A memorial for the late French cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger was inaugurated Wednesday in the Benedictine monastery of Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem, in the presence of a number of Jewish and Catholic personalities, including Latin Patriarch Fuad Twal and Cardinal André Vingt-Trois.
Lustiger, the former Catholic archbishop of Paris, was born in 1926 into a Jewish family which had its origins in Poland. He later converted to Catholicism and become one of the key personalities in closer dialogue and reconciliation between Jews and Catholics.
Lustiger was always conscious of his Jewish origins and once said: “I was born Jewish, I received the name Aaron from my paternal grandfather. Having become a Christian by my faith and my baptism, I have remained a Jew, as did the apostles [of Jesus].” Lustiger’s mother perished in Auschwitz.
The cardinal, who died in 2007, initiated a program together with the World Jewish Congress which brought together French bishops and American rabbis. Lustiger was a regular speaker at meetings of the World Jewish Congress. In January 2005, he became the first cardinal ever to address a WJC Plenary Assembly.
The initiative for the Abu Gosh memorial came from Richard Prasquier, honorary president of CRIF, the French Jewish umbrella body. For Prasquier, there was “a desire on the part of the Jews to pay tribute to the cardinal.”
