Ukraine\'s Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich has asked Pope John Paul II to open church archives and reveal the names of Jewish children who were raised as Catholics during World War II. The rabbi said that thousands of Jews in Poland and western Ukraine were taken in by Christian families to save them from the Nazis, and many of them were never told of their Jewish origins. \"We think that every normal person understands that Jewish children who were saved during the war should have been returned to the Jews after the war,\" Rabbi Bleich said, shortly before he and the Pope paid tribute to Nazi victims at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. The Germans killed 33,761 Jews there within 72 hours in late September 1941, and over the next two years, killed another 170,000 people there, most of them Jews.
After the Holocaust, then-Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog asked for Pope Pius XII\'s assistance in locating Jewish orphans who were cared for by Catholic families, but the Pope refused. Today\'s Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau recounted last year that the present Pope told him in 1993 that he had refused to baptize a Jewish child whose parents had died, \"because the parents had specifically requested that the child be brought up as a Jew.\"
After the Holocaust, then-Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Herzog asked for Pope Pius XII\'s assistance in locating Jewish orphans who were cared for by Catholic families, but the Pope refused. Today\'s Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau recounted last year that the present Pope told him in 1993 that he had refused to baptize a Jewish child whose parents had died, \"because the parents had specifically requested that the child be brought up as a Jew.\"