Introduction.

On january 16, 2004, the associated press reported that israel's chief rabbis, Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar, had received an audience with Pope John Paul II. The rabbis asked the pope to speak out against anti-Semitism and to devote a day in the Catholic calendar “for study and reflection on the Jewish faith.” The pope replied that he had “striven to promote Jewish-Catholic dialogue and to foster ever greater understanding, respect and cooperation.” But, in his native country of Poland, the Polish society and the Catholic Church continued to struggle with the difficult legacy of Polish-Jewish relations. Surrounded by denial, condemnations, and apologetics, the question of relations between the Polish Catholic Church and the Jews still stirs strong emotions and controversies even though of the millions of Jews in Poland in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, fewer than twenty thousand remain. One such controversy centered around a painting, formerly known as Infanticidia or “Ritual Murder by Jews,” in the cathedral church in Sandomierz, a small town in southeastern Poland. The painting depicts the murder of a Christian child by Jews, a crime of which Sandomierz Jews were accused a number of times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The painting itself is said to commemorate a murder of 1710. These tales were popularized in two notorious books published contemporaneously by the local priest, Stefan Żuchowski, instigator of one of the trials of Jews for such alleged crimes and commissioner of the painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]