NEW YORK — When Pope Benedict XVI enters a U.S. synagogue for the first time, there likely will be an emotional encounter between a Holocaust survivor and the German pontiff who both suffered in the same war.

"Both of us experienced the tragedy of World War II," said Arthur Schneier, senior rabbi of Manhattan's Park East Synagogue, which the pope is to visit on April 18.

The Vienna-born rabbi told The Associated Press in an interview at his office that he and the pope have the same mother tongue, German. "So we have a common language — at least in terms of meine Muttersprache, my mother tongue," he said.

Schneier, 78, fled Adolf Hitler's forces in Austria for Budapest in 1939 with his mother and worked in a labor camp before Hungary was liberated by the Red Army. He said most of his family had been deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and died there. He moved to the U.S. in 1947.

The rabbi said sharing the war experience with the pope brings the two men closer.

"When you emerge from that kind of tragedy with all the human lives lost," he said, "it does something in terms of shaping your outlook and what you need to do to make sure that this becomes a better world and we don't repeat the mistakes of history."

The 80-year-old pontiff is a native of Bavaria, whose father was anti-Nazi. He said he enrolled in the Hitler Youth against his will and was then drafted into the German army in the last months of the war. He wrote in his memoirs that he deserted in the war's last days.

Schneier said the pope's visit to the synagogue on the eve of Passover, which begins at sundown April 19, "is another tangible expression of his outreach to the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel." He added that "the very clear message is that Jews and Catholics and Christians, we are in the same boat, we have common concerns for humanity."

It will be the first visit by a pope to a synagogue in the United States and Benedict's second as pontiff to a Jewish house of worship. On his first papal trip abroad in 2005, Benedict entered a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, that had been destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt.