BRUSSELS/NEW YORK (EJP)---Two Jewish organizations have condemned a statement made by a senior Vatican official comparing Gaza to a Nazi concentration camp.
Cardinal Renato Martino, a former Vatican envoy to the United Nations who is currently the Pope’s top official on issues of justice and peace, was quoted by the Italian media as saying the conditions in Gaza "look more and more like a big concentration camp."
The Brussels-based Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), a leading rabbinical organization in Europe and the highest Jewish authority in the continent, representing over 700 rabbis of Jewish communities all over Europe, called the prelate’s comparison "totally injustified and fundamentally wrong."
"It is totally unjustified and fundamentally wrong to equate the deliberate extermination of Jews in Europe as a ‘Final Solution’ with what is transpiring in Israel today," Asher Gold, the centre’s spokesperson said in a statement.
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“It is totally contemptible and all the more tragic that it comes from the Vatican that has expressed its own remorse and regret for the Holocaust. Cardinal Renato Martino has exploited a cheap propaganda soundbyte and should be ashamed of his remarks."
'Shocking and disgraceful'
In New York, the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish organization in the fight against anti-Semitism in the world, condemned the prelate’s statement as “shocking and disgraceful.”
“It is shocking and disgraceful that a high-level Vatican official would employ Holocaust imagery in reference to the state of Israel’s attempt to defend its citizens from Hamas,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL’s national director and a Holocaust survivor.
“We hope that the Vatican will publicly repudiate Cardinal Martino’s statements and make clear that comparisons between the absolute tyranny of the Nazi Holocaust and the complex situation in Gaza are inappropriate and offensive.”
ADL noted that Holocaust comparisons and Nazi imagery have been a recurring feature of anti-Israel rallies in the US and around the world since Israel’s Gaza operation was launched on December 27.
“Comparisons between the Jewish state and those who perpetrated the greatest act of anti-Semitism in world history are not impartial or dispassionate,” Foxman said.
“This is a charge that is purposefully directed at Jews in an effort to associate the victims of the Nazi crimes with the Nazi perpetrators, and serves to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust,” he said.