CNN/Time
The Pope's Rabbi; Dogs of War; Just a Bullet Away
Aired March 19, 2000 - 9:00 p.m. ET
ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME. Tonight, "The Pope's Rabbi."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLES GLASS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: His was the rarest of visits to an ancient and holy
land.
DAVID ROSEN, RABBI: For him, it is the crown in a way or the jewel in the crown of his
pontificate.
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ANNOUNCER: But it wasn't a Christian who helped clear the way for the Pope's historic journey to
Israel. It was an Orthodox Jew.
ANNOUNCER: "Dogs of War." They had names like Hobo (ph) and Clipper.
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JOHN BURNAM, U.S. ARMY VETERAN: Clipper and I were on the patrol near the Cambodian
border.
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ANNOUNCER: More than companions, they were brothers in arms.
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BURNAM: And he saved a lot of people's lives as a result of his alerts.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: And their reward for this heroic service? The U.S. military left many behind.
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KARL GROSS, U.S. MARINE VETERAN: Days on end, you -- you would think about him or
wonder what happened to him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: "Just a Bullet Away." He's on the run.
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FRANCISCO SANTOS, COLOMBIAN REPORTER: They were going to shoot me.
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ANNOUNCER: A crusading journalist crosses the line and becomes a target for assassination.
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SANTOS: I never thought it would happen to me.
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ANNOUNCER: From kidnapping to exile, a reporter's story in his own words.
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SANTOS: Colombia is a country that have so much values that -- that even heroes are forgotten
very easily.
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ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME, with Jeff Greenfield and Bernard Shaw.
BERNARD SHAW, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to CNN & TIME.
This week, Pope John II travels to Israel, the first papal visit to the holy land in nearly four decades.
The pilgrimage follows the pope's unprecedented apology for the sins of Catholics over the last
2,000 years, including their treatment of Jews.
JEFF GREENFIELD, CO-HOST: But despite the pope's millennial act of repentance, there are
many Jewish hard-liners who say he is not welcome in Israel, and yet one of the strongest
supporters of the papal visit is a well-respected Orthodox rabbi.
That story now from Charles Glass.
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CHARLES GLASS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): David Rosen is not everyone's idea
of the typical Orthodox rabbi.
DAVID ROSEN, RABBI: I never really decided to be a rabbi. I grew up in a modern Orthodox
environment feeling an heir to two world cultures, to my Jewish heritage and to world culture
generally.
GLASS (voice-over): His mission is building bridges, first of all to modern secular Jews. He
conducts interfaith dialogues with Muslims, including the president of Indonesia, and he has
preached in a mosque, and the International Conference of Christians and Jews made him their
president, and when Pope John Paul arrives in the holy land this week, one of the few Israeli rabbis
he will recognize is David Rosen.
ROSEN: He has always referred to his dream of being able to visit the holy land and how he prays
and looks forward to fulfilling that particular dream.
GLASS: Rosen was the rabbi in the Vatican, meeting the pope frequently and taking part in talks on
the holy see's recognition of the State of Israel.
ROSEN: I wouldn't describe myself as a -- as very much a kind of a new age person, but as I was
walking there into the Vatican, I had that feeling millions of eyes of my ancestors were looking
down at me in absolute stupefaction, "Our little baby going into that place," which -- if you came
out intact -- physically intact -- at all, would your soul still be intact? Because that's what it
represented throughout the -- the centuries of history.
GLASS: David Rosen was born 50 years ago in Great Britain and educated at a school founded by
his rabbi father. He emigrated to Israel, and unlike most rabbinical students who receive military
deferments, went into the army. He completed his service in the occupied Sinai, and then went back
as a rabbi.
In 1973, Rosen moved with his wife, Sharon, to South Africa. In Capetown, as head of one of the
largest Orthodox congregations in the world, Rosen denounced racial discrimination from the pulpit.
ROSEN: I would say that Judaism is color blind. I would refer to Prophet Amos that says, "Are you
children of Israel not unto me like the children of Ethiopia? In other words, God is not only present
in the history of all peoples, he doesn't care a hoot about the color of your skin.
GLASS: In the 1970s, white South Africans did care about skin color. When Rosen joined Christian
and Muslim activists who opposed apartheid, the establishment reacted.
ROSEN: I think the government decided I was a dangerous person to have around, and the phone
was tapped, death threats, and those sort of things that took place, and there was -- we had to make a
decision.
GLASS (on camera): When you say you received death threats, what form did they take?
RYAN: One day a phone call came through to our help in the house saying, "Kiss the children
goodbye. We're coming to kill them." It's bad enough when you get threats directed at yourself, as I
did often in the mail and things like that. When people threaten to kill your children, there gets to be
a little more worry.
GLASS (voice-over): In 1979, when the South African government refused to renew his visa,
Rosen moved to the Republic of Ireland. The almost entirely Catholic country has only a few
thousand Jews, but, as their chief rabbi, Rosen became a diplomat, representing Jews to the
government and to the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
ROSEN: It just meant I was getting much more involved with the church. I felt that I was also
contributing a great deal to a better understanding of my community and to develop better
understanding between Christians and Jews.
GLASS: Rosen and his family wanted to return to Israel and, in 1985, moved to Jerusalem. In the
Jewish state, however, he did not give up the dialogue with Christians. He made it his goal to
overcome two millennia of mistrust and even the Vatican's 19th-century hostility to Zionism and its
founder Theodore Hertzel (ph).
ROSEN: Theodore Hertzel notes in his diaries Pope Pius X's response to him when he asked the
pope for his support for the Zionist enterprise, and according to Hertzel, Pius X said to him, "I
cannot recognize you, for you have not recognized our Lord. I can't stop the Jews returning to
Palestine, but if they do, our priests will be there with holy water to baptize them all."
GLASS: When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the Vatican refused to recognize it. Many
Israelis blamed anti-Semitism, but the church blamed Israel for expelling thousands of Palestinians,
many of them Christians, during the war in 1947 and '48. When Israel made Jerusalem its capital,
the church accused it of violating U.N. resolutions making Jerusalem an international city.
Then in the early 1960s came the second Vatican council. The church changed its attitude toward
the Jewish people. Nowhere is this more obvious, Rosen says, that in the evolving role of the
Catholic Sisters of Zion. When they were founded by Jewish converts to Catholicism in 1842, this
order tried to convert Jews. Sister Patricia Wadsen (ph) is director of the order's house just outside
Jerusalem.
SISTER PATRICIA WADSEN, CATHOLIC SISTERS OF ZION: The best thing we thought to
achieve God's plan would be that the Jews would come to accept Jesus as Messiah and, therefore,
become Christian.
GLASS: Today, their role has changed dramatically. These nuns now pray in Hebrew and work for
Catholic-Jewish understanding.
ROSEN: The result of the second Vatican council on its total transformation and its teaching and
attitude toward the Jewish people was that the Sisters of Zion were given the responsibility to
educate Christians about the Jewish roots of Christianity. So this is an incredible transformation.
GLASS: No one has done more to improve Catholic-Jewish relations than Pope John Paul. A Pole
who lost Jewish friends in the Nazi death camps, he warned Catholics never to commit a grave sin,
anti-Semitism. He opened the door to the negotiations that began in 1992 and finally led to
diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican. Among the negotiators for the Israelis, Rabbi
David Rosen.
ROSEN: Basically, there was an awareness on the other side of the table on not only diplomats and
legal experts but men of the cloth, and we thought it would be a good idea to have an interfaith
expert on our side.
GLASS: At the Vatican, Rosen and the pope discovered they had something in common. Both their
families came from Poland's Krakow region.
ROSEN: From my mother's side, our ancestors were heads of the ecclesiastical court. In other
words, leaders -- religious leaders in the Jewish community in Krakow, so that, obviously,
interested him a great deal.
GLASS: The pope told him he could not forget what happened in Poland during the war.
ROSEN: And he spoke primarily about the -- about the holocaust -- that was his initiative -- and
what it meant, how it impacted on him, how it must -- is the most important -- not only tragic but
the most important event of all times and throughout history.
GLASS: Israel and the Vatican achieved a concordant in 1993. For the first time, the holy see
recognized Israel, and Pope John Paul would be able to fulfill his dream of visiting the holy land.
Many Israelis remain suspicious of the pope, something he will face when he arrives. Israeli writer
Cidra Israji (ph), a longtime friend of David Rosen, explains.
CIDRA ISRAJI, ISRAELI WRITER: I think that there still are many, many Israelis who can't let go
of the sense that Catholics really do expect the Jews ultimately to convert and, therefore, to fulfill a
Catholic vision. I think that somewhere lurking behind most -- the minds of most Israelis who give
some thought to it is the sense that this has not really been relinquished, and David is one of those
who believes that it has.
GLASS: Some Orthodox rabbis condemn the pope for planning to say mass in Nazareth on a
Saturday when Jewish security guards should be observing the Sabbath.
ROSEN: There's also -- a majority of Israeli society doesn't have a problem with the pope holding a
mass on Saturday that involves the police force as being called out in such large numbers and taken
away from maybe their day of Sabbath rest. But there are areas which are not basic which these
quarters have not opposed. For example, soccer games are played on Saturday. They also involve
police and security and paramedical facilities, et cetera. They don't make an issue over that.
GLASS: "The Jerusalem Post" ran this cartoon suggesting the pope wants to expel the Jews from
Israel.
(on camera): What -- what is the point of a cartoon like that?
ROSEN: First of all, it's very ignorant if he doesn't understand how far we've come since the period
of the crusades. If he's still living the 11th century, then he's got a serious problem, or she, whoever
did that -- made that particular cartoon. If this was their interest, then why on earth would they have
established a fundamental agreement and a formal concordant and put their institutions under Israel
law and recognize the integrity and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland? So it's nonsense. It's
nonsense. Deplorable and condemnable nonsense.
GLASS (voice-over): On the evening of his visit to Israel, while not apologizing for any specific
event, the pope asked for the forgiveness of the Jewish people. He said that the church was deeply
saddened by the behavior of those who had, in the course of history, caused these children of yours,
meaning the Jews, to suffer.
(on camera): Does it make any difference that now that -- now in the 21st century that someone says
I'm sorry for what happened a thousand years ago?
ROSEN: It says to the Jewish people, "We are cognizant of -- of the terrible things that we've done
in our name. We consider these to be a desecration of God's name, blasphemous, and we are
determined to do our best not to allow these things to happen again." That creates a sense of trust
and confidence, and I hope that these words will come through from the pope very powerfully.
GLASS (voice-over): The Israeli holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, is on the pope's pilgrimage. His
presence here may be more significant than any papal apology, in the view of former Catholic priest
and writer James Carroll (ph).
JAMES CARROLL, FORMER CATHOLIC PRIEST: I don't think that the apology as such is the
issue. The apology has become a symbol of whether the church is serious about not just reconciling
with Jews but changing itself so that the problems of the past are never repeated in the future.
Whether the pope were to apologize, for example, at Yad Vishem, during his visit to Jerusalem in
some new way is much less important than the fact that he's there.
GLASS: Last month, the pope traveled to Egypt to visit Mount Sinai where the Bible says Moses
received the Ten Commandments. Now he'll visit the Biblical sites of Jesus Christ's ministry and his
crucifiction. The pope will also meet Muslim and Palestinian leaders.
POPE JOHN PAUL II: John Paul II -- he also loves you.
GLASS (on camera): Efforts at dialogue among the three faiths -- Islam, Christianity, and Judaism - will go on here, enhanced by the papal visit, but so too will the conflicts that keep them divided.
(voice-over): For the Jewish people and the pope, this still includes aspects of the holocaust.
Although he has prayed at Auschwitz, John Paul II supported the canonization of a woman who
died there, Sister Edith Stein (ph), a Jewish convert.
ROSEN: It's not the business of the Jewish community to tell the Catholic Church who its saints are,
and it just showed a degree of ignorance not to understand the way the Jewish community sees both
the question of apostacy as well as the fact that she was killed because she was a Jewish woman, not
because she had become a Catholic nun. GLASS: Despite such disagreements, David Rosen
continues his work toward interfaith understanding and respect, and the visit of the pope is vital
both to that cause and, he believes, toward John Paul II's desire for reconciliation.
ROSEN: For him, it is the crown in a way or the jewel in the crown of his pontificate. So it's
important as a statement about the Catholic Church in the world today for him. It's important as a
statement about the Catholic Church's relationships with its historical roots in the Jewish people. It's
important as a statement of the relationship with the Muslim world as well.
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