The Jewish orphans controversy was a dispute about the custody of thousands of Jewish children after the end of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Some Jewish children had been baptized while in the care of Catholic institutions or individual Catholics during the war. Such baptisms allowed children to be identified as Catholics to avoid deportation and incarceration in concentration camps, and likely death in the Holocaust. After the end of hostilities,
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
officials, either
Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII ( it, Pio XII), born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (; 2 March 18769 October 1958), was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 2 March 1939 until his death in October 1958. Before his e ...
or other prelates, issued instructions for the treatment and disposition of such Jewish children, some but not all of whom were now orphans. The rules they established, the authority that issued those rules, and their application in specific cases is the subject of investigations by journalists and historians.
In 2005, ''
Corriere della Sera
The ''Corriere della Sera'' (; en, "Evening Courier") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average daily circulation of 410,242 copies in December 2015.
First published on 5 March 1876, ''Corriere della Sera'' is one of It ...
'' published a document dated 20 November 1946 on the subject of Jewish children baptized in wartime France. The document ordered that baptized children, if orphaned, should be kept in Catholic custody and stated that the decision "has been approved by the Holy Father". Two Italian scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, confirmed that the memorandum was genuine although the reporting by the ''Corriere della Sera'' was misleading, as the document had originated in the French Catholic Church archives rather than the Vatican archives and strictly concerned itself with children without living blood relatives that were supposed to be handed over to Jewish organisations.
Angelo Roncalli
Pope John XXIII ( la, Ioannes XXIII; it, Giovanni XXIII; born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, ; 25 November 18813 June 1963) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 until his death in June 19 ...
, later Pope John XXIII, was serving as
Nuncio
An apostolic nuncio ( la, nuntius apostolicus; also known as a papal nuncio or simply as a nuncio) is an ecclesiastical diplomat, serving as an envoy or a permanent diplomatic representative of the Holy See to a state or to an international or ...
for France, and reportedly ignored this directive.
A related case was the highly public
Finaly Affair in France. Fritz Finaly and his wife Anni were Jews seized by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
and deported from France to
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
in 1944. Days earlier, they had left their two small boys, Robert and Gérald, in the care of a friend. The children ended up in a local nursery school. Starting in 1945, their relatives tracked them down and tried to get custody of them. Their requests were thwarted for years, and the children were secretly baptized in 1948. Documents released in 2020 demonstrate that in 1953, Vatican officials secretly directed clerics in France to defy court orders to turn over the children to an aunt, with Pope Pius XII directly informed of those instructions. Church leaders also tried to plant misleading news stories in the press. After months of enormous international pressure, Cardinal
Pierre-Marie Gerlier
Pierre-Marie Gerlier (14 January 1880 – 17 January 1965) was a French Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Lyon from 1937 until his death, was Primate of Gaul and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1937.
Biogr ...
and abbé
Roger Etchegaray
Roger Marie Élie Etchegaray (; 25 September 1922 – 4 September 2019) was a French cardinal of the Catholic Church. Etchegaray served as the Archbishop of Marseille from 1970 to 1985 before entering the Roman Curia, where he served as Preside ...
finally settled the dispute by transferring the children back to their Jewish relatives, who raised them in Spain and Israel.
Pius XII personally intervened when a Polish Catholic woman,
Leokadia Jaromirska, later honored as one of the
Righteous Among the Nations
Righteous Among the Nations ( he, חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, ; "righteous (plural) of the world's nations") is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to sav ...
by Yad Vashem, wrote him a letter seeking his permission to keep a young Jewish girl she had sheltered during the war. Pius denied her permission to do so and ordered the child returned to her father. He described it as her duty as a Catholic to return the child and to do so in goodwill and friendship.
Abe Foxman
Abraham Henry Foxman (born May 1, 1940) is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, and is currently the League's national director emeritus. From 2016 to 2021 he served ...
(born 1940), the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States specializing in civil rights law. It was founded in late Septe ...
(ADL), who had himself been baptized as a child and had been the subject of a custody battle, called for an immediate freeze on Pius's beatification process until the relevant
Vatican Archives
, seal = Seal of the Vatican Secret Archives.svg
, seal_width = 200
, seal_caption = Former seal of the Vatican Apostolic Archive
, logo =
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, headquarters = Cortile del Belvedere, Vatican City
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and baptismal records were opened. He wrote that opening archives could
allow orphans "an opportunity to discover their true origins and possibly a return to their original faith while providing a magnificent story of courage by Catholics. In the hell that was the Holocaust, this is one bright shining light." Foxman omitted this in later statements and ADL press releases concerning Pope Pius XII.
Yad L'Achim
Yad L'Achim ( he, יד לאחים, "hand for brothers") is a Haredi Jewish organization operating in Israel focusing on outreach, counter-missionary work, and opposition to interfaith marriage. Yad L'Achim is made up of both paid staff and volun ...
, an Israeli Jewish organization, has inquired into the orphans controversy and has demanded that Pope
Benedict XVI
Pope Benedict XVI ( la, Benedictus XVI; it, Benedetto XVI; german: link=no, Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, , on 16 April 1927) is a retired prelate of the Catholic church who served as the head of the Church and the sovereign ...
act to reveal the "hidden Jewish children" of the Holocaust.
See also
*
Mortara case
The Mortara case ( it, caso Mortara, links=no) was an Italian ''cause célèbre'' that captured the attention of much of Europe and North America in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure of a six-year-old boy named Edgardo ...
*
Germaine Ribière
*
Hidden children during the Holocaust
* ''
Postremo mense
Pope Benedict XIV promulgated the papal bull ''Postremo mense'' on 28 February 1747. Like all other papal bulls, it takes its name from the opening words of its Latin text, ''Postremo mense superioris anni'', meaning "In the last month of the p ...
''
*
Vorpahavak
Following the Armenian genocide, ''vorpahavak'' ( hy, որբահաւաք; ) was the organized effort to "reclaim" women and children who had been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam during the genocide.
See also
*Rape during the Armenian ge ...
*
Finaly Affair
References
External links
Marrus, Michael. "The Vatican and the Custody of Jewish Child Survivors after the Holocaust", ''Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 378–403
{{Pope Pius XII, state=collapsed
1946 in religion
Aftermath of the Holocaust
Catholicism-related controversies
Child custody
Child refugees
Children in the Holocaust
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Judaism
Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust