Jews used the Holohoax to 'remove the skeleton key to aniti-semitism':

Rabbi Piattelli says, choosing his English words carefully. '' 'Nostra Aetate' was a very important document, because it changed the Catholic Church's relationship to Judaism. Now relations are much better. We have taken many steps toward each other.'

'Nostra Aetate'' (''In Our Age'') is the Second Vatican Council's document on the church's relation to non-Christian religions. It is four and a half pages long and took four years to write. After dealing with the nature of religion, with Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, it turns to ''the stock of Abraham.'' In ''15 long Latin sentences'' (as one cleric put it), it removed the skeleton key to anti-Semitism: the idea that the Jewish people killed Christ and deserve to be punished until their conversion at the end of time.

The experts say that ''Nostra Aetate'' began a new era in Catholic-Jewish relations. Surely it is more correct to say that the Holocaust ended an era, the murder of six million Jews in Christian Europe compelling the church to change its attitude toward the Jews.