Warsaw - Poland's Roman Catholic Church was taking an important step to improve relations with the Jewish community yesterday by apologising for the Poles who took part in a massacre of up to 1,600 Jews during the second World War. The 1941 massacre in the town of Jedwabne came to prominence last year with the publication of Neighbours, a book by emigre scholar Jan Gross, who alleged that Poles, not occupying Nazi Germans, had brutally murdered Jews and taken their possessions.