Controversy
Tensions escalated into 1989 when two notable protests occurred. In May 1989, the Women's International Zionist Organization led a protest of 300 members carrying signs and Israeli flags. In July 1989, New York City Rabbi Avraham Weiss traveled with six supporters and led a protest that earned international notoriety. Weiss and his supporters scaled the fence of the convent wearing concentration camp uniforms. The group then harassed the nuns with banging and shouting until local Polish workers ran them off with buckets of water. Representatives of the Council of Jews and the World Jewish Congress stated that mostly Jews were killed at Auschwitz and demanded that religious symbols be kept away from the site. Some Catholics have pointed out that the people killed in Auschwitz I were mainly Polish Catholics. (Furthermore, Auschwitz I is the site of the martyrdom of Catholic Saint Maximilian Kolbe). Ian Kagedan of B'nai Brith Canada called the erection of the cross, "an obvious gap in understanding."
In March 1998 the Plenipotentiary for Relations with the Jewish Diaspora, Krzysztof Śliwiński, was quoted in a French newspaper as saying that the cross would be removed, because its presence was disrespectful of the Jewish legacy at Auschwitz. By the end of March 1998, a large group of government and nongovernment leaders, including then Chief of the Prime Minister's Cabinet Wiesław Walendziak, 130 Sejm deputies, 16 senators, former President Lech Wałęsa, Cardinal Józef Glemp, and Gdańsk Archbishop Tadeusz Rokoczy, went on record as opposing the removal of the cross. The cross is clearly visible from the former camp's Block 11 and marks the site where Polish political prisoners (including Catholic priests) and later Jewish prisoners were murdered by the Germans. The leader of the Defenders of the Pope's Cross, Kazimierz Świtoń, and Mieczysław Janosz, leader of the Association of War Victims, which leased the land on which the cross stood, distributed leaflets opposing the removal of the cross.
Read more about this topic: Auschwitz Cross
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
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