Why was Pope John Paul II’s canonization of Edith Stein controversial?

The canonization of Edith Stein by Pope John Paul II in 1998 was controversial because many members of the Jewish community felt that the Catholic Church was usurping a Jewish tragedy for its own religious purposes.1

Stein, a Jewish-born philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, was executed by the Nazis at Auschwitz specifically due to her Jewish ancestry. The controversy was further intensified when the Pope suggested that her feast day should serve as a Catholic remembrance of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, a gesture that many Jews perceived as an inappropriate appropriation of their suffering.231