Jews, whatever their feelings about the Catholic Church, have a duty to reject any attempt to usurp the Holocaust and use it for partisan purposes in such a debate--particularly when the attempt disparages the testimony of Holocaust survivors and spreads to inappropriate figures the condemnation that belongs to Hitler and the Nazis. The Talmud teaches that "whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved the whole world." More than any other twentieth-century leader, Pius fulfilled this Talmudic dictum, when the fate of the European Jewry was at stake. No other pope had been so widely praised by Jews--and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was genuinely and profoundly a righteous gentile.
--Rabbi David G. Dalin