Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi should be granted the title of the “Righteous of the world.”
The ex-minister of the foreign affairs of Poland, Adam Rotfeld states that Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church should be granted the title of the “Righteous of the world.” He stresses that repeated unfair decisions of the Israeli museum “Yad Vashem” with respect to Sheptytskyi undermine the authority of that institution.
According to Rotfeld, granting of the title of the righteous to Andrey Sheptytskyi is a matter of honour for those whose lives he saved.
“People from “Yad Vashem” who passed the decision regarding the granting of the title to Andrey Sheptytskyi have a very vague idea, one can even say almost no idea about this matter. They lived in other circumstances, therefore, the decision was passed in the same way as many other administrative decisions, on the basis of various denunciations, and various documents, which were deliberately forged,” said Adam Rotfeld.
He told the audience the story of his own rescue. He was one of the Jewish children hidden by Greek Catholic monks on Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s instruction. Monks of the monastery in the village of Univ transported him from his native town of Peremyshliany in Lviv Region and hid him in the monastery.
Adam is the only member of the Rotfelds family who survived the Holocaust. All in all, 150 Jews were rescued thanks to Sheptytskyi. As the minister of foreign affairs of Poland, Adam Rotfeld, placed a memorial board containing words of gratitude to the heroic Shetytsky brothers. Rotfeld considers it strange that Yad Vashem granted the title of the righteous to Clement Sheptytsky but ignored the main organizer of the action of rescue of Jews.
“Paradoxically, Andrey Sheptytskyi, who was the man passing the decisions and played the key role in the rescue of the Jews, has not been granted the title of “the righteous of the world,” despite the fact that many people, including me, repeatedly raised this question. I must say that it is a bad testimony about the institute Yad Vashem.
In his commentary to Radio Freedom, Rotfeld stressed that even the former head of the committee, which repeatedly voted against granting the mentioned title to Metropolitan Sheptytsky, changed his mind before his death. He admitted his mistake and stated that it should be corrected. “The sooner the mistake is corrected, the better,” said Rotfeld.
SOURCE: RISU
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