Jewish childhood friend of late Pope John Paul II dies

(January 03, 2012) A lifetime Jewish friend and childhood playmate of the late Blessed John John Paul II has died in a Rome clinic, his widow said on Monday. Jerzy Kluger, a Polish-born Jew who lost much of his family to Nazi death camps, was 90 when he passed away Dec. 31. Irene Kluger told The Associated Press that her husband was suffering from Alzheimer's disease for three years and was buried on Monday. The couple lived in Rome for decades, but at Pope John Paul's urging, Kluger, a World War II veteran, occasionally returned to visit Wadowice, the southern Polish town where the two spent their boyhoods, his widow said. Kluger, a year younger than Pope John Paul, who died in 2005, was one of the last living childhood friends of the late pontiff. He was 5 when he met Karol Wojtyla, who would become a priest two decades later in his predominantly Catholic homeland, and eventually Krakow's cardinal, before being elected as history's only Polish-born pontiff in 1978.