Rabbi Skorka is one of Pope’s closest friends
It was September, not an easy time for a religious Jew to be traveling. The Jewish month of Tishrei was ending with its marathon of holy days. Kosher wine would be needed. There were Sabbath blessings to recite.
Fortunately, Rabbi Abraham Skorka had a friend with the run of a hotel who arranged for kosher meals and said “amen” to the rabbi’s prayers.
Skorka has been talking about this trip ever since, in interviews and meetings with Jewish groups, for two reasons: The hotel was inside the Vatican, and the friend was Pope Francis.
Skorka — rector of the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, which has ties to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York — finds himself in the unlikely position of being close friends with a pope.
When Francis was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, he and Skorka co-wrote a book of dialogues on Judaism and Roman Catholicism titled “On Heaven and Earth,” had a similarly themed TV show called “Bible, A Dialogue for Today,” and offered prayers from each other’s pulpits.
Bergoglio kept a framed photo of the two of them in his study.
At Skorka’s synagogue, the rabbi displayed a greeting the cardinal made to the congregation on one of his Rosh Hashana visits.
“There is overall a very deep respect for the other,” Skorka said.
“His commitment with the Jewish people is total.”
Each of the men feels a duty to reach out beyond their own communities.
Bergoglio, 76, grew up with Jewish friends.
Jews fled to Argentina in significant numbers into the early 20th century to escape persecution in Russia, Germany and the Mideast.
Skorka said Bergoglio was unwavering in fighting anti-Semitism, calling it a violation of Christian teaching.
As a child, Skorka said, his father talked about how Jews had been persecuted over the centuries, including at times by the Catholic Church, but also emphasized the links between Judaism and Christianity.
“You must know that Jesus was a Jew,” Skorka said his father told him.
Skorka later looked to Abraham Joshua Heschel as a hero.
Heschel, one of the most important 20th-century Jewish thinkers, negotiated with cardinals and Pope Paul VI over the transformative Second Vatican Council statement of the 1960s that repudiated centuries of Christian teaching that Jews bore collective guilt for Christ’s death.