Germany ? German-born Pope Benedict XVI on Friday became the second pope to visit a synagogue, entering to the haunting tones of a ram’s horn, praying before a Holocaust memorial and lamenting a rise in anti-Semitism.

“We need to show respect for one another and to love one another,” Benedict said, pressing a theme of interfaith understanding that has marked his first foreign trip as pope.

The hourlong stop, for which Cologne’s Jews stood and applauded, was filled with significance for the 78-year-old Benedict, who grew up in Nazi Germany. He called those times “the darkest period of German and European history.”

He made no mention of his own trials, when he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later deserted from the German army near the end of the war.

But his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, called the stop at the blue-domed Roonstrasse Synagogue “an event of historic significance – a German pope, who was on his first official trip, himself took the initiative for the visit.”