Pope Benedict meets Germany's Jewish leaders

Following his speech to Parliamentarians of the German Bundestag, Pope Benedict XVI met privately with a group of Jewish leaders. Our correspondent, Veronica Scarisbrick gives us the details:
The gleaming dome of the Reichstag building acted as a ceiling of light into the afternoon of Benedict XVI’s first State Visit to his homeland where he'd been invited to address Parliament.
But once his key note speech delivered, his afternoon at the Reichstag continued in another venue and this time there was no light filtering down from the dome above.
Symbolically reflecting a dark chapter in history for the group there to meet him: the representatives of the German nation’s Jewish Community. Jews who in this city and in this nation were arrested and shipped off to extermination and concentration camps.
And on this occasion the Pope chose to highlight the memory of this Shoah :
“Today, he said I find myself in a central place of remembrance, the appalling remembrance that it was from here that the Shoah, the annihilation of our Jewish fellow citizens in Europe, was planned and organized. Before the Nazi terror, there were about half a million Jews living in Germany, and they formed a stable component of German society.”
Whereas the Pope went on to say after the Second World War it had become virtually impossible for Jews to live in Germany.
Jews represented on Thursday afternoon in the Reichstag building by the President of the Central Council of Jews in German, Doctor Dieter Graumann who said to the Pope : “ We are here together , we believe together and we quite simply belong together”.
And replying to Doctor Graumann , Pope Benedict too spoke of exchanges between the Catholic Church and Judaism in Germany : “Jews and Christians he said, have a shared responsibility for the development of society which always has a religious dimension. May all those taking part in this journey move forward together.”
The Council is an umbrella organization inaugurated in the aftermath of the Second world War in an effort to cope precisely with the consequences inherent to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis.
But the good news today is that this scenario has undergone a new development, a renewal triggered by the breaking down of barriers with the East, when an influx of migrants from the former Soviet Union multiplied by four the number of Jews in Germany which at 120.000 registered members has become Europe's third largest group.
A younger group , who have no memory of the holocaust highlighted in 2005 by the creation of a Memorial just down the road from the Reichstag : a gigantic, oppressive, maze of gun metal stone slabs in different sizes. An eery place with paths so narrow visitors are forced to move single file. Built with the purpose of recreating the confusion and disorientation holocaust survivors have so often described.
With the Pope in Berlin , I’m Veronica Scarisbrick
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