Would You Have Answered, "Amen"?

Ha'aretz reports:

One day Rabbi Rene-Samuel Sirat was invited to attend a lecture on the Holocaust, held in the amphitheater of the Sorbonne University in Paris. The speaker, a member of the Academie Francaise, moved the audience when he spoke of a Jewish girl who missed out on a golden opportunity to escape a concentration camp to remain near her parents. Eventually, she was sent to her death along with them.

"Next to me sat [Roman Catholic] Cardinal Lustiger," the former chief rabbi of France recalled. "I glanced at his face and saw tears running down his cheeks. At that moment I knew he was remembering his mother, who suffered a similar fate at the Auschwitz death camp." [Lustiger was born Jewish.]

On more than one occasion, Sirat met the cardinal entering Paris' main synagogue. "He would come to say kaddish for his mother," he said.…

And then, this:

“I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”…

In 1995, while he was visiting Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau, the Ashkenazic chief rabbi and a concentration camp survivor, said Cardinal Lustiger had “betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods” in the 1940s. The rabbi dismissed the assertion that the cardinal had remained a Jew.

In response, the cardinal said: “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

And, characteristically, this:

He stepped down as archbishop in 2005, but with the pope’s death that year, the cardinal was frequently mentioned as a potential successor.

He countered such speculation with characteristic humor. Asked by a Jewish friend over dinner whether he thought he might become pope, the cardinal responded in French-accented Yiddish, “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

Comments

[Lawrence M. Reisman]

With all the respect due to Rabbi Lau (if not as a rov then as a survivor), I think he's wrong when he "dismissed the assertion that the cardinal had remained a Jew." A Jew, even though he sins, remains a Jew, I believe the Gemorah says. It's not complimentary either; it means that the punishments for failure to observe mitzvos still apply.

However, I think that if he was saying kaddish for his parents, the church would have reason to question his bona fides as a Catholic. Can someone with some expertise in that area weigh in?

[PishPosh]

Wouldnt his current theology state that his mother, along with all the other Jewish victims, suffers perdition for not accepting JC??? Or was it Vatican 2 that pronounced the dual covenant statement and therefore letting his concious of the hook???

[Lawrence M. Reisman]

I'm sure someone is going to bring up the Brother Daniel case. Brother Daniel was a Polish Jew who converted to Catholicsm and became a monk. In the 1950s, he applied for automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return saying he was a Jew of the Christian faith. The Israeli government asked the rabbinate for its opinion, and the rabbinate replied that under halacha, Brother Daniel was a Jew. The government refused to grant him citizenship under the law of return, and he sued in court. The Israeli supreme court turned him down, saying that having converted to Catholicism, he lost the right to claim special status as a member of the Jewish people.

In the wake of the case, the Knesset revised the Law of Return to define a Jew as someone who was either born of a Jewish mother or converted, and who did not practice another religion. When the law used the word "converted" it did not say "according to halacha" leaving open the possibility that those converted by Conservative and Reform rabbis in a manner not in accordance with halacha could be admitted as Jews. The rest, of course, is history. In any case, the Law of Return now reads such that a non-Jew ("convert" not according to halacha) can be admitted as a Jew, while an apostate Jew, who is still halachicly a Jew, cannot. Not that I care.

Oh yes, Brother Daniel eventually became a citizen of Israel under the provisions of the law allowing non-Jews to become citizens (2 years residency, fluency in Hebrew, and allegiance to the idea of Israel as a Jewish state). The way I see it, Israel could abolish the Law of Return and require everyone to under go the same citizenship requirements as non-Jews without too much hardship. If Jews or those thought to be Jews are being persecuted somewhere in the world, the law could provide for immediate residency if necessary to get them into the country. No one would worse off. However, abolishing the Law of Return would go against a caridnal pillar of the Zionist ideology.

[Dr Fred]

People do things that are manifestly wrong, but who knows what the ultimate implications will be? He was a Jew and perhaps his was a tortured and conflicted choice that we cannot relate to.Personally, I focus my judgement to how a person treats others.Another's relationship to God is beyond my ability or right to judge.

[Skeptodox]

From what I have read, the issue of whether someone can so distance themselves from Judaism so as to no longer be Jewish is more complex than we learned in yeshiva day school. It may well be possible halakhically.

[Jim the Catholic]

>However, I think that if he was saying kaddish for his parents, the church would have reason to question his bona fides as a Catholic. Can someone with some expertise in that area weigh in?

I reply: Yes I can. We Catholics & our Eastern Orthodox brethren, like Orthodox Jews, pray for the dead. I am aware of the content of the Kaddish prayer & there's nothing in it that contradicts Catholic teaching. Also, a Catholic can pray for his dead relatives anywhere so it doesn't matter whether he does so in a church or a synagogue. So there's no reason why a Catholic, Jew or Gentile, couldn't say that prayer.

>Wouldnt his current theology state that his mother, along with all the other Jewish victims, suffers perdition for not accepting JC??? Or was it Vatican 2 that pronounced the dual covenant statement and therefore letting his concious of the hook???

I reply: Catholic theology has long taught(even before Vatican II) that there are two types of non-believers. Type A: non-believers by negation who don't know the full truth through no fault of their own & Type B: non-believers by opposition who reject the truth out of sinful malice. Type A can be saved in spite of their material non-belief if they follow whatever extraordinary graces Christ gives them. Type B goes to hell; they're not invincibly ignorant. But Catholics do believe that people who are materially non-Catholic can be saved.

Pius IX said just because God can save non-believers by negation that is not an excuse not to preach the gospel. It has always been a problem with Jewish-Catholic dialogue that liberal Catholics have given Jews the false impression that we can or will change our doctrine that objectively everyone must believe in Jesus and join his Church for salvation. This is not the case. But what we can promise is that we repudiate any & all coerced conversions or obnoxious & triumphalistic missionary work.

As for Jewish Christians being halakhically Jewish, I just thought I'd comment that I once read a book about a Catholic priest becoming an Orthodox Jew(which as you probably guess thrills me about as much as Cardinal Lustiger thrills some of you). From a Catholic perspective, the baptismal character is still on his soul, as is his ordination, so such a man can still be in a certain sense, a Christian & a priest even though he's an "apostate".

[Jim the Catholic]

Oh, one last thing. Pius IX said we Christians can't know who among the non-believers is Type A or B. We are forbidden to try to find out because that's seeking to know that which is known only to God. Pius XII added that even if you could know that someone was Type A you would rob him of spiritual graces by not preaching the gospel to him.

That pretty much is it.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Paris was the only city to have an Sephardi Chief Rabbi, and an Ashkenazi Archbishop.

Lawrence writes: However, abolishing the Law of Return would go against a cardinal pillar of the Zionist ideology.

I thought I was the punster here!

[Lawrence M. Reisman]

Yochanan:

Honestly and truly, the pun was unintended.

[Jim the Catholic]

Awesome pun dude!

[mazeartist]

Lustiger's father worked hard to prevent his son's conversion. Lustiger's annual kaddish for his father and prayers for his mother were nothing more than crocodile tears. He's a worse traitor than Shmarya.

[Jim the Catholic]

G_d in His Wisdom already knows if you are right or wrong.

[yona loriner]

big deal

[Lev]

As I said in a different post that maybe it was Rotzoin HaBoirei that the only sexually moral Frenchman is a Polish Jew...