“The Day of Judaism is an expression of concern for the good of the Church”, stresses the chairman of the Polish Episcopate Conference Committee for Dialogue with Judaism, Archbishop Grzegorz Ryś in his message to the faithful before the XXVI Day of Judaism in the Catholic Church in Poland. This year, the Day’s motto is “The Passage of the Lord: Today you are going out”.
The aim of the Day of Judaism in the Catholic Church in Poland is to show the deep ties between Judaism and Christianity and to discover the Judaic roots of Christianity. The Day of Judaism was established by the Polish Bishops’ Conference in 1997.
“Its necessity stems from the growing conviction that without an ever-deepening awareness of the Jewish roots and the ever-present Jewish dimension of the Christian faith, the very identity of Christianity and the Church is lost”, says Archbishop Ryś.
He points out that the Second Vatican Council and the declaration ‘Nostra Aetate’ were a huge change in Catholic-Jewish relations. In his opinion, this document is so important that, summarising it after 50 years, Pope Francis said that as a result of Nostra Aetate we have experienced in the Church an upheaval in relations with the Jewish people and henceforth we no longer think of ourselves as enemies and strangers, but as friends and brothers.
Archbishop Ryś reminds the public that according to the Church’s teaching, the Jews are still the Chosen People, because God did not reject Israel; neither the Jews who lived contemporaneously with Christ nor those of later generations must be held responsible for Christ’s death, and all anti-Semitism must be condemned.
The central celebration of the XXVI Day of Judaism took place on Tuesday in Siedlce. They began at the site where a local synagogue was burnt down by the Germans in 1939. Rabbi Boaz Pash from Jerusalem was a special guest. The events were accompanied by an exhibition of Judaica items from the Diocesan Museum in Siedlce, the Parish Museum in Kock and from private collections.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński