I am convinced that one of the best ways to avoid the ignorance of stereotypes and prejudice is for people of different backgrounds and faiths to get to know one another by spending quality time together that often leads to friendship and greater understanding. I grew up in a neighborhood and Catholic culture here in South Jersey that pretty much insulated many of us from meeting people of other faiths or different racial backgrounds. These segregated experiences can often lead to false generalizations or misrepresentations, fear and prejudice.
Fortunately, during high school I began working at the Lafayette Hotel in Atlantic City which became a kosher establishment shortly after I was employed. I made some friendships there that endure to this day and that have taught me more than anything I read in a book or heard in a lecture about Jews and Judaism.
Working alongside mostly Jewish and African American coworkers I also learned what it means to be in the minority! Those friendships and experiences opened my heart and mind to the quest of bringing people together for greater understanding and bonds of unity.
It was with sadness that I read the other week of the death of Jerzy Kluger, the Jewish boyhood friend of the late Pope John Paul II. Kluger, who was 90, died in Rome at the San Camillo Hospital on New Year’s Eve of complications from bronchitis and was buried in Rome’s Jewish cemetery. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had been living in a home for the elderly in Rome.
In the Polish town of Wadowice the pope and Jerzy met as young boys in the 1920s. Their friendship was somewhat unusual. Karol Wojtyla came from a deeply Catholic family and Jerzy Kluger from an observant Jewish family. Jerzy and the pope knew each other by their boyhood nicknames, Jurek and Lolek. They met in grade school, played soccer in the streets and did homework together. Jerzy, who eventually became an engineer, let the young Karol see his math homework; the future pope let Jurek copy his Latin exercises.
Once Jerzy had entered a church in Wadowice to wait for a friend, and a woman rudely reproached him because he was Jewish and had come into a Catholic church. Karol defended Jerzy, saying, “Aren’t we all God’s children?”
They lost track of one another when the Second World War broke out with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Jerzy was arrested by the Russians and was sent to a gulag in Siberia along with his father. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Jerzy was freed and he and his father fought against the Germans, enlisting in the famous Anders Brigade, which picked up Polish exiles who fought alongside the Allied forces and took part in the pivotal battle of Monte Cassino just south of Rome. Toward the end of the war, when he discovered that his mother, sister and many other family members had been killed in the Auschwitz death camp, he decided to stay in Italy. Jerzy married a Catholic woman from Ireland, settled in Rome and started a business importing heavy equipment.
The two old friends reunited in 1965 in Italy when Archbishop Karol Wojtyla was in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. Prior to this meeting in Rome both had assumed that the other had died during the war. After John Paul was elected pope in 1978, he stunned the world by granting his first papal audience to Jerzy and his family.
When asked about how his ties with the pope could deepen relations between Catholics, Jews and Israel, Jerzy said, “The people in the Vatican do not know Jews and previous popes did not know Jews, but this pope is a friend of the Jewish people. He grew up in Wadowice.”
Pope John Paul and Jerzy Kluger deepened their friendship over the years. Jerzy helped organize reunions between the pope and classmates from Wadowice either in Rome or during the pope’s trips to Poland. Jerzy joined Pope John Paul when he made his historic visit to Rome’s synagogue in 1986 and called Jews “our beloved elder brothers.” When the pope made his first trip to Israel in 2000, Jerzy joined him and was in attendance at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust gathering.
Their friendship continued right up to the pope’s death in 2005.
Here in the Diocese of Camden we have opportunities throughout the year to attend the various classes, symposiums, prayer services and other gatherings offered by the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. It is at these gatherings that you can meet and perhaps even become friends with local Jews, Muslims and people of other religions. Stay tuned for information announcing these opportunities.
Father Joseph D. Wallace is coordinator, Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs, Diocese of Camden.
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