Jewish orphans controversy

After the end of hostilities, Catholic Church officials, either Pope Pius XII or other prelates, issued instructions for the treatment and disposition of such Jewish children, some, but not all, of whom were now orphans.

Two Italian scholars, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, confirmed that the memorandum was genuine, but added that the reporting by the Corriere della Sera was misleading, as the document had originated in the French Catholic Church archives, rather than the Vatican archives, and strictly concerned itself with children without living blood relatives that were supposed to be handed over to Jewish organisations.

[4][5] After months of enormous international pressure, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier and abbé Roger Etchegaray finally settled the dispute by transferring the children back to their Jewish relatives, who raised them in Spain and Israel.

[6][7] Pius XII personally intervened when a Polish Catholic woman, Leokadia Jaromirska, later honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem,[8] wrote him a letter seeking his permission to keep a young Jewish girl she had sheltered during the war.

[9][10] Abe Foxman (born 1940), the national director of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, who had himself been baptized as a child and was the subject of a custody battle, called for an immediate freeze on Pius's beatification process until the relevant Vatican Archives and baptismal records were opened.