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A church bell’s chime is constantly heard in the large room, a space tastefully transformed into unpredictably curving pathways and nooks that give the feel of an old European town.
Upon turning one corner, the path goes through an entrance to a Nazi ghetto in Poland. One enters the portal and the chimes blend into a recording of World War II-era Luftwaffe planes roaring overhead.

On the other side of the wall — simultaneously feet and worlds away — the mournful yet uplifting sounds of Yiddish singing can still be heard.

Such are the starkly contrasting yet expertly woven sounds and images of the new exhibit of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, “A Blessing To One Another: Pope John Paul II & The Jewish People,” which opened this week and runs through Jan. 1, 2011.

Even for those familiar with the remarkable journey John Paul II had with what he famously called “our older brothers,” one cannot help but be taken aback by the artifacts and photographs presented, let alone the complexity and depth of Karol Wojtyla’s life, which took him from childhood years in Wadowice, Poland to the world stage at the Holy See in Vatican City.

In that one lifetime, he helped to fight the Nazis, struggled on behalf of the landmark Roman Catholic Church Vatican II Reforms of the early 1960s, battled Communism for decades and, by example, created a theological earthquake in how Catholics and Jews can approach one another.

Now, five years after his death at the age of 84, John Paul II’s life journey rightly is being put into historical perspective. That was the task Rabbi Abie Inger, Dr. James P. Buchanan and Dr. William Madges set out to accomplish in 2004 in conjunction with the pope’s approaching 85th birthday. The Roman Catholic Church’s leader, however, died just prior to the exhibit’s opening.

The exhibit, whose media sponsors are the Baltimore Jewish Times and The Catholic Review, expertly captures one of the defining attributes of the subject’s 26-year papacy.

Indeed, one might think it impossible to weave into context an actual canister of Zyklon-B gas — which the Nazis dropped into “showers” for Jews who had just disembarked from trains at death camps, a 1920s era Polish soccer ball similar to the one young Karol kicked around with his lifelong Jewish friend Jerzy Kluger, and a zuchetto (skullcap) worn by the
Roman Catholic leader during his famous 2000 visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

As the exhibit shows, John Paul II was obviously no simple human being. He combined media savvy with medieval theology, athletic prowess (he was a famed skier) with an uncannily warm smile, packaging all of those skills to deliver his understanding of God’s love to deeply fractured lives and societies.

Throughout, he maintained a seemingly undisturbed sense of calm spirituality. That comes through, for example, in the text under a photograph of a 20-something Wojtyla working at the Solvay Chemical Co., to whose quarry he was assigned by the Nazi regime. By night, he worked with the Polish underground in resisting the Germans.

“Fellow workers at Solvay recalled him frequently on his knees at prayer,” reads the text.

Jewish Museum director Karen Falk said she is somewhat in awe of what the exhibit’s creators did in only six months, such a task often taking years.

For example, she explained, they traveled to the pope’s hometown of Wadowice to record the sound of the bell at the church that the future pontiff attended. “That is an amazing attention to details,” Mrs. Falk said. “They did this when they all had day jobs — meeting after work and sometimes going until 3 in the morning.”

At one point, the three men wrote to the pope’s residence in Rome, asking to borrow anything. For months there was no word. Then the pope fell ill, eventually dying, and with that expectations of a contribution vanished.

“Then literally right before the exhibit opened, they received a Fed-Ex box from the papal residency and it was the pope’s cane and the zuchetto,” Mrs. Falk said. “They had to figure out quickly how to install it, but they did.”

Perhaps the exhibit’s most poignant moment comes at its final stop. Here the pope’s commentary on the positive virtues of other religions are displayed on the right-hand side of the wall with photographs of his seemingly decades-long world tour. On the passage’s other side sits a simple wooden desk abutting a replica of the massive Herodian stones of the Western Wall. On that desk are scraps of paper on which people are asked to write a prayer and then to insert it in the space between the huge blocks. Eventually, those notes will be taken by the exhibit’s creators to the Kotel in Jerusalem.

But here in Baltimore visitors will likely have a lasting sense of how this highly multi-dimensional pope so greatly impacted the world in which he lived.

“You came out of the show feeling like you got to know him, who he was and how he got to be the person he became,” Mrs. Falk said. “This man understood multi-culturalism;
he really got it. This could be just a celebration, which it is, but it’s much more than that. The title is the message — a blessing to one another.”

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