http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/europe/16pope.html

 ROME — When Pope John Paul II visited Rome’s main synagogue in 1986, the first time a pope had ever entered a Jewish house of worship, it was a historic step forward in Catholic-Jewish relations. When Pope Benedict XVI visits the same synagogue on Sunday, the question is whether it will begin to repair the tensions that have developed between the two religions under his papacy.

Since becoming pope in 2005, Benedict has set off several contretemps with Jews. He has advocated a rite that includes a prayer calling for their conversion. He revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops, one of whom had denied the scope of the Holocaust.

Last month, he advanced Pius XII, the World War II-era pope, one step closer to sainthood, a move that almost derailed the synagogue visit and has prompted at least one leading Italian rabbi to boycott it. Many Jews say Pius could have done more to stop the deportation of Jews; his defenders say his silence toward the Nazis was sound diplomacy, aimed at saving more lives.

Amplifying sensitivities is the fact that Benedict, 82, is also a German of a certain generation, an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth, whose every action is scrutinized closely in that light.

“The cloud over the relationship still relates to the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

And yet a visit by a pope to the Jewish community here, the oldest one in Europe, has particular resonance. The city’s Jews have lived in the heart of the Roman Empire and the shadow of the Vatican theocracy for millennia. Consigned by the popes to a ghetto in the mid-16th century, they gained full citizenship only with the unification of Italy in the 1870s, before Mussolini’s 1938 racial laws stripped away many of their rights again.

In 1986, John Paul was warmly received at the Rome synagogue, where he called the Jews “our dearly beloved brothers.” He also quoted from “Nostra Aetate,” a landmark document on interfaith relations from the Second Vatican Council, saying that the church “deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone.”

If John Paul’s visit “brought down a wall, then Benedict’s visit builds a bridge across two sides of the Tiber that sometimes seem very far,” said Andrea Riccardi, a church historian and founder of the lay Community of Sant’Egidio, which helped orchestrate Sunday’s event. (The Vatican is on the other side of the Tiber from the synagogue in the former Jewish ghetto.)

Both the Vatican and Jews in Rome see Benedict’s visit, his third trip to a synagogue since becoming pope, as the continuation of an interfaith friendship and an effort to calm recent controversies.

“It’s true that there have been moments of tension and misunderstanding,” said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. “But a specific meaning of this visit is to affirm from the Catholic side the essentiality and richness and importance of the common elements in the relationship.”

The visit evolved from a longstanding invitation by Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, for Benedict to call at the synagogue. “We have a very, very complicated history and a lot of problems to resolve,” Rabbi Di Segni said. “But it’s one thing to resolve them at a distance marked by chill and total hostility, and it’s another thing to have a willingness to listen respectfully.”

Both sides were waiting for the right time. Tensions flared last January after Benedict revoked the excommunications of four bishops from the Society of St. Pius X, a group founded in opposition to the liberalizing changes of the Second Vatican Council. The Vatican has said that Benedict, who has denounced anti-Semitism, was not aware that one of the bishops had publicly denied the scope of the Holocaust.

Relations between the Vatican and Jews improved somewhat after the pope went to Israel and the Palestinian territories last May, although some Israelis complained that he did not mention the word “Nazi” or “German” while at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Benedict’s decision just before Christmas to confirm the “heroic virtues” of Pius XII, moving him closer to sainthood, stung many Jews, especially those in Rome, where 1,000 Jews were deported to their deaths in 1943 during the Nazi occupation.

“These acts happened under the windows of the pope,” Rabbi Di Segni said. But he added that it was “undeniable” that the church helped save thousands of Italian Jews by hiding them in church buildings.

The Vatican has explained that the beatification track of Pius is not a “hostile act” toward Jews and is based on his Christian life, not his historical record.

Scholars and Jewish groups have called on the Vatican to open the archives from Pius XII’s papacy to full historical scrutiny. The Vatican has said it will take at least five more years to catalog all the material.

Yet Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, the president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly and a former chief rabbi of Milan, said he would not attend the visit on Sunday, as a protest of the pope’s move on Pius XII. “To do this so close to the visit was in bad taste,” Rabbi Laras said. He said the visit would not help dialogue. “Who gains more?” he asked. “It’s not us, it’s some reactionary elements in the church.”

At the start of what is expected to be a two-hour stop on Sunday afternoon, Benedict is to place a wreath by a plaque in the Jewish ghetto commemorating the deportation to Auschwitz of 1,000 Roman Jews.

Shopkeepers in the former Jewish ghetto surrounding the synagogue seemed generally enthusiastic about the visit. Tending her family’s clothing shop, Fatina Calò displayed the kind of realpolitik and resignation that have helped Rome’s Jews survive for millennia. “Peace is better than war,” she said with a shrug.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2010, on page A7 of the New York edition.