The World - News from Feb. 24, 1989

The head of the European Jewish Congress protested delays in moving a Carmelite convent from the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. Lionel Kopelowitz, the group’s president, said in a statement that the continued presence of the nuns there past an agreed upon deadline is an affront to Jews. Vatican and Jewish leaders in 1987 agreed that the nuns would leave the site by Feb. 22, 1989. “Until this problem is resolved, ongoing Jewish relations with the church will remain difficult,” Kopelowitz said. Vatican sources blamed the delays on logistics. The nuns have occupied a building at Auschwitz known as the Old Theater, where the Nazis stored the poisonous gas Zyuklon B along with the clothes and valuables of their victims.