Holocaust hangs over pope's visit to Rome synagogue

But silence greeted his assertion that the Holy See "performed actions of support, often hidden and discreet."
The 82-year-old pontiff, a respected theologian, punctuated his speech with Hebrew words, stressing the two faiths' common heritage.
"We pray to the same God and have the same roots but often remain unknown to each other," he said.
The much-anticipated visit came barely a month after the pope angered many Jews by moving his wartime predecessor Pius XII, accused of inaction during the Holocaust, further on the road to sainthood.
The Catholic Church has long argued that Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, saved many Jews who were hidden away in religious institutions, and that his silence was born out of a wish to avoid aggravating their situation.
Speaking before Pope Benedict, the head of Rome's Jewish community demanded access to Vatican archives on Pius XII.
"Awaiting a shared judgement, we wish with the utmost respect that historians will have access to the Vatican archives concerning this period," Riccardo Pacifici said, referring to the "painful" silence of the wartime pope.
"Maybe he could not have stopped the death trains, but he could have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity for our brothers taken off to Auschwitz," he said.
Pacifici, whose grandparents died at Auschwitz, however said in a voice choked with emotion that he was "grateful" to Catholic nuns in Florence for sheltering his father and uncle.
In another emotion-charged moment, Pacifici paid homage to Holocaust survivors present, many of whom had tears in their eyes, as the pope rose to applaud them.
The Vatican said last year that some five or six years of work remained before the secret archives on Pius XII could be opened to researchers.
Archivist Sergio Pagano said the documents would show that he had "taken risks, including personal risks, to save the Jews."
Benedict's visit, announced in October, appeared at risk of being cancelled amid howls of protest over a papal decree bestowing the title "venerable" on Pius XII.
Adding fuel to the fire, the head of the Roman Catholic Church on Friday urged Vatican doctrinal experts to speed rapprochement with a Catholic fraternity that includes a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson.
The tension on Sunday was in stark contrast to the warm welcome reserved for Benedict's predecessor John Paul II, who became the first modern pope to visit a synagogue -- the same imposing temple on Rome's River Tiber -- in 1986.
A high-profile stayaway was the president of Italy's assembly of rabbis, Giuseppe Laras, who said Benedict had "weakened" ties between Catholics and Jews.
Laras said afterward that the pope's remarks included no "new elements inducing greater optimism on relations between Judaism and Catholicism."
He noted that Benedict did not cite Pius XII by name, "saying only that many priests helped the Jews, a point that no one disputes."
Rome's Jewish community has some 15,000 members.
While Pius XII was pope, the Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 Roman Jews for deportation on October 16, 1943. Only a handful returned from the death camps.
Benedict placed a wreath before a plaque commemorating this tragedy before going into the synagogue.
He also stopped before another inscription marking a 1982 attack by Palestinian extremists that killed a two-year-old child and wounded 27 other people.
Pope Benedict has visited two other synagogues as pontiff, in Cologne in his native Germany and in New York.
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