Vatican ambassador to Israel will attend Holocaust memorial service despite boycott

JERUSALEM – The Vatican’s ambassador to Israel will attend a Holocaust memorial service at the Yad Vashem museum, reversing an earlier decision to boycott the event, officials said Sunday.\nVatican officials had said they would skip the Sunday event because of a caption at the Holocaust museum describing the wartime conduct of Pope Pius XII.\nOfficials from Yad Vashem, the Vatican’s Embassy and the Israeli Foreign Ministry confirmed Sunday that the ambassador, Monsignor Antonio Franco, would attend.\nThe caption next to the picture of Pius reads, “even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest.”\nPius “maintained his neutral position” with two exceptions, the caption says, criticizing “his silence and absence of guidelines.” The exceptions were appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia toward the end of the war.\nThe boycott had threatened to upset fragile relations between Israel and the Vatican.\nThe memorial service is traditionally attended by all foreign ambassadors to Israel or their representatives. Yad Vashem had said this would mark the first case in which a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the ceremony.\nThe disputed photo caption first appeared in 2005, when Yad Vashem opened its new museum. Shortly after, the previous Vatican ambassador asked that the caption be changed.