Europe’s Chief Rabbis Condemn Pope’s Call to Probe Israel’s ‘Genocide’
Survivor and leading Christian and Jewish figures rebuke Francis for belittling the Holocaust
Europe’s chief rabbis, a holocaust survivor, a historical expert on the Namibian genocide, and an Anglican archdeacon who also happens to be an attorney are among the many people worldwide condemning Pope Francis’s recent call for an investigation into Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
Some of the high-profile Jewish and Christian figures who have rebuked the pontiff for trivializing the Holocaust and downplaying the term “genocide” are in turn calling for a probe into the Vatican’s own historic complicity with genocidal regimes.
Pope Francis sparked a firestorm after The Associated Press published incendiary excerpts on Sunday from his forthcoming book, Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Toward a Better World, which was released on Tuesday in Italy, Spain, and Latin America.
The book, written for the 2025 Jubilee Year scheduled to begin on Christmas Eve, consists of interviews with Pope Francis by Argentinian journalist Hernán Reyes Alcaide.
“Dangerous Proposition”
On Tuesday, the standing committee of Conference of European Rabbis (CER), which was meeting in Munich, issued a statement blasting Francis’s assertion that the Israel Defense Force’s actions in Gaza “should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition of genocide as formulated by jurists and international bodies.”
The CER, the main umbrella body for more than 900 mainstream synagogues in Europe, said they were “deeply disturbed” by the pontiff’s “support for this dangerous proposition” since it lends “credibility to the insidious narrative propagated by Iran and its proxies through international organizations.”
“Israel is fighting a defensive war against an unprovoked, barbaric enemy, unrestrained by any Western code of law or warfare,” the rabbis asserted.
They noted that the war in Gaza was a “military response” to Hamas’s “indiscriminate murderous rampage” against Israel’s civilians on October 7, 2023 — and that, “unlike Israel, the aggressors absolutely do intend, have attempted, and continue to attempt Genocide.
“The term Genocide is now thrown around as a surreptitious propaganda device, shifting the responsibility from perpetrator to victim, from terrorist organisations unto the State of Israel,” they concluded.
Pope Denigrates the Shoah
On Monday, 93-year-old Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck of Rome rebuked Francis for misusing the term “genocide.” The Hungarian-born Jew who survived incarceration in the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps stressed that despite what Francis says, Israel is not attempting to eliminate the entire Palestinian population.
“This is how he downplays the historical significance of the Shoah,” Bruck told Italian daily La Repubblica. “Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide.”
Rather, committing genocide is “something Hamas wants to do,” she said, noting that Hamas has said it “wants to wipe out all the Jews in the entire world.”
“He came to my house to ask for forgiveness for everything that had happened to the Jews. But it is not enough. He should deal a little more with anti-Semitism,” said Bruck, who is a personal friend of the pontiff. She lamented that the bloodshed in Gaza is a “tragedy that concerns us all.”
Francis “doesn’t feel the weight of the phrase he’s saying. And that’s why he says it too easily,” Bruck added, noting that this carries the risk of diminishing “the gravity of real genocides, using the word when it is not appropriate.”
“Genocides are something else,” Bruck said. “The Armenian genocide was a genocide. The million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz was a genocide, along with the other five million Jews, who also burned in the concentration camps.” But what is taking place in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is “not genocide.”
Vatican Complicity with Genocidal Regimes
Historical novelist and award-winning journalist Mari Serebrov told The Stream that “the pope’s statement not only smacks of ignorance of the history and meaning of the word ‘genocide,’ it also ignores the Vatican’s own long and continuing history of complicity in genocides and its ongoing paternalistic colonialism in developing countries.”
Serebrov, who is an expert on the Herero Nama genocide that took place in modern-day Namibia between 1904 and 1908, lamented the Vatican’s silence or complicity “from centuries of antisemitism to the Herero-Nama genocide to the Armenian Massacre to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide.
Jews Are Targets of Islamist Genocide
The Rev. Job Serebrov, an attorney and archdeacon in the Anglican Church in North America who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background, agreed that Francis’s statement “not only smacks of ignorance of the history and meaning of the word ‘genocide,’ it also risks the destruction of all advances in relations with Jews made by the Vatican.”
“Francis has the matter backwards,” he told The Stream. “It is the Jews of Israel and those around the world have been the targets of genocide. They have been unjustly attacked, murdered, and persecuted by radical Islamists. Logic dictates that Israel and Jews generally have the right to defend themselves from such threats.
“There will be no more repeating the pattern of the Holocaust in the 1940s. Jews will not go silently into gas chambers, to forced labor, as rats for medical experiments, or be classified as non-human,” he said. “Francis not only has it wrong, the Vatican has a long history of complicit behavior with genocides.”
Vatican vs. Jews
On Monday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) slammed the pontiff’s remarks, warning that “Israel is currently facing a war of intended annihilation on seven fronts, and these remarks look like a possible opening of an eighth front, from of all places, the Vatican, which can also lead to the spilling of Jewish blood around the world.”
“For a Pope who appears to prize even-handedness and peace, we see that the Jewish state once again appears to be the exception,” said CAM CEO Sacha Roytman.
“We had hoped after Nostra Aetate in 1965 that the Jewish people would be seen as equal to all others around the world by the Catholic hierarchy, but these claims suggest otherwise, and out of all the conflicts and real genocides around the world, the national homeland of the Jewish people is once again singled out as a target for opprobrium.
“The Catholic Church has a very troubling history of investigations into the conduct of Jews, which were frequently called Inquisitions,” Roytman continued. “It would behoove Pope Francis to choose his words more carefully, because they bring to mind a horrific and bloody history of Catholic religious leaders attacking Jews for the enjoyment of others in public at tribunals and Inquisitions where the Jew would always be found guilty regardless of the facts.”
Last year, CAM leaders met with Vatican representatives in Israel to offer them seminars on antisemitism which were never followed up, a press statement from the organization revealed.
Francis Betrays Vatican II
“Pope Francis has sided with the real genocidal regime in Gaza,” eminent Jewish-Canadian songwriter, poet, and columnist David Solway told The Stream.
“As Pope John XXIII embodied all that is best in the Catholic Church, Francis embodies all that is worst. Many have come to regard him, a liberation theologist of Marxist orientation, as a contemporary anti-Pope, who belongs not in Rome but in Avignon.”
In 1960, Pope John XXIII ordered the removal of the Latin word perfidis, which refers to Jews, from church rituals. And in 1962, he adopted the declaration Nostra aetate, which condemned antisemitism and recognized the shared heritage of Jews and Christians.
Meanwhile, Reyes (the Argentinian journalist) defended Francis in an interview published Wednesday, arguing that the pontiff was only calling for a probe and not making a judgment.
“The Pope isn’t taking a stance on whether genocide is happening or not,” Reyes insisted. “Instead, he’s emphasizing the importance of an investigation.
“He suggests that if there are claims of genocide, a thorough investigation is required to determine whether the conditions for genocide — criteria A, B, C, and D — are met. If these conditions are fulfilled in the current circumstances within that region, it would then require a formal declaration by the international community.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.