carmel affair.24
Although it is only of the order of hypothesis, the diplomatic consequence of these negotiations is of even greater importance. On 30 December 1993, a document was signed that established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel.25 It took the Holy See nearly fifty years to fully accept the sovereignty of the “former Israel.” Many were those who, in Israel as in the diaspora, saw in the Vatican’s non-recognition of Israel proof that the Church, presenting itself as the “new Israel,” had not renounced the famous thesis of the substitution of Judaism by Christianity.26
It is certain that the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians, in September of the same year, had facilitated the normalization of relations between Jerusalem and the Vatican. This unblocking of the Israeli-Palestinian situation made it possible to attenuate the oppositions, sometimes virulent, of Eastern Christians toward Israel — opposition that is often regarded as a means for them of demonstrating their political loyalty in Arab countries where creeping Islamization makes their situation a little more difficult each day.
Without going beyond the reciprocal misunderstandings, the Vatican’s 1998 declaration condemning the silence of the Church during the Shoah and the visit of John Paul II to Jerusalem in 2000 put an end to the questions about the real intentions of the Catholic Church toward the Jewish people, as the Auschwitz Carmel affair had illustrated. Certain decisions of his successor Benedict XVI raised questions and keen anxieties about his attitude toward the Jews, without the heritage of John Paul II being truly repudiated.
The CRIF, through the Carmel affair, became a transnational actor able to lead diplomatic missions, a role reserved in the past for the Alliance israélite universelle. The 1990s and 2000s confirmed this new aspect of the involvement of the organized Jewish community in international questions. Two eloquent examples illustrated what appears to be a genuine “CRIF diplomacy.”27 The first is the ecumenical trip organized by Jean Kahn, then President of the CRIF, in 1991 to Sarajevo, in the midst of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. The second is the tour of the Near East led by Henri Hajdenberg in the spring of 1999. A CRIF delegation then traveled to Egypt, where it met in particular with the President of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat; to Jordan; to the autonomous Palestinian territories; and to Israel, where it was not received — revealing of the Israeli refusal to see the diaspora take independent political positions on the peace process — by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This internationalization of the role of the CRIF triggered polemics and lively debates on the relevance and legitimacy of such actions, in particular within the French Jewish community. This debate is far from closed.
Notes
Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006.↩︎
On 13 January 1953, Pravda published a communiqué on the arrest of nine doctors, six of them Jewish, accused of conspiring on behalf of “the international bourgeois Jewish nationalist organization JOINT.” Laurent Rucker, Staline, Israël et les Juifs (Stalin, Israel and the Jews), PUF, 2001.↩︎
Jacques Attali, Verbatim I 1981-1986, page 655, Paris, Fayard, 1992.↩︎
On the creation of the CRIF: Fajvel Shrager, Un militant juif (A Jewish Militant), Paris, Éditions Polyglottes, 1979, and Adam Rayski, Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy. Entre soumission et résistance (The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance), Paris, La Découverte, 1993.↩︎
The Bund is the Yiddish acronym of the General Jewish Labour Alliance of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, a Jewish political and trade-union workers’ organization founded in Vilna in 1897 by Vladimir Medem. On the role of the Bund in the creation of the CRIF, see Henri Minczeles, “La résistance du Bund en France pendant l’occupation.” Le Monde juif 51:154 (1995): 138-53.↩︎
Jean Baumgarten, Rachel Ertel, Itzhok Niborski, and Annette Wieviorka, Mille ans de cultures ashkénazes (A Thousand Years of Ashkenazi Cultures), page 570, Paris, Liana Levi, 1994.↩︎
Michel Wieviorka, Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarność (The Jews, Poland and Solidarność), Paris, Denoël, 1984.↩︎
For a history of the camp since 1945, “Éléments pour l’histoire du camp musée d’Auschwitz” (“Elements for a History of the Auschwitz Museum-Camp”), Auschwitz, 60 ans après (Auschwitz, 60 Years On), pages 227 to 263, Annette Wieviorka, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2005.↩︎
Jan Józef Lipski, Dwie Ojczyzny, Dwa Patriotyzmy, 1981; Jan Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, 1987, article translated into French: “Les pauvres polonais regardent le ghetto” (“Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”), Les Temps modernes, no. 516, July 1989. On the evolution of Poland with regard to its Jewish past: Juifs et Polonais, 1939-2008 (Jews and Poles, 1939-2008), edited by Jean-Charles Szurek and Annette Wieviorka, Paris, Albin Michel, 2009; Jean-Yves Potel, La Fin de l’innocence. La Pologne face à son passé juif (The End of Innocence: Poland Facing Its Jewish Past), Paris, Éditions Autrement, 2009.↩︎
Estelle Veru, De l’affaire du carmel d’Auschwitz à celle des croix (1984-1998). Les relations judéo-chrétiennes mises à l’épreuve (From the Auschwitz Carmel Affair to the Affair of the Crosses (1984-1998): Jewish-Christian Relations Put to the Test), Master 2 thesis under the direction of Anne Grynberg, Université de Paris I, June 2007.↩︎
“Un couvent de carmélites dans le dépôt de gaz mortels d’Auschwitz !” (“A Carmelite convent in the lethal-gas depot of Auschwitz!”), Le Soir, 14 November 1985.↩︎
“Carmel d’Auschwitz : les pièces majeures du dossier” (“The Auschwitz Carmel: the Major Documents of the File”), La documentation catholique, Bayard Presse, Paris, 1991.↩︎
Communiqué of 6 April 1986, CRIF archives.↩︎
Estelle Veru, introduction.↩︎
Interview, February 2007.↩︎
Interview, May 2007.↩︎
Théo Klein, L’affaire du carmel d’Auschwitz (The Auschwitz Carmel Affair), page 30, Paris, Jacques Bertoin, 1991.↩︎
Théo Klein’s personal archives.↩︎
The use of the term is recent. It developed in France from the time of the release of the film of the same name by Claude Lanzmann, in 1985.↩︎
Interview, June 2008.↩︎
Declaration of the second Geneva meeting, 22 February 1987.↩︎
Letter from Jean Kahn to Théo Klein, dated 15 July 1993, uncatalogued CRIF archives.↩︎
As witnessed by the posthumous tribute paid to Jean-Marie Lustiger by Théo Klein. See “Aaron-Jean-Marie Lustiger, mon cousin” (“Aaron-Jean-Marie Lustiger, My Cousin”), Théo Klein, in Le Monde of 9 August 2007.↩︎
“L’épiscopat s’attaque aux racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme” (“The Episcopate Confronts the Christian Roots of Antisemitism”), Le Monde, 30 September 1997.↩︎
“La normalisation des relations entre Jérusalem et le Vatican” (“The Normalization of Relations between Jerusalem and the Vatican”), Le Monde, 1 January 1994.↩︎
Henri Tincq, L’étoile et la croix : Jean-Paul II-Israël, l’explication (The Star and the Cross: John Paul II–Israel, the Reckoning), Paris, Lattès, 1994.↩︎
La politique étrangère du CRIF, la communauté juive française : une force diplomatique ? (The Foreign Policy of the CRIF, the French Jewish Community: A Diplomatic Force?), Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac, EHESS thesis, 2007.↩︎