Rabbi Jack Bemporad tells a clever story about a 60-year-old Jewish man in the Northeast. One day in 1986, he received a chemistry set in the mail from his mother. Puzzled by this strange occurrence, he immediately called his mother and asked for an explanation.

She told him: “Remember when you were a young boy and you kept begging me to buy you a chemistry set. I kept answering you that when the Pope goes to shul, you'll get a chemistry set. Well, it happened. The pope just went to shul.”

The Great Synagogue of Rome is located only two miles from the Vatican. Yet no pope ever set foot in it until 1986. That year, the secretary of Pope John Paul II phoned Rome's Chief Rabbi, Elio Toaff, to inform him that the pope wanted to visit the synagogue.

On April 13, the pope and his entourage arrived for this historic moment. Rabbi Toaff, who is now 89, recalls the dramatic moment when the pope entered the sanctuary. He hugged the rabbi as though he were family. Everyone in the synagogue that day felt the pontiff's love and affection.

When John Paul died last month, Rabbi Toaff was one of only two living persons mentioned in his will.

Tonight, I want to focus on the pope's relationship to the Jewish community. I shall leave the assessment of other aspects of his leadership to other commentators. John Paul's synagogue visit was one of his numerous gestures to put an end to the ugly history of Roman Catholic hostility and contempt toward the Jews and Judaism.

Quite frankly, when in 1978, the College of Cardinals elected John Paul, a native of Poland, to head the Church, I became anxious. Poland has been infected for centuries with the poison of anti-Semitism. Yet, as more encouraging reports about him were issued, my fears quickly evaporated.

From his youth, he consistently demonstrated his extraordinary compassion and understanding toward Jews. He had close Jewish friends while growing up in Poland. He also experienced first-hand the horrors of Nazi tyranny.

Idit Tzirer, a Holocaust survivor, recalled his kindness in 1945. She had just been liberated from a Nazi death camp. At that time, he was a parish priest in Poland, known as Father Karol Wojtyla. As a starved 13-year-old, Idit was sitting on a street corner, too weak to walk. Others ignored her.

However, Father Wojtyla brought her hot tea with bread and cheese. He learned that she wanted to go to Cracow but was unable to walk. Idit reported that the priest hoisted her on his back and carried her three or four miles.

Earlier, Helen and Moses Hiller and their only child, Shachne, were confined to the ghetto in Cracow. By this time, the murder of Polish Jews had reached its zenith. After much soul searching, the Hillers decided to contact Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Yachowitch, a Roman Catholic couple with no children. The Hillers convinced the Yachowitch's, at great danger to their lives, to care for Shachne and to conceal him from informers and persecutors.

Like most Cracow Jews, the Hillers went to their deaths. As a devout Roman Catholic, Mrs. Yachowitch, upon learning of the deaths of Shachne's parents, decided to have him baptized. She approached Father Wojtyla and told him the secret of Shachne's true Jewish identity.

He listened carefully to her. He then asked her what the Hillers told her about the religion of the child when they entrusted him to her. She informed Father Wojtyla that the Hillers last request was that Shachne be told of his Jewish origins. They also asked that he be returned to the Jewish people if they should die. Father Wojtyla replied that it would not be fair to baptize the child and refused to perform the ceremony.

Such was an extraordinarily heroic act, considering that this episode happened long before Vatican II. At that time, Roman Catholic leaders believed that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. The Church maintained that Jews and all non-Catholics must be converted to be saved.

In fact, John Paul roundly rejected the pre-Vatican II view that Judaism was obsolete and dead and was replaced by a vibrant and triumphant Christianity. He emphasized that God never retracted the Divine covenant with the Jewish people. He insisted that Jews are “irrevocably the beloved of God.” He spoke eloquently about the close ties of Judaism and Christianity. He repeatedly called Jews “elder brothers in faith.”

Throughout his 26-year papacy, John Paul manifested a profound empathy with the anguish and agony of the Jewish people. He spoke out repeatedly against the scourge of anti-Semitism. In fact, he declared it a sin. He decried the centuries of oppression and tyranny Jews had to endure at Christian hands. Shortly after becoming pope in 1979, he knelt and offered a moving prayer at a monument honoring Jewish martyrs at Auschwitz in his native Poland.

Five years ago, he visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Following a time-honored Jewish custom, he placed this moving prayer between the stones. Here is what he wrote: “God of our fathers, You chose Abraham and his descendants to bring Your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those, who, in the course of history, have caused these children of Yours to suffer and, asking Your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”

John Paul II also championed close ties between the Vatican and the State of Israel. For centuries, the Church believed that God punished the Jewish people for not accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. God exiled the Jews from the Holy Land shortly after Jesus' crucifixion. God condemned Jews to be a wandering a stateless people until they are ready to accept Jesus. Only then can they can have a state of their own.

In 1904, Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, visited Pope Pius X. The pope reaffirmed that belief that Jews must remain without a homeland by telling Herzl: “We can't prevent Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we can never sanction it....The Jews have not recognized our Lord and we can not recognize the Jews.”

John Paul abolished that belief. He was the first pope to refer to the Holy Land by the name “Israel.” In 1993, the Vatican recognized Israel and established full diplomatic relations with it.

Indeed, John Paul was a cherished friend of the Jewish people. Yet even our friends occasionally do things that displease us. To offer an honest picture of John Paul, I need to point out that there were a few rough spots in his relations with the Jewish community. After Kurt Waldheim became President of Austria, John Paul visited him. By then, it was well know that Waldheim had been an unrepentant Nazi and a proven war criminal. Yet in addressing Waldheim, the pope never mentioned the Holocaust or Waldheim's sordid past. Instead, he praised Waldheim as a man of peace.

He also canonized Edith Stein. She was a German Jew who had converted to Catholicism, become a Carmelite nun, and died at Auschwitz. He called her a martyr for the Catholic faith. The reality is that the Nazis regarded Edith Stein as a Jew, in spite of her conversion. She was put her to death, solely for that reason. To imply otherwise offends Jewish sensibilities. In addition, John Paul beatified Pope Pius XII. Many Jews have faulted Pius XII for his relations with Hitler and for not speaking out during the Holocaust.

Yet in the large picture, these incidents do not detract from the magnificence of his contributions to Christian-Jewish understanding. Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, said it so well in this moving tribute to the pontiff:

“Pope John Paul II fundamentally changed 2000 years of relations between the Church and the Jewish people. He reached across millennial divides to promote mutual respect and understanding. His lessons and accomplishments are a legacy for Catholics, Jews, and all humanity. Our hope is that we all honor that legacy by building on it for future generations.” Amen.

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