The Polish Bishops' Conference describes anti-Jewish rhetoric in Poland as being "contradictory to the principles of Christian love of one's neighbour."

A group of Polish rabbis responded, saying they "deeply appreciate" their condemnation of anti-Semitism.

They have vowed to "continue to speak out against analogous attitudes among Jews".

They were referring to anti-Polish sentiment voiced by Israelis and American Jews recently.

Bad feelings erupted in late January over a new Polish law criminalising anyone who blames Poland for the Nazi Holocaust.

Anyone who "publicly and against the facts attributes to the Polish nation or Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes," or "flagrantly reduces in any way the responsibility of the real perpetrators" may go to jail for up to three years.

Archbishop Wojciech Polak, Poland's Catholic primate, says anti-Semitism is "a moral evil and a sin".

He says attempts to divide people or pit them against each other "in a nationalistic context should be totally censured".

Another Polish archbishop, Stanislaw Gadecki, says hostility belongs "neither to Christian nature nor to the nature of Judaism."

He urged prayers to ensure "the great good achieved by common efforts of Poles and Jews" was not squandered.

"We need a spirit of peace to mitigate these extreme positions and show there's more uniting than dividing us," he said.

The Polish bishops also said St John Paul II had urged Christian nations to "uproot from their mentality all unjust prejudices about Jews and other symptoms of anti-Semitism."

Poland's new law has been condemned as "baseless" by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem Memorial Institute.

The Institute says the law will impede Holocaust research and debate.

Source

• Business Insider
• Crux Now
• Image: Catholic Herald

The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes near the Sea of Galilee was set alight on June 18 and anti-Christian graffiti was daubed on its walls.

A crowd-funding campaign by a group of Orthodox rabbis and Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein raised NZ$20,000 - as at July 27 - for repairs to the church.

"Condemnation is not enough; after a while it loses its credibility," said Elijah Interfaith Institute Director Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, who is spearheading the effort.

"When Jews reach into their pockets to support a cause, one knows they are serious," he said in a Times of Israel report.

The project received the endorsement of 17 leading Orthodox rabbis.

"The church is visited daily by 5000 people, making this act of vandalism the most visible to date in a series of attacks on religious sites of other religions," a statement from the group said.

"The accompanying graffiti appealed to texts from the Jewish prayer book, making it an attack on explicitly religious grounds."

Last week, Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's defence minister, ordered the detention without trial of Mordechai Meyer, 18, for extremist activities believed to include starting the fire at the Galilee church.

He was one of three extremists detained after Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government was prompted to launch an unprecedented offensive against "Jewish terrorism".

This followed an arson attack by suspected hardline settlers in the West Bank village of Duma last Friday that killed a one-year-old Palestinian toddler and gravely injured his parents and brother.

Meanwhile, Catholic Church leaders in Israel filed a complaint for incitement with the police against the leader of the far-right group Lehava, Benzi Gopstein, after it was reported that he called for churches in Israel to be torched.

Sources

• Times of Israel
• The Telegraph
• Haaretz
• Image: Times of Israel