A meeting between the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) was held this morning in Paris.
One of the main speakers was Metropolitan Emmanuel of France, who defended the positions of the Orthodox Church, while in a public “attack” against Hellenism, he replied clearly that the Orthodox Church and the Greek people had never been deprecated the Jews and that in the modern Greek state the phenomena of anti-Semitism observed in other societies have been eliminated.
He even referred to the historical events of the heroic rescue of Greek Jew citizens during the Second World War in Zakynthos by the late Metropolitan Chrysostomos, in Thessaloniki by the late Metropolitan Gennadius, and to the memorable official letter of protest signed in Athens on March 23, 1943 by the late Archbishop Damaskenos and 27 leading members of cultural, academic and professional institutions.