PARIS (EJP)---Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, will be recited Friday morning in Paris at the funeral of Jewish-born French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.

Lustiger, who died last Sunday aged 80, was the only Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism to become a French archbishop in modern times.
His funeral at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris will be preceeded by a “Jewish family prayer” on the Cathedral's square.

Psalm 113 will first be recited in Hebrew and French by a grand nephew, Jonas Moses Lustiger. Historian Arno Lustiger, the cardinal’s cousin who lives in Germany will then say the Kaddish “with all who want to join the prayer.” Gila Lustiger, Arno's daughter, who lives in Israel, is a renowned novelist.

Arno Lustiger, cousin of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.

Soil taken from the Holy Land from a monastery near Jericho and in a garden at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem will be put on Lustiger's coffin.

“To say Kaddish was one of the last wishes of my cousin,” Arno Lustiger, said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy will break his American holiday and return briefly to France to attend Friday’s funeral.

Lustiger became a Catholic at 14 during the early days of the German Occupation, and lost his mother Gisèle two years later when she was arrested after being denunced and sent to Auschwitz, where she died.

He saw his conversion as a natural progression, believing that Christianity and Judaism were "indissolubly linked" and that "the New Testament was hidden within the Old and the Old Testament came to light in the New, since Christ was the Messiah of Israel."

He once declared: “I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that’s unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That’s my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”

Lustiger (R) with former Israel's Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.

Conversion condemned

Lustiger’s prominent role as a Jewish convert was strongly condemned both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora.

This hostility reached its height in 1995 when he was invited to address a conference at the University of Tel Aviv on "God’s silence during the Holocaust".

The Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau disrupted his visit to Israel by publicly accusing him of "betraying his people and his religion".

Aaron Lustiger was born in Paris on September 17 1926, the oldest child and only son of Charles and Gisèle Lustiger, who kept a hat shop in Montmartre.

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (L) with Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Council of Jews in Germany, at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in 2005 marking the 40th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate Declaration.

His parents, emigrants from Poland, had started selling goods from a street stall before prospering and taking French citizenship. Although the children’s grandfather had been a rabbi, they were given no religious instruction and had a secular upbringing.

The family spoke French at home, but the parents spoke Yiddish if they did not wish their children to understand.

After the war Lustiger’s father, assisted by the Chief Rabbi of Paris, tried to get his son’s baptism annulled on the ground that Aaron had converted for empirical reasons, an argument that Jean-Marie strongly denied.

In the late 1970s, he appeared to have undergone a spiritual crisis when he considered making “Alyah” or immigrating from France to Israel. He started to learn Hebrew with cassettes but abandoned his project.

Charles Lustiger, who had watched his son’s progress without great enthusiasm, died in 1980 one year after Jean-Marie was made Bishop of Orléans by Pope John-Paul II.

At the time, Archbishop Lustiger asked a cousin to say the Kaddish over his father’s grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse, although the funeral service had to be cut short because of a bomb warning.