KAUNAS: Pope Francis said on Sunday that society should be vigilant for “any whiff” of resurgent anti-Semitism, calling for new generations to be taught the horrors of the Holocaust.

He made his appeal in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, on the 75th anniversary of the wartime liquidation of the ghetto in the capital Vilnius. Two years of Nazi oppression in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed or deported culminated on Sept 23-24, 1943.

More 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered by the Nazis, aided by some locals. The country’s Jewish community today numbers about 3,000.

“The Jewish people suffered insults and cruel punishments,” Pope Francis told a crowd of about 100,000 at an open-air Mass.

“Let us ... ask the Lord to give us the gift of discernment to detect in time any seed of that pernicious attitude, any whiff of it that can taint the heart of generations that did not experience those times,” he said.

Pope Francis, who was due to visit a monument to the ghetto victims later on the second day of a four-day visit to the Baltic states, was using the anniversary to make a broader appeal beyond Lithuania, a papal aide said.

Reports of anti-Semitic acts have increased in Europe, coinciding with the rise of populist, right-wing parties in a number of countries.

Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2018