CRIF PAYS HOMAGE TO LATE POPE

CRIF has the greatest respect for the work of reconciliation between Catholics and Jews that John Paul II pursued all through his mission. He continued on the path opened by his predecessor John XXIII and progressively replaced the Church's teaching of despise by the teaching of respect and recognition of the Jews.

Many times, in highly symbolic places and circumstances, John Paul II showed the way of dialogue and reconciliation, mainly during his unprecedented visit to the synagogue of Rome in 1986 when he identified the Jews as the elder brothers of the Church and when he stressed his deep pain in front of the horror of the Holocaust.

In March 2000 his visit to Jerusalem was a major progress in the appeased dialogue between Catholics and Jews.

John Paul II left in the memories the historic image of his meditation at the foot of the Western Wall, remnant of the Second Temple and sacred place for the Jews, when following the Jewish tradition he inserted a prayer between the bi-millenary stones.

Earlier last week, the Paris Jewish Community Center organized a special ceremony for the healing of the Pope. The Jewish prayer for the ailing was recited in front of a large picture of John Paul II holding a rosary.