Pope John Paul II - At Israel's Holocaust Memorial (2000)

In March of 2000, Pope John Paul II conducted an historic week-long pilgrimage to the Holy Land, visiting several sites in Israel for the first time including the location in Bethlehem believed to be the birth place of Jesus.,In Jerusalem, the Pope visited Yad Vashem, Israel's main Holocaust¹ memorial, to pay tribute to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis³ from 1938-45. During the Nazi² era, the Pope had been a seminary student in his native country of Poland, which was also the location of the largest Nazi death camps including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. Jewish friends and neighbors of the Pope had been killed by the Nazis.,At Yad Vashem, the frail⁴ Pope first laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance at a massive granite⁵ slab⁶ that covers the cremated⁷ remains⁸ of some of the unidentified Jews killed in death camps. He then ceremoniously lit the eternal flame. Among those present during the ceremony was Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, whose mother's parents had been killed at Treblinka. Also in attendance were 50 Holocaust survivors⁹, including 13 originally from the Pope's hometown of Wadowice, Poland, several of whom remembered the Pope as a child. The entire event was broadcast live on Israel's two major TV networks.,The Pope's visit was not without controversy¹⁰, however, as debate continues in Israel and elsewhere over whether or not the Catholic Church owes an apology to Jews for failing to sufficiently¹¹ come to their aid during the Holocaust. During the Nazi era, Pope Pius XII never spoke¹² out publicly against the ongoing¹³ extermination¹⁴ of Europe's Jews, despite his awareness¹⁵ of the death camps.,At Yad Vashem, Pope John Paul II stopped short of making the apology some had hoped for, but also moved several of the Jews at the ceremony to tears.,