Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
Conference Report: “Christianity in East Central Europe and the Holocaust,” 2025 Seminar on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 9-13 June 2025
By Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont
Convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust (PERH), the seminar “Christianity in East Central Europe and the Holocaust” brought together educators and scholars from Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United States. The annual PERH Faculty Seminar on Religion and the Holocaust seeks to assemble university-level educators and scholars for in-depth consideration of the narratives, scholarship, and pedagogical opportunities and challenges associated with a specific topic. The 2025 seminar was led by Dr. Ion Popa of the University of Manchester, who also serves as a historical consultant to the USHMM’s Vatican Archives Initiative, and facilitated by Rebecca Carter-Chand, PERH Director, and Dr. Kathryn Julian, PERH Program Officer.
The most brutal aspects of the Holocaust – ghettoization, massacres, and industrialized mass killing – took place in the lands of East Central and Eastern Europe, where the population was predominantly Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Greek Catholic. Yet the themes of antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, church-state relations, and the responses of church leaders and laity to the crimes of the Shoah remain insufficiently addressed in both scholarship and teaching. The region, stretching from the Baltic States to the Balkan Peninsula, from Poland well into the Soviet Union, was multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious. All the countries under consideration in this seminar, whether Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, or Hungary, experienced interreligious and interethnic hostility and violence, and in all of these lands Jews were targeted for annihilation. As Ion Popa emphasized in his introductory comments, research on the churches and the Holocaust in this part of Europe has evolved slowly, not only because of limited access to documentary sources, whether prior to the fall of communism or in the present day, but also because of national and religious identities that continue to impede objective and innovative scholarship.
Day one of the seminar addressed issues fundamental to the themes developed later in the week – geography, history, ecclesiastical structure, and terminology associated with the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Greek Catholic faiths – and the day’s proceedings placed particular emphasis on Orthodox theology and traditions. Of particular relevance to the situation of the Orthodox Churches in the first half of the twentieth century were the notion of “symphonia” between the church and civil authorities as well as the tendency of Orthodox churches to align themselves with national/ethnic states. “Embodied Tradition in the Orthodox Churches: Incarnation, Culture, and Communion” was the theme of the second session of the seminar, led by the first of two guest speakers, the Very Reverend Dr. Geoffrey Ready, Director of Orthodox Christian Studies in the Trinity College Faculty of Divinity at the University of Toronto. Providing a perspective both theological and historical, Dr. Ready drew attention to the importance of Orthodox self-identity. Not simply a “denomination,” but more a “way of life,” Orthodox Christianity emerges as a faith, he emphasized, “lived in the flesh, rooted in place, and shaped by culture.” Ready also drew attention to key characteristics that have distinguished the Orthodox from other Christian traditions: an understanding that the Incarnation “is not simply an event, but a paradigm”; the emphasis on continuity with the apostolic and patristic faith; the church as a model of a “relational communion”; and Orthodoxy’s view of salvation “not as juridical acquittal but as deification.” Revisiting the idea of “symphonia,” that is, the notion that church and state are called to “collaborate for the good of the people,” Ready also pointed potential dangers linked to this tradition, such as a tolerance for autocratic government. Session Three of the seminar, focusing on “Orthodox Churches and Jews before the Holocaust,” highlighted themes that would be revisited throughout the week, such as the persistence of “victim narratives” among Orthodox communities and the links emerging in the nineteenth century between Orthodox culture, nationalist aspirations, and antisemitism.
On the second day of the seminar, participants had the opportunity to tour the USHMM’s permanent exhibition, and then addressed the themes “Re-Christianization of Society between National and Transnational” and “Ethnonationalism and the Orthodox Churches.” With a focus on the interwar years, these two sessions considered again the role of geography, but in the post-World War I context of emerging states, new borders, political volatility, as well as ethnic and religious diversity and conflict. It was against this backdrop that churches worked to address many of the perceived threats and evils generated by the wartime experience such as poverty, mental illness, inflation, political instability, and violence, even as they engaged in a struggle against the secularization and “godlessness” of the era exemplified by the alleged destruction of the family, gender equality, civil marriage, public education and, not least, communism and its alleged link to Jews. Indeed, the notion of “Judeobolshevism” was capable of spanning both time and space in these years, providing fertile ground for the crimes of the Holocaust soon to follow.
Day three of the seminar began with an investigation and discussion of the Greek Catholic Churches. Outlining the situation of Greek Catholics in the Polish, Romanian, and Soviet contexts, Ion Popa provided historical background of these communities and discussed the persistence of “victim narratives” that influenced their relationships to state, nation, other faith communities, and Jews. Of particular interest was Popa’s presentation of the paradoxical and at times contradictory roles of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics in this period: support for Ukrainian nationalism was consistently strong, but the church openly condemned the violent actions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN); in another example, Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky welcomed the German invaders in July 1941 and supported the formation of a Ukrainian SS Division, and yet informed the Vatican about the mass killing of Jews and worked to shelter Jews in convents and orphanages.
Consonant with its larger research mission, the USHMM has taken a leading role in investigating and duplicating documents in the Vatican archives that have only recently become accessible to scholars. This was the focus of a presentation on the Museum’s “Vatican Archives Initiative” by Anatol Steck, Senior Project Director of Curatorial Services at the museum.
“Nationalism, Germanization, and the Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation” was the theme of Session Seven, led by the seminar’s second guest speaker, Dr. Jonathan Huener, Professor of History at the University of Vermont and at the time of the conference the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the USHMM’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Focusing on the unique context of occupied Poland, Huener emphasized that most Jews who died in the Shoah were killed in occupied Polish territory, that those Jews came to Poland from across the European continent, and that nearly everywhere in Poland Jewish death was proximate. At the same time, however, ethnic Poles and the Roman Catholic Church to which most of them adhered were subject to severe persecution. Persecution of ethnic Poles and the persecution of the Catholic Church – a theme insufficiently charted in the literature – burdened Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation and contributed to a “martyrological idiom” in Polish collective memory in the postwar years.
The seminar also focused on pedagogy by exploring ways for participants to incorporate into their teaching themes, controversies, and sources relating to the churches and the Holocaust in East Central Europe. This was accomplished in three sessions led by Kathryn Julian: “Integrating Visual Culture in Teaching,” “Conversion as Rescue and Violence,” and “Teaching Comparative Memory.” The latter session on memory was of special relevance, as comparison – among confessions, nations, occupation regimes, and legacies – was integral to the entire work of the seminar.
Day four began with a focus on the theme of “Judeobolshevism” and the importance of this myth to the churches’ re-Christianization effort of the 1930s and its foundational role in the Holocaust. Significantly, anti-communist discourse and the attendant notion of “Judeobolshevism”, whether in the Orthodox, Greek Catholic, or Roman Catholic context, gave impetus to and legitimized participation in, support for, or acceptance of the war against the Soviet Union, even as it nurtured, for many Christians, hostility toward Jews and undermined any sense of solidarity with them. Linked to the theme of “Judeobolshevism” was the controversial subject of Session Nine, “Clerical Fascism.” Not easily defined and subject to considerable debate, the notion of clerical fascism invites reconsideration of the ways in which fascist and Nazi ideology and praxis were regarded by some not as antithetical but rather as complementary to Christianity, and the ways in which the collaboration of Christian clergy and laity in the crimes of the Holocaust may have been understood as acting in the service of the faith and church.
Turning to a neglected and often misunderstood religious minority, Rebecca Carter-Chand led the next session on “Mennonites in Eastern Europe.” This relatively small Protestant denomination, with half its members in North America by the early twentieth century, was also concentrated in Eastern Europe, with approximately 120,000 Mennonites in the Soviet Union at the outbreak of the war. Regarded by the National Socialists as “Volksdeutsche,” or ethnic Germans living outside the Reich, Mennonites were not generally persecuted by the Nazis, except for a small pacifist fringe. In fact, a commitment to nonviolence, which many today associate with the Mennonites, was not central to their identity during World War Two. Significantly, in contrast to other Christian bodies in Europe, Mennonites have shown an ongoing commitment to acknowledging their past under National Socialism, prompting a question addressed on multiple occasions during the seminar: What does “acknowledgement of the past” mean for different churches in different contexts, and how and where have churches failed and succeeded in this regard?
This was an appropriate transition to the final day of the seminar, which featured sessions on “Obscuring History and Collective Amnesia after 1945” and “A Return to Interwar Christian Antisemitism?” Collective memory and collective amnesia, as Ion Popa stressed, were strongly influenced by the control and persecutory measures of communist governments, but were also the products of “whitewashing narratives” that did not accurately depict the wartime experience of the churches and their relationships to the Holocaust. Paradoxically, however, such obscurant narratives could at times serve the needs of both the communist governments and the churches. And the challenges remain to the present day, with churches in several East Central European countries aligning themselves with nationalist governments or engaging, along with those governments, in “right-wing nostalgia,” antidemocratic initiatives, and support for authoritarianism.
