The Tikkun Olam Pope

Haaretz carries this piece by Rabbi David Rosen, former chief rabbi of Ireland, Director of the American Jewish Committee's Interreligious Affairs Department. He formerly served as the Anti-Defamation League's co-liaison to the Vatican.

If such love does indeed exist today between Jews and Christians in general and Jews and Catholics in particular, we are grateful to Pope John Paul II for his great contribution in making this so.

Yedioth Ahronoth carries the story of Edith Zierer's encounter with the young Karol Wojtyla.

The strapping Polish seminarian gathered up into his arms the starving Jewish girl who had just been liberated from a Nazi forced labour camp. Now, Edith Zierer, 74, remembers the warm look in Karol Wojtyla's eyes and on Saturday she mourned the death of the man who became Pope John Paul II. "He was a kindred spirit in the greatest sense -- a man who could save a girl in such a state, freezing, starving and full of lice, and carry her to safety," she told Reuters. "I would not have survived had it not been for him." Polish-born Zierer was 13 when she ran away from the Nazi camp at Czestochowa in Poland after the Soviet army liberated it in January 1945, five months before World War Two ended in Europe.

Holocaust survivor Joseph Binensztok recalls his childhood friend Karol Wojtyla, the man who would be Pope John Paul II says this in Yedioth Ahronoth

I am sad today. I am sad for the death of the Pope who had respect and sympathy for the Jewish people. But mostly, I am sad for your death - Karol, my friend from the first grade."

"The silence of his absence will be very loud indeed." says this Jerusalem Post opinion piece.