DEBORAH AMOS, Host:
We go now to Rome, where Pope Benedict visits Rome's main synagogue on Sunday. The visit comes at a time of Jewish-Catholic tensions. One of Italy's top rabbis is boycotting the event. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells us about the long history of troubled relations.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI: While roofers prepare for the pope's visit, guided tours of synagogue are still under way.
YAEL CALO: The first sign that the Jews arrived in Rome, we're talking about 161 before Common Era.
POGGIOLI: Yael Calo says Jews arrived here long before the birth of Christ.
CALO: We have 22 centuries uninterrupted presence in Rome.
POGGIOLI: Under papal rule persecution of Jews alternated with relative calm - until 1555, when Pope Paul IV ruled they shouldn't prosper alongside Christians. As infidels, he said, God condemned them to eternal servitude. He ordered all Jews in the Rome region be restricted to the eight-acre ghetto. Jews were not allowed to pursue education or practice professions, and could leave the ghetto only between sunrise and sunset.
CALO: The main occupation for more than three centuries for the Jews of Rome was selling used clothes. Schmata - that's the Yiddish word. Okay.
POGGIOLI: Guide Calo says Roman Jews were subjected to constant humiliations.
CALO: The main reason of the ghetto was not to kill the Jews - the Nazis are going to think about that later. The pope wanted them to convert to Christianity by letting them live a hard life.
POGGIOLI: Jews were forced to listen to priests' sermons and at times even forced to convert. The issue of conversion still rankles. A cartoon in an Italian-Jewish newspaper shows Benedict crossing the Tiber River on a tightrope, balancing with a pole - the word dialogue at one end, conversion at the other. The paper's editor, Guido Vitale, says these two contradictory aspirations undermine Jewish-Catholic relations.
GUIDO VITALE: (Through translator) We heard a variety of Jewish voices, and all agree that dialogue has value only if it's tackled with humility, honesty and mutual respect, and without the presumption of converting the other.
POGGIOLI: Veteran Vatican analyst Marco Politi says Roman Jews in particular cannot forgive Pius' silence during the Holocaust.
MARCO POLITI: Because during the war there was a great deportation of Roman Jews, practically directly under the windows of the papal palace. These Jews were kept by the Nazi troops. They stayed two days here in Rome waiting for the train to leave for Auschwitz. And the pope never spoke. He never said publicly this has not to happen.
POGGIOLI: Lisa Palmieri, the American Jewish Committee's liaison to the Vatican, says the Jewish-Catholic dialogue is essential for both sides, and it's crucial that there be no step backward.
LISA PALMIERI: It is hoped that the pope will realize that the Jewish requests regarding Pius XII be honored.
POGGIOLI: Those requests are that beatification be postponed until the Vatican opens up its archives to independent researchers.
AMOS: Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.