L.A. Jewish Leaders to Join Interfaith Meeting

Because a high-level meeting at the Vatican looks promising for Jewish-Roman Catholic understanding, Los Angeles Jewish community leaders said Monday that they will participate after all in an interfaith celebration in Los Angeles next month with Pope John Paul II.

The Southern California Board of Rabbis and other local Jewish organizations had announced June 23 that they would boycott the interfaith meeting unless the Pope explained to world Jewish leaders why he was granting an audience on June 25 to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, accused by Jewish groups of complicity in Nazi war crimes.

The Pope did not yield to Jewish protestations and cancel the audience, but it was announced last week that a substantial range of Jewish-Catholic concerns will be discussed at the Vatican before the Pope journeys to the United States. The Vatican meeting will be held in about three weeks.

Rabbi Harvey Fields, interreligious chairman of the Board of Rabbis, said there was “a unanimity of feeling” among 20 representatives of major Jewish organizations meeting Monday that it would be appropriate to accept the invitation to join the Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu representatives in the Sept. 16 event as originally planned.

“We were delighted that the Vatican doors of dialogue were opened and that we can look forward to strengthening our own local dialogues,” said Fields, who is also senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

The Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese had held back the mailing of invitations to the 100 Jewish leaders, pending attempts for rapprochement at the international, national and local levels.

But Fields said he has asked the archdiocese to send the invitations. He said that he and Howard Miller, who chairs the community relations committee of the Jewish Federation-Council of Greater Los Angeles, will be sending a letter to the 100 invitees saying that Los Angeles Jewish leaders “applaud” the planned meeting at the Vatican and are “looking for a positive outcome.”

Msgr. Royale Vadakin, who is coordinating the interfaith event for the archdiocese, said Catholic and Jewish leaders have kept in constant touch since the controversy erupted.

“During these past seven weeks of strain and tension, the archdiocese has been deeply grateful for and impressed by the courage, compassion and commitment to dialogue which the Los Angeles Jewish community has shown,” Vadakin said in a statement.

The interfaith celebration, the next-to-last event on the Pope’s two-day schedule in Los Angeles, will be held Sept. 16 at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

It is still uncertain whether U.S. Jewish leaders will meet Sept. 11 in Miami with the Pope. National Jewish officials, conferring in New York on Friday, hailed the upcoming Jewish-Catholic conference at the Vatican but did not say whether they would drop their boycott of the meeting in Florida as a result.