Churches And The Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans And Reconciliation - Hardcover

Mordecai Paldiel

9780881259087: Churches And The Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans And Reconciliation

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 088125908X ISBN 13: 9780881259087

Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, 2006

Over the centuries, the traditional Christian teaching of contempt held that the Jews deserved to be punished because of their rejection of Jesus and the new religion he founded. This unfortunate doctrine was expounded by virtually all Christian churches Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. The teaching of contempt led to universal discrimination against Jews, to persecutions and outbreaks of violence, and was a major element in the ideological and emotional background against which the World War II Holocaust took place. At the same time, Christians have always been exhorted to help those in distress and to be merciful to the needy and helpless.

For some members of the Christian clergy, the conflict between compassion for helpless victims and the traditional view of the Jews posed a major moral and theological conflict. Many of them, like most other Europeans, said and did nothing. But some forthrightly stood up for the Jews as fellow human beings and helped them despite the extraordinary danger, often resulting in their own imprisonment and execution by the Nazis.

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From Booklist:

In 1953, Yad Vashem was created by the Israeli parliament--the Knesset--as the nation's memorial of the Holocaust. Part of its mission is to designate non-Jews as "Righteous among the Nations," people who had risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Paldiel delves into the world of 300 Christian clerics who have been declared righteous and what motivated them. The author of Paths of the Righteous Gentile and numerous scholarly articles on the Holocaust, he explores both aspects of clerical aid to the Jews during that tragedy. The first is how the Christian tradition shaped the minds of religious leaders with regard to Jews and the position adopted by ecclesiastical officials when faced with Nazi anti-Semitism. The second deals with Good Samaritans--stories of help extended to Jews by clerics of the three major denominations: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Paldiel's copious research brings to readers a searing work of scholarship. George Cohen
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