Pope draws criticism from Jews for comparing refugee centers to concentration camps

A Jewish organization has criticized Pope Francis for his remarks comparing European refugee holding centers to concentration camps.

The pope made the remarks during his visit to the Basilica of St. Bartholomew in Rome on Sunday, where he met migrants and told them about his trip to a camp on the Greek Island of Lesbos last year.

Francis narrated his encounter with a Muslim refugee from the Middle East who told him how "terrorists came to our country." Islamists cut the throat of the man's Christian wife because she refused to follow their instruction to throw her crucifix to the ground, Reuters reported.

"I don't know if he managed to leave that concentration camp, because refugee camps, many of them, are of concentration (type) because of the great number of people left there inside them," the pope recounted.

The pope referred to the slain woman as "another crown" among modern martyrs, and he used the occasion to draw attention to the squalid conditions in migrant reception centers where people fleeing from persecution and war wait for months for their asylum application to be processed.

Following the pontiff's remarks, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) issued a statement urging Francis to "to reconsider his regrettable choice of words."

"The conditions in which migrants are currently living in some European countries may well be difficult, and deserve still greater international attention, but concentration camps they certainly are not," said David Harris, head of AJC, in the statement.

"The Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labor and the extermination of millions of people during World War II. There is no comparison to the magnitude of that tragedy," he continued.

The pope was not the first to compare the migrant centers to concentration camps. Greek Interior Minister Panagiotis Kouroumplis once described the now-closed Idomeni camp, which housed 8,000 people in a Greek village on the northern border with Macedonia, as a "modern Dachau."

During the visit to the basilica, Francis thanked countries that are helping refugees and urged people in northern Italy to take in more migrants.

The pontiff noted that Italy had one of the world's lowest birth rates and said that it would be "suicide" for the country if it closes its doors to migrants.

The basilica where Francis met with the migrants was home to a shrine for Christians who were killed for their faith in the 20th and 21st century.