The International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) met in Paris to discuss the future of the dialogue begun after the Catholic Church renounced its Antisemitism and declared its respect for Judaism at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Elijah Board members, Rabbis David Rosen and Richard Marker, were prominent in the forum.

"We have new generations for whom the problems between Judaism and Christianity, especially the Shoah, are history," said Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Vatican official for relations with Jews. "We can't leave that to history."

Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee said: "Today most young Catholics have no comprehension of how tragic the relationship in the past between Jews and Catholics was.

"Jews were viewed as the enemies of God, in league with the devil, responsible for the tragedies of the world," he said, but the Church now saw them as "dearly beloved elder brothers."

 Relations have gone up and down in the 40 years since the ILC first met in 1971. Current tensions – over the planned beatification of wartime Pope Pius XII or Holocaust denial by a traditionalist bishop – came up briefly at the conference.

 "The issue is how to interpret them," said Rabbi Richard Marker, the top world Jewish official for interfaith ties.

"While one might argue that, in the scheme of all our achievements, these issues are merely symbolic, the fact that they speak to sensitivities in the community makes them important," he said.

 Illustrating their close ties, the Vatican on Wednesday issued pre-publication excerpts of a new book by Pope Benedict in which he gives a detailed explanation of why the Church no longer accused the Jews of causing the death of Jesus.

 Marker, who chairs the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation (IJCIC), said demographic changes would affect how the two faiths related to each other in future.

"Catholicism is becoming a Southern Hemisphere religion," he said, referring to its growth in Africa, Latin America and Asia. "They're not familiar with Judaism, they're not familiar with each other and they're all different from European Catholicism."

Delegates to the ILC have traditionally been "northern and western," he noted, and that would probably have to change.

 Many participants saw interfaith dialogue as part of their religious identity, he said, but there were now some Catholics and some Orthodox Jews "who feel that dealing with the other is not necessarily a productive enterprise."

 The passing of the generations with direct knowledge of the Holocaust would also change the dialogue, he said, adding: "It takes two generations for something to go from memory to myth."