JERUSALEM  The Vatican sought on Tuesday to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism of his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial the day before.

But as has become familiar in Benedict’s four years as pope, the attempt at media relations stumbled, in a particularly awkward way for a trip to Israel: the German pope’s spokesman first said that Benedict “never, never, never” had belonged to the Hitler Youth but later had to issue a retraction.

The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was working to counter both criticism of the speech  blasted in the press here as at best a bland missed moment for a German pope who experienced the Holocaust firsthand  and hostility from some in Israel to the pope himself.

Even before the pope spoke on Monday, the day he arrived in Israel, a cartoon in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot showed him at Yad Vashem looking at a photo of a group of Hitler Youth and saying, “Hey, that’s me.”