Pope John Paul I and was then led to another place and was offered a bench to kneel and pray. Luciani was summoned to Rome for the conclave to elect the new pope. Luciani was not considered papabile at the time though mentioned upon occasion in several papers, but a few cardinals approached him with their opinion that he would make a fine pontiff. The electors did not want a Curial figure, as Paul VI had been, but a warm and pastoral figure like Pope John XXIII. Luciani was elected on the fourth ballot of the August 1978 papal conclave. Luciani had previously said
Pope John Paul II and Judaism in April 1986 was the first known visit to a synagogue by a modern pope. He visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Israel in March 2000, and touched the holiest outward remaining shrine of the Jewish people, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He placed in the Western Wall a prayer that read: John Paul II supported dual-covenant theology. On November 17, 1980, Pope John Paul II delivered a speech to the Jews of Berlin in which he discussed his views of Catholic-Jewish relations. In it, John Paul II asserted that God's Old Covenant with the Jewish people was never