OSWIECIM (AFP)--- The speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI Sunday at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland was a call to the world to unite against anti-Semitism, Israel’s ambassador to Poland said.

"The most important sentence in the speech is that ’the rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel us from the register of peoples’," Ambassador David Peleg told Agence France Presse, citing word for word from Benedict’s speech.


"This is a strong sentence to come from the pope in Birkenau. I think it’s important to remember that in the place where he spoke, 95 percent of those who were murdered -- more than one million people -- were Jews," said Peleg.

"The place where we are standing is a place of memory, and at the same time the place of the Shoah," Benedict, who as a teenager was a member of Hitler Youth, had said in front of the huge stone memorial at Birkenau to the more than 1.1 million victims of the camp, Nazi Germany’s biggest death factory.

"I hope that this speech will serve as an important message to the
international community that anti-Semitism can be defeated only if there is a worldwide campaign against it," Peleg said.

‘A great moment’

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who was the victim of an
anti-Semitic attack the day before he intoned the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, at the ceremony with Benedict at Birkenau, called the pope’s speech "a great moment in the process of reconciling" Jews and Christians.

Although he said the pope "could have said things a bit more strongly ... his mere presence here was very important. It was a cry against anti-Semitism."

"We pray that he will continue down the same path as John Paul II and fight anti-Semitism."

Some observers have criticised the pope’s speech for failing to point out that, of the six million Poles lost their lives to the Nazis, more than three million were Jews.

"It is important to make the distinction between the Jews who were murdered and others," said Ambassador Peleg.

"There is a uniqueness to the Jewish victims because of the Germans’ Final Solution, which said ’Kill all Jews because they are Jews’.

"With all the respect and tragedy for the murder of others, this is one
thing that must be emphasised," said Peleg.

Piotr Kadlcik, a Jewish community leader in Poland, said Benedict’s
warnings about anti-Semitism were not as strong as those issued by his Polish predecessor, John Paul II.

"The pope spoke about the past a lot, while John Paul II spoke about the dangers that exist in our time," said Kadlcik.

"I thought that was lacking a bit, because this ill still exists and,
indeed, is thriving. John Paul II warned us a bit more about it," he said. 

‘problematic content’

Rome’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, called Pope’s speech “problematic” in his content. “The visit was an historical moment but the content of his speech was problematic,” he was quoted as saying by Italy’s news agency ANSA.

“A sort of accent was put on the absence of God and not on the silence of man and its responsibilities,” Di Segni stressed.

“I am not convinced by the interpretation concerning the German people, as it had been a victim and not on the side of the persecutors,” he said.

In his speech, Benedict XVI said the German people were not to blame for Nazi excesses against the Jews.

The pope described himself as "the son of a people over which a ring of criminals rose to power, by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour."

The German people had been "used and abused" as an instrument of Hitler’s "thirst for destruction and power," he said.

“We agree when one says that one cannot judge God but not history because history is made by men and we have the duty to judge,” Rome’s chief rabbi said.