Yad Vashem honors Archbishop Saliege of Toulouse

July 14, 2012: On the eve of the 70^th anniversary of "combing the Velodrome in winter", Yad Vashem, Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, added an engraving on the medal of the Righteous, delivered in 1970, posthumously, to the family of the archbishop of Toulouse, Cardinal Jules-Gérard Saliege, for his work on behalf of Jews during World War II.
"combing the Velodrome in winter” took place on 16 and 17 July 1942 and was the largest mass arrest of Jews made in France during World War II - 13,000 Parisian Jews including 4000 children were arrested to be sent to concentration camps.
On Friday the museum of the Legion d'Honneur in Paris, paid tribute to the archbishop of Toulouse exposing the medal of the Righteous, the Cross Liberation Medal and the Legion of Honour of the Cardinal. Bringing together the three medal of the Righteous of the nations is a unique project in any museum in the world.
In August 1942, the cardinal archbishop of Toulouse stood in defense of the Jews among his Christian brethren in a famous pastoral letter, reminding them that they could not forget that "all Jews are our brothers." The Vichy regime, forbidding the publication of that letter, in fact contributed to its spread.

This extraordinary gift will add to research conducted by Sylvie Berney based on many unpublished documents - funds congregations, private correspondences, episcopal archives, including personal notes of Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, archbishop of Paris during the occupation - and reveal that these positions were not the fruit, as they are often presented today.

More generally, this research in the diocesan archives throws further light on the attitude of Pius XII. In fact, since 1942, in the free zone in the south of France, Bishop Valerio Valeri, the papal nuncio, at the request of the Pope played a leading role in implementing a collective strategy. Sylvie Berney in his work recalls that the networks of Jewish resistance from that time benefited from the support of Catholics, working with religious institutions. Berney also shows that this collaboration would not have been possible without the support of the French bishops, which was then inserted explicitly assistance to Jews being hunted down one of the objectives of the congregations in their dioceses.
So it is in the framework of this apparent strategy is the collective action of the great heroic figures of the French Church, like that of Cardinal Saliege. And it is his prophetic courage that Yad Vashem has honored by making an impact on the back of the medal of the Righteous formula of the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life saves humanity."