MOSCOW When a leader assumes office, his initial acts are often guided to his natural constituency.
As the spiritual leader of 700 million Roman Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI turned to the immense gathering at World Youth Day in Cologne. Born and raised in Germany, he chose his home country as the place of his first official visit as pope outside Rome.
That Catholics and Germans were spiritually uplifted and challenged to regenerate the moral and religious aspects of their lives is undeniable. And that the pope spoke in such a defining manner to both his own religious flock and to his compatriots marks him out as a truly outstanding international leader.
But Benedict chose to do more than speak to his own flock. He chose to reach out and interact with members of other faiths and nationalities. Therein lies the difference between ordinary internal leadership and a wider, more open form, which we call statesmanship.
Moreover, the pope chose to enter a synagogue as part of his first visit abroad, and he did it as both the leader of the Catholic faith and as a German.
The world view of Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, and his relations with the Jewish people, were at least in part a result of having been a religious leader in a totalitarian Communist country.
Similarly, his successor's formative years took place against the backdrop of the most vicious, barbarous and ungodly regime the world has ever known. Many Germans acted, supported or acquiesced in those days of horror and many were Catholic. And the result of those actions and inactions was the systematic, planned murder of six million Jews.
Thus culminated 2,000 years of history during which the Catholic Church, through a plethora of deeds and manifestations, put us Jews through an extremely rough school.
Today, however, because formidable new challenges are looming on the horizon, Jews and Christians should join forces to defend their shared values and common interests.
In today's emerging popular culture of instant gratification, where sound bites inspired by mass communication seem more important then erudition, celebrities often have more influence on religious trends than the clergy. This phenomenon deeply influences the very foundation of our faiths.
In addition, Jews and Catholics alike find themselves confronted by radical Islam's repeated calls for the complete physical eradication of all other faiths of "non-believers" and for a "jihad" - a holy war against a Western society which has learned through its own hard lessons of history the necessity for human rights and dialogue.
Throughout history, we Jews learned the hard way how to survive as a constantly persecuted minority in a hostile world.
Following in the illustrious footsteps of his predecessor John Paul II, and as a worthy heir to John XXIII, Pope Benedict has opened his arms to Jews around the world.
And we, in our turn, wish to open our arms to those of the Catholic faith.
As the greatest experts on earth on religious survival as a besieged minority, we can help Catholic believers to retain their human dignity, their human rights, their religious freedom, their right to be different, their right to hold on to their beliefs in the face of emerging existential threats.
We, the Jewish people, are reaching out to the Catholic Church in brotherhood. Let us try to start the third millennia of Jewish-Christian relations with renewed hope and mutual goodwill, and also with mutual respect and dignity.
If we are both to survive among the oldest civilizations on earth, we must rise to meet the daunting challenges, both internal and external, that are facing us.
Much has been accomplished during the second half of the last century, starting with the Declaration Nostra Aetate adopted by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and the declaration "We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah" in 1998 by John Paul II.
This was followed by full diplomatic recognition of the state of Israel and the visits by John Paul to the synagogue of Rome and to Israel.
Now we have witnessed similarly gracious gestures by a German pope in his own homeland.
May the Lord bless us all, so we may hand over this earth in better shape that we inherited it. We owe nothing less to the generations to follow!