In the years immediately following World War II, most church leaders tried to ignore that the Holocaust terrors had been perpetrated by professed Christians. However, the implications of this disturbing fact were not lost upon the Jewish people.

As the years passed, Holocaust survivors began speaking up. Books, magazines, and film presentations brought the world face-to-face with the terrors of the concentration camp. The State of Israel’s fight for survival likewise focused the world’s attention on Jewry. As a result, Christendom has increasingly come under fire. As G. Peter Fleck wrote in The Christian Century: “There is something terribly wrong with . . . a religion and a civilization that could bring forth and tolerate such an abomination [as the Holocaust]. And there must be something wrong with a church that observed near total silence and inaction during the horror.”

Jewish leaders agree. Rabbi Stuart E. Rosenberg asks why, following World War II, ‘so few churches or their leaders saw that there was a relationship between the long and continuous history of Christian anti-Judaism and the end product of Nazism​—the calculated murder of one third of the Jewish people.’ He noted that many church members “hid their faces, or, even worse, placidly accepted the doom of the six million in Hitler’s Europe as a divine judgment for the ‘Jewish rejection of Jesus.’”​—The Christian Problem.

And Elie Wiesel says in his book A Jew Today: “How is one to explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever excommunicated by the church? That Pius XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka? That among the S.S. a large proportion were believers who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between massacres? And that they all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?”

On the other hand, Judaism is repelled by the idolatry rampant in Christendom. The Trinity doctrine is likewise viewed with disdain by Jews as a clear contradiction of “the essence of Judaism”​—the monotheistic doctrine embodied in the words, “HEAR, O ISRAEL: THE LORD OUR GOD, THE LORD IS ONE.” (Deuteronomy 6:4, The Soncino Chumash) Scholar Jakób Jocz observed: “It is at this point that the gulf between the Church and the Synagogue opens before us in all its depth and significance. . . . The teaching of the divinity of Jesus Christ is an unpardonable offence in the eyes of Judaism.”​—The Jewish People and Jesus Christ.

Christianity and Judaism also have differing views of the Mosaic Law and its traditions. Rabbi Stuart E. Rosenberg argued: “Without God’s covenant there would be no Jewish nation: It shaped their very beginning, and they never abandoned it. . . . But from the very first, Christians have had a problem with Israel’s covenant.” Indeed, the apostle Paul said of the Mosaic Law: “[God] blotted out the handwritten document . . . , and He has taken it out of the way by nailing it to the torture stake.”​—Colossians 2:14.

After all, what have the religions of Christendom done to recommend themselves to Jews? Rabbi Samuel Sandmel catalogs some of the horrors of history “performed by Christians against Christians, in the name of Christianity,” and he asks: “In this light, can you reasonably expect us to acquiesce in the judgment that your religion is superior to ours? Has it bred better people? Has it determined the issues of peace and war, and prosperity and tranquillity among Christian nations?”

The Holocaust has also brought the issue of Jewish survival​—as a people, as a religion, and as a culture—​to the forefront. Jews thus tend to view conversion, not as simply the adopting of heretical doctrine, but as an act of treason. The Journal of Jewish Communal Service lamented: “We can ill afford to lose any of the newest adult generation of Jews. . . . What the Nazis failed to do in the Holocaust, may yet occur through [proselytizing].”

Rabbi Henry Siegman thus concludes: “The memory of forced conversions is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the Jewish people and has been the most serious obstacle to the development of Christian-Jewish relations.”