Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors welcomed Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, although some said they thought his remarks were problematic.

The Jewish co-chairman of Poland's Council for Christians and Jews, Stanislaw Krajewski, said Pope Benedict's May 28 visit had provided an "exceptional occasion" to say "important things which would be heard not just in Poland, but throughout the world." He praised the pope for his quotation from Psalm 44 that Jews were being killed and marked "as sheep to be slaughtered."

"It's very important he said the murder of Jews was intended to kill God himself," Krajewski told Catholic News Service. "This is still true today, at a time when Jewish life is being devalued."

Poland's former foreign minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, said he believed Pope Benedict's visit would confirm the church's previous contributions to Polish-German reconciliation. Bartoszewski, who earlier welcomed the pope at the camp's death block, said he recalled feeling "powerless and degraded" when, as a prisoner, he watched executions.

"It would have been beyond my imagination that two popes would come here --- first a Pole, then a German," Bartoszewski said, referring to Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to the camp. "It's overwhelmingly symbolic that a German pope from Bavaria has now been here, and I think the whole world understands this."

Speaking after the Birkenau ceremony, during which he recited the Jewish prayer for the dead, Poland Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said the pope had shown "spiritual courage" by coming to the camp.

"He knows where he comes from and his experience of his country's history during youth," the New York-born rabbi told KAI, the Polish Catholic news agency. "As human beings, we must understand what he must feel here and respect the fact that he found the spiritual strength to come."

The chief rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Riccardi Di Segni, described the pope's address as "historic," but told Italy's ANSA news agency May 29 it was also "problematic in its contents." He said the pope's reference to "vicious criminals" suggested the German people "were themselves victims and did not stand alongside the persecutors."

"We agree when someone says God cannot be judged," Rabbi Di Segni said. "But if history is the work of people, then it is our duty to judge them.

"There is almost an accent on the problem of the absence of God and not on the silence of men and their responsibilities," Rabbi Di Segni said of the address.

Israel Gutman, a historian from Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, criticized the pope for not "offering an apology or condemning anti-Semitism and racism."

"European anti-Semitism has a long history --- unfortunately, Christianity and above all the church's leaders did not always struggle against it or express clear condemnation," Gutman told Poland's Dziennik daily May 29.

Los Angeles Rabbi David Baron, who participated in the ceremony, criticized Pope Benedict's reference to the Poles who, the pope said, "along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place."

"As a German pope and Jewish rabbi, we'll in (the) future be praying with the same intention for a spirit of love and reconciliation," the rabbi told KAI.

"But although we should be aware of Polish sufferings, this place was created to destroy not Poles, but Jews, the whole of my nation," he said. "Innocent Poles died here too, including those who helped rescue Jews. But we should remember what the aim was."

Meanwhile, the Jewish-born former archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, whose mother died at Auschwitz, described the visit as "one of the most important moments" of his life.

"As a priest, Christian, Jew and son who lost a mother, I think the pope's words were deep, truthful and sincere," Cardinal Lustiger told Polish TV. "They were exactly what should be said in this place, where we witnessed history being made today."

The cardinal's half-brother, Arno Lustiger, who lives in Germany and lost his father and brothers at the camp, told KAI: "As a Jewish nonbeliever, I value the Christian perspective which can find hope in the face of such evil. Frankly speaking, I haven't matured to this yet. I still feel a pain which simply cannot be forgotten."

Henryk Mandelbaum, the only surviving member of Auschwitz-Birkenau's Jewish "Sonderkommando" --- the Jews who were forced to dispose of the bodies of others killed in the death camps --- was 19 when he was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He said that on May 28 he had given Pope Benedict a book with a dedication urging him to continue Pope John Paul's efforts "to bring the world to peace."

A Jewish-born Catholic priest, Father Romuald Weksler-Waszkinel, who met the pope at Birkenau wearing his Jewish skullcap, said Auschwitz represented "a permanent test of conscience for Christian Europe," but added that the visit by a German pope had also "brought part of history to an end."

---CNS