Israeli ambassador to Poland Shevach Weiss, a survivor of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, predicted the gesture would be "a positive step for everyone, as well as for the Polish nation." The mass-circulation Gazeta Wyboreza said the bishops' prayers represented an "unprecedented" acknowledgment for specific crimes.

Poland's Catholic bishops asked forgiveness for the crime at a service at All Saints Church in Warsaw May 27.

Auxiliary Bishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Gniezno, chairman of the bishops' Commission for Dialogue with Judaism, said his church condemned "all forms of intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism. adding that the Jedwabne atrocity was all the more horrific for being perpetrated during the Nazi Holocaust.

"We wish to show regret and penance for crimes which occurred at Jedwabne and elsewhere, whose victims were Jews and whose perpetrators included Poles and Catholics, baptized people," Bishop Gadecki said.

'We are deeply pained by the behavior of those who, especially in Jedwabne and other places, inflicted suffering or even death on Jews. We recall this crime so we can fruitfully assume responsibility for overcoming every evil occurring today" the bishop said.

Work has begun to exhume the remains of Jews killed by Polish villagers in the Jedwabne pogrom.

Up to 1,600 Jewish men, women and children were burned alive at Jedwabne in 1941, three weeks after the German occupation of eastern Poland. During the eight-hour rampage, scores of others were tortured and hacked to death.

Poland's 3.5 million Jews made up a tenth of its population before World War II. About 100,000 survived the German inflicted Holocaust.

Details of the Jedwabne pogrom, publicized in a February book, Neighbors, by U.S.-Polish historian Jan Tomasz Gross, have spurred a national debate in the country, whose mostly Catholic inhabitants have traditionally viewed themselves as victims rather than perpetrators of historic misdeeds.

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