12 April 2007
On a visit of Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution, Yad Vashem, the leader of Germany’s Protestant church, Wolfgang Huber, has said that Christians also bore guilt for the Nazis’ crimes against Jews. Bishop Huber, who is leading a delegation of the Protestant Church in Germany currently on visit to Israel and the Palestinian areas, referred to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an evangelical vicar active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement and murdered in 1945, who said in 1940 that the church had become guilty for failing to protect the lives of “the weakest brothers of Jesus Christ.” Huber, who is bishop of Berlin and Brandenburg and president of the Germany Council of Evangelical Churches (EKD), pointed out that the Protestant churches in Germany had undertaken many efforts to remove anti-Semitic references from prayers, chorals and theological texts. He said that it was the task of all churches to combat any occurrence of anti-Semitism.
Meeting with the delegation, Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yona Metzger said that he was in favor of an intensive dialogue with the German Protestant churches. “It is a way of showing that we all believe in the same God,” Metzger said. He raised the issue of the three Israeli soldiers kidnapped last year by Hamas and Hezbollah. The German delegation will meet with representatives of the Palestinian Authority, including president Mahmoud Abbas, on Friday.
