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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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082189
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08218900.068
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1990-09-19
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RELIGION, Page 49Auschwitz IreStay-put nuns spark protests
For the past five years, efforts to improve ties between Roman
Catholicism and Judaism have been disrupted by turmoil over the
presence of 14 Carmelite nuns at the site of the infamous Auschwitz
death camp in southern Poland. The nuns maintain a convent just
outside the camp's barbed-wire perimeter, in a red brick building
that once housed canisters of deadly Zyklon B gas. Their mission:
to pray for all the Nazis' victims, including the 6 million Jews
who died in concentration camps. But the establishment of a
Christian institution at a place that will forever symbolize Jewish
martyrdom has stirred outrage among Jews.
The dispute was supposedly settled in 1987, when four
Cardinals, including Franciszek Macharski, whose Cracow archdiocese
encompasses Auschwitz, promised that the nuns would move to a new
center by February 1989. That deadline passed, but the nuns did not
budge and renovations that had begun on their convent continued.
The delay provoked strong Jewish protests and demonstrations at the
site. Tensions escalated last month when Polish workers at the
convent roughed up seven Jewish protesters and dragged them off the
property.
Last week Cardinal Macharski, citing a "violent campaign of
accusations and slanders" by Jews denouncing the delay, said he
was indefinitely suspending plans to construct the new center
because the work could not proceed in an "atmosphere of aggressive
demands." The World Jewish Congress quickly assailed Macharski's
comments as "brutal and violent" and "a tragic blow" to ecumenical
efforts.
Macharski's surprise action moved another of the four
Cardinals, Albert Decourtray of Lyon, to issue his own declaration
that the 1987 agreement must be honored. The demonstrations and
hostile climate "cannot outweigh the accord," he asserted. Pope
John Paul II has so far declined to intervene openly in a local
Polish church matter, but behind Decourtray's unequivocating
statement may be glimpsed a papal hand.