Jewish leaders urge restraint in Israeli-Vatican spat

Posted 7/29/2005 5:29 PM

Jewish leaders urge restraint in Israeli-Vatican spat
7/29/05

VATICAN CITY (AP) ?- Jewish leaders urged the Vatican and Israel to tone down the rhetoric in the escalating dispute over papal pronouncements on terrorism, saying Friday they feared the feud could do lasting damage to relations.

Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, said the dispute was "only damaging for both parties" and he hoped it would end quickly, particularly before Pope Benedict XVI visits a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, next month.

"As a religious leader, I am really worried about the escalating level of this debate and that we stop as soon as possible," he said in an interview.

Both the Vatican and Israel tried Friday to put the dispute behind them, refusing to comment further after a week of trading pronouncements that culminated Thursday with a harshly worded Vatican statement telling Israel to stop trying to give the pope lessons on what to say.

The dispute began Monday, when Israel summoned the Vatican envoy to complain that Benedict had "deliberately failed" to include a July 12 suicide bombing in the Israeli city of Netanya when he listed countries recently hit by terrorist attacks, including Egypt, Britain, Turkey and Iraq.

The Vatican press office said Benedict's condemnation during his Sunday prayer covered all terrorist attacks in recent days.

But an Israeli Foreign Ministry official, Nimrod Barkan, was quoted Tuesday in the Jerusalem Post as saying that Israel had for years quietly protested that the late Pope John Paul II had refrained from condemning attacks in Israel and was now going public with its protest in hopes that the new pope would change the policy.

"If they understand we won't let this pass quietly, I assume they will change their ways," Barkan was quoted as saying.

He said he wasn't concerned that public protest would damage relations with Benedict, saying, "What could be worse than implying that it is OK to kill Jews?"

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls made an unusually harsh rebuttal Thursday, issuing a two-page list of the times John Paul condemned attacks against Jews and calling Barkan's accusations "groundless" and invented.

He said the Vatican could not condemn every attack against Israel because Israel often responded in ways that violated international law. "It would consequently have been impossible to condemn the former and remain silent on the latter," he said in a statement.

On Friday, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Los-Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was sure the pope did not intend to "make a distinction between suicide attacks in London and suicide attacks in Israel."

But, he said in response to Navarro-Valls' comments on international law, "You must judge Israeli retaliation in the same manner as one would judge United States retaliation against the terrorist attacks in Iraq. I would think that under those standards Israel would more than pass muster."

Seymour Reich, a former chairman of the New York-based International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations who has been involved in Jewish-Vatican negotiations in the past, said both sides had overreacted.

He urged them to "take a deep breath and look at the bigger picture regarding Israel-Vatican relations and the Vatican's world Jewry relations."