Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Today we're taking you back to April 1986, when Pope John Paul II made a historic journey to a synagogue in Rome.

He hoped to heal the wounds inflicted by centuries of division between Jews and Catholics.

In 2014, Alan Johnston spoke to Professor Jacka Mossaban, a Jewish community leader who met with the Pope.

Italian state television is covering an event at Rome's main synagogue, a black limousine, sweeps up to its entrance and the Polish Pope.

John Paul II emerges in his white robes, he wanes at the crown.

John Paul's come from Nevada, in which lies just across the river Tyber, but it's taken centuries to make this short journey.

In 2000 years of Catholic history, there's no record of a Pope having ever entered a synagogue.

It seems that John Paul will be the first.

The synagogue is in what used to be Rome's Jewish ghetto, where thousands once lived severely restricted humiliating lives.

A former leader of the community, Professor Jacka Mossaban, recalls the Latin words of the 16th century papal decree that ordered the establishment of the ghetto.

Is it not ridiculous that the Jews should live amongst us in peace after they have crucified Jesus?

And the Jews were closed up in this region.

They had to pay the expense of reacting walls also.

And behind those walls there were very strict limits on how Rome's Jews could make a living.

They were largely restricted to money lending activities and trading in second hand goods.

Many endured extreme poverty.

It was all a complex of laws and bylaws which aimed at diminishing the prestige and making the Jews feel second-rate citizens with no money.

With no value at all.

In the squalor of their overcrowded alleyways, they were subjected to intense pressure to convert to Christianity.

They were regularly forced to attend anti-Semitic sermons delivered by Catholic priests.

The ghetto conditions ended in 1870, but memories of that long period of oppression meant not all Rome's Jews welcomed the idea of the Pope visiting their synagogue.

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