Rome's chief rabbi sparked controversy today by boycotting a major Vatican inter-religious event because of the presence of a French Catholic cardinal who had converted from Judaism.
Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni stayed away from a conference in Rome attended by dozens of top world Catholic and Jewish leaders because Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris was among the speakers.
"Rabbi di Segni did not think that the decision to have Lustiger among the panel was opportune," Leone Pasermann, president of Rome's Jewish community, told reporters.
Lustiger was born a Jew but converted to Catholicism when he was a teenager. His mother was killed in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. "That was such a stupid thing for Di Segni to do," Henry Sobel, the chief rabbi of Brazil, told reporters at the event marking the 40th anniversary celebrations of a Second Vatican Council document called "Nostra Aetate" (In Our Time) that revolutionised relations by repudiating the concept of continuing collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ.
"Few people have done more for Catholic-Jewish relations than Cardinal Lustiger," Sobel said. Mark Winer, senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue of British Jews, said he understood why Di Segni may have felt the way he did, but said "boycotting a friend of the Jewish people is not doing the right thing".
In a message sent to the conference, Pope Benedict assured the world's Jews that he and the Vatican were irrevocably committed to good Catholic-Jewish relations and would never forget the Holocaust.