July 2006

  • 100,000 Names for 100,000 Lives campaign close to 25,000 signatures
  • Letters to President Vladimir Putin
  • Open Letter
  • Sousa Mendes Honored in Florida Synagogue
  • Spiegel online. Bernardo Jerochim is German Again
  • The New York Sun. Nazi Holocaust Papers Released to Public
  • The New York Sun. Storms Of Brutality
  • Putin to receive over 22,000 request to liberate a prisioner
  • Appeal to Italian World War II Saviors and Survivors
  • Folk Artist Returns Home to Promote Understanding Through Song
  • Wallenberg Project at German School
  • Anti-Semitism Research Center of the Technological University of Berlin
  • Calendar

100,000 Names for 100,000 Lives campaign close to 25,000 signatures

The IRWF launched a world wide campaign to definitively discover Raoul Wallenberg’s final destiny. Fill the form below and your name will be registered with thousands of others who will gather 100,000 names for the 100,000 lives Wallenberg saved in Budapest during Second World War. Help us claim for the solution of this case. The IRWF will present the collected signatures before the UN.

Letters to President Vladimir Putin

On January 17th 1945, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary during the Holocaust, was captured by the Soviets never to be seen again.

The one person who can solve this mystery and help us all bring Raoul home is the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Read the letters

Open Letter

30 June 2006

We, the former independent consultants to the Swedish-Russian Working Group on the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg (1991-2001), are today releasing an Open Letter to the G8 Summit. The letter has the full support of Raoul Wallenberg’s family and is signed by international Wallenberg experts, historians and other prominent individuals. In Great Britain, signatories include John Le Carré and Gitta Sereny. In Sweden, Georg Klein, Arne Ruth, Maria-Pia Boëthius and Stig Ekman have signed the petition.

The letter requests the participating leaders to urge Russian President Vladimir Putin to reveal all facts about Raoul Wallenberg’s fate.

Read the letter

Sousa Mendes Honored in Florida Synagogue

Beth Torah Synagogue in Aventura, Florida, has dedicated one of their benches in memory of Portuguese Consul General Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who served in Bordeaux, France during World War II and issued more than 30,000 life-saving Portuguese visas.

The initiative was inspired after the granddaughter of the Portuguese savior, Sheila Abranches, spoke at the Temple on a Shabbat morning on occasion of the anniversary of Sousa Mendes unprecedented deed as part of the International Raoul Wallenberg oundation’s annual commemorations to honor the diplomat.

Read the article

Spiegel online. Bernardo Jerochim is German Again

After his family escaped from the Nazis during the Third Reich, Bernardo Jerochim lived as a stateless person in Argentina. After almost sixty-five years as a Jewish shoe polisher from Berlin, he has finally regained his passport.

This time in Buenos Aires, Bernardo Jerochim doesn’t have to show an invitation to get into the German Embassy. The executives in front of the embassy allow him to pass through. They remember the shoe polisher who visited a few weeks before for a meeting with the ambassador.

Read the article

The New York Sun. Nazi Holocaust Papers Released to Public

America and seven other nations signed an agreement yesterday opening to the public a massive archive of information on victims of the Holocaust.

The deal resolves a diplomatic logjam in which several European countries cited privacy concerns to block access to the records, which have been maintained for decades by the International Tracing Service of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Read the article

The New York Sun. Storms Of Brutality

The organized riot known as Kristallnacht, which on November 10, 1938, destroyed most of the synagogues and Jewish-owned stores in Germany, can be considered the first act of the Holocaust. Observers at the time, both Jewish and foreign, were fully aware that it marked a significant transition in the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the moment when legal discrimination, economic extortion, and selective imprisonment turned into wholesale destruction.The quandaries it raises, then, are the quandaries we associate with the Holocaust itself: How could so many ordinary Germans participate in, or mutely approve of, violence against their own neighbors? How is an entire population seduced to hatred?

Read the Article

Putin to receive over 22,000 request to liberate a prisioner

This week, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation will present a 425 pages document with the interim result of their signature campaign to President Vladimir Putin, as well as to other leaders around the world and the United Nations. The ongoing ”100,000 Names for 100,000 Lives” campaign has already accumulated over 22,000 signatures in an effort to solve the mystery of Raoul Wallenberg.

Read the Article

Appeal to Italian World War II Saviors and Survivors

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation is looking for those rescued by Italians during World War II and their families, as well as the rescuers themselves. The IRWF will be hosting an event, ”The Banality of Good: Rescuers in Italy at the Time of Persecution” on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 in conjunction with the Consulate of Italy in NY and the Italian Cultural Institute. Please contact us at irwf@irwf.org

Folk Artist Returns Home to Promote Understanding Through Song

After completion of his inspirational and successful tour of New York City schools, renowned Swedish folk artist Ben Olander will bring his lectures back to his home country of Sweden under the auspices of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. Olander is set to give presentations to schools and government institutions around Sweden through November.

Read the Article

Wallenberg Project at German School

There is a street dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg in the Marzahn District in Berlin, but until last year many people living there did not know about Wallenberg’s heroic mission to save human lives during the Holocaust. It was not until several students and teachers of the Rudolf Virchow High School started a pilot project about the Swedish diplomat that people learned about his deeds. As Carola Parchmann, one of the students, pointed out, ”we decided to dedicate ourselves to spreading the popularity of Raoul Wallenberg, his work and the work of his supporters, in our environment because only a few seem to know his mysterious story.”

Read the Article

Anti-Semitism Research Center of the Technological University of Berlin

The IRWF along with the Center of Studies on anti-Semitism of the Berlin University of Technology, presided by Professor Wolfgang Benz and under the academic direction of Dr. Beate Kosmala, promotes the results of an investigation that concentrated on the period from 1941 to 1945. Until now, data entries of approximately 3,000 people who helped persecuted Jews has been gathered.

Read the Article

Calendar

  • August 4 – Raoul Wallenberg´s Birthday in Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • August 4 – Raoul Wallenberg´s Birthday in Berlin, Germany
  • August 4 – Raoul Wallenberg´s Birthday in Jerusalem, Israel
  • August 6 – Raoul Wallenberg´s Birthday in New York, USA
  • August 8 – Panel ”The Saviors of the Holocaust” in Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • August 9 – Presentation ”The Triumph of Life” in Allsång på berget, Halmstad, Sweden
  • August 21 -Inauguration of the New School Raoul Wallenbergen Stockholm, Sweden
  • August 24 -Presentation ”Raoul Wallenberg’s Battle Against Evil” in Lassgården (Gothenburg Kommun), Sweden
  • August 29 – Presentation ”Raoul Wallenberg’s Battle Against Evil” in The Jewish Peace Logue, Stockholm, Sweden
  • September 9 – Raoul Wallenberg´s Birthday organized by the Raoul Wallenberg Youth and Culture Center in Berlin, Germany
  • September 17 and 18 – ”Wallenberg” Musical in New York, USA (a confirmar)
  • October 17 – Seminar ”The Banality of Good: Rescuers in Italy at the Time of Persecution” in New York, USA