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Pope to Visit New York City Synagogue

April 4, 2008

When Pope Benedict XVI enters a U.S. synagogue for the first time, it will be an emotional encounter between a Holocaust survivor and the German pontiff  bonding over their suffering in the same war.

“Both of us experienced the tragedy of World War II,” said Arthur Schneier, senior rabbi of Manhattans Park East Synagogue, which the pope is to visit on April 18, the nations bishops announced Thursday.

The Vienna-born rabbi told The Associated Press in an interview at his office that he and the pope have the same mother tongue, German. “So we have a common language — at least in terms of meine Muttersprache, my mother tongue,” he said.

Schneier, 78, fled Adolf Hitlers forces in Austria for Budapest in 1939 with his mother and worked in a labor camp before Hungary was liberated by the Red Army. He said most of his family had been deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and died there. He moved to the U.S. in 1947.

The rabbi said sharing the war experience with the pope brings the two men closer.

“When you emerge from that kind of tragedy with all the human lives lost,” he said, “it does something in terms of shaping your outlook and what you need to do to make sure that this becomes a better world and we dont repeat the mistakes of history.”

The 80-year-old pontiff is a native of Bavaria whose father was anti-Nazi. He enrolled in the Hitler Youth against his will and was then drafted into the German army in the last months of the war. He wrote in his memoirs that he deserted in the wars last days.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Pope to Visit New York City Synagogue”

  1. solomon on April 14th, 2008 11:34 am

    hello sir everything is finished, and our prophecy becames a history

  2. micheal ndungu on April 19th, 2008 4:07 pm

    what i see its time for the bride to be taken home,this has to go on and on to force us out ,TIME IS NO MORE be blessed

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