times past, cowered behind locked doors for fear of a Christian mob seeking 'revenge' for deicide. Without the poisoning of Christian minds through the centuries, the holocaust is unthinkable'. International Council of Christians and Jews During the blitz of 1942 some British Christians and Jews met with members of the American National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) who were visiting London. It was agreed that after the war an international conference should be held for all the bodies who were active in the field of Christian-Jewish relationships. The American group had not been formed to counterattacks on Jews, as was the case in London, but rather through anti-Catholicism agitation stirred up by the Ku Klux Klan at the time when Catholic Al Smith was standing for president. Jewish and Protestant leaders in the United States reacted and this led Catholics to join them in solidarity. The conference was held in Oxford in 1946 and over one hundred delegates from fifteen countries attended. A public meeting held on the eve of the conference included as guest speakers the Archbishop of Canterbury, Reinhold Niebuhr, R. A. Butler and Rabbi Leo Baeck, a survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp. Various commissions were set up, a resolution was sent to the Paris Peace Conference, an agreement reached to hold an emergency conference dealing with anti-Semitism in Europe, and that a committee should research the possibility of forming an International Council of Christians and Jews which would bring together all the various national bodies. Jacques Maritain was elected to serve as co-Chairman with Dr. MacCracken of U.S.A. and the Marquess of Reading on the board of the proposed International Council of Christians and Jews. An emergency conference took place in Seelisberg Switzerland in 1947. "The Ten Points of Seelisberg" agreed at the conference became a reference for many future statements by various Churches regarding new approaches to Judaism. Pere de Lopinit who had worked in Italian camps in which Jews had been interned during the war took the document back to the Vatican and a form of nihil obstat was received. Cardinal Griffiths was dismissive of the plan but in time the ten points may have been a formative influence in the declaration on religious liberty of Vatican II (Nostra aetate) The plan for an International Council of Christians and Jews did not come to fruition until 1974 due to differences regarding how it should