Mediator of Auschwitz Dispute Wins Prize

NEW YORK — The British businessman who helped mediate a controversy over the placement of a Catholic convent near Auschwitz has won the $1.2-million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the richest award for achievement in any field.

The prize Wednesday went to Sir Sigmund Sternberg, 76, executive committee chairman of the International Council of Christians and Jews.

“It is time for religion to come out of the church, the synagogue, the mosque, the temple,” he said. “While it is recognized that all religions have their own truths, and these shall be unassailable, there is a sense of a spirit which soars above all else and which, if harnessed, could contribute to the creation of caring societies as nothing else could.”

The Templeton Prize was established in 1972 by investment manager John M. Templeton. The award will be bestowed at Buckingham Palace in London in May.

Sternberg was born in Hungary and went to Britain in 1939 during the rise of Nazism. He founded real estate and software companies and became one of the earliest and strongest advocates for interfaith dialogue.

He helped resolve the dispute that developed in 1984 when a group of Carmelite nuns established a convent at the perimeter of the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

The nuns said their intent was to pray for death camp victims. But others saw it as an intrusion into a setting indelibly linked to the Holocaust.

In meetings with Catholic and Jewish leaders, Sternberg helped develop a consensus for moving the convent. The nuns moved out in 1993. Last month, the government announced that a wooden cross remaining on the site would be moved.

Last year, along with Sheikh Zaki Badawi, principal of Muslim College in London, Sternberg established the Three Faiths Forum to find common ground among Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Sternberg said he is “certainly no saint.”

“I am really a simple soul, a businessman, who, in a modest way, has been smiled on by fortune and who has tried to repay the blessings which have been bestowed on me by opening to others a sense of the goodness which lies in us all, regardless of our faith,” he said.

Sternberg is the second Jewish recipient of the Templeton Prize. Lord Jakobovitz, former chief rabbi of Britain, won in 1991. Other past winners include Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.