Chief Rabbinate of Israel cuts ties with Vatican over Holocaust bishop

Gledhill, Religion Correspondent and Richard Owen in Rome

In a measure of Jewish anger around the world at the decision to reinstate the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X, the Chief Rabbinate has written to the office of Pope Benedict XVI condemning Bishop Richard Williamson's comments as "odious" and "outrageous". The letter was leaked to the Jerusalem Post.

Jewish leaders in the UK have also protested at the lifting of the excommunicatons on Bishop Williamson and three other bishops.

Bishop Williamson, who was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and converted to Catholicism as a young man, has in the past endorsed the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He told Swedish television that no Jews died in gas chambers, and that up to 300,000 died in the Holocaust. Historians generally accept that six million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.

According to The Jerusalem Post, the Chief Rabbinate also cancelled a meeting scheduled for March 2-4 in Rome with the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.

In a letter to the commission's chairman, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Chief Rabbinate Director-General, Oded Weiner, wrote that "without a public apology and recanting, it will be difficult to continue the dialogue".

Meanwhile, the Pope moved today to calm tensions when he uses his weekly audience to reaffirm his "full and unquestionable solidarity with Jews" and said that the attempt to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust should remain a warning for all people.