Public Statement May 6, 2018
We recognize the heritage of the Jewish people in the roots of our faith and in our hope.
We are grateful to them for this heritage and we are indebted to them for having transmitted to us the Bible, the book, which establish our faith, our values and our worldview.
The Jewish people were for us, according to the promise made to Abraham, light and blessing by making us know the only God creator and redeemer.
Through the ages our traditions have obscured the special place of the Jewish people.
The theology of the substitution of Israel by the Church, the teaching of contempt, false propaganda, silence and indifference were the ferments of the marginalization of the Jewish people, their rejection, their persecution and the deprivation of fundamental rights in Switzerland and in our city.
As heirs of these traditions we reject those mechanisms that contributed to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
We repent and ask forgiveness for these serious abuses.
We want, alongside the Jewish people, to refuse any form of anti-Semitism and we want to denounce its modern form which found in anti-Zionism the means to justify hatred and murder.
We recognize the legitimacy of the nation of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people in the land of their ancestors. We do not want to associate ourselves with those who, in each generation, rise up against those people to destroy them and who today would like to wipe Israel out of the community of peoples.
We respect and value the special and unique place of the Jewish people in the concert of nations and we are committed to honor and do them good.
We will encourage the new generation in the ways that we are affirming today.
We want to pass on to them a legacy nourished by the hope of the prophets of Israel for a society of justice and peace in which men will no longer learn to wage war.
Public statement made on Sunday May 6, 2018 on the Place des Nations in Geneva.