At a meeting held last week, the city council of Monforte voted unanimously to name a street in the town’s old Jewish Quarter ”Rua de Raoul Wallenberg”.

The move was initiated by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and received the backing of Monforte Mayor Nazario Pin Fernandez as well as the towns historian, Felipe Aira Pardo.An official street-naming ceremony will be held in the next few months.

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On January 3l, 2003, the city council of Monforte de Lemos, a city in the Galician Province of Lugo, unanimously agreed to name a street in their city, Rua de Raoul Wallenberg.

Rua Wallenberg is located in a part of the center of the City of Monforte in the old Jewish quarter where there are monuments.

The promoters of this initiative are the Mayor of Monforte de Lemos, Nazario Pin Fernandez, and Monforte’s historian and delegate of the group of Jewish quarters of Spain, Felipe Aira Pardo; thus, following an initiative presented by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, and NGO founded by Argentine, Baruch Tenembaum. In August 2002, Tenembaum anticipated the news from the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, during a meeting held in New York.

The proposal was celebrated by the President of the Xunta de Galicia, Manuel Fraga Iribarne. In a letter addressed to Tenembaum, he expressed his satisfaction that a street in Galicia would be the first in Spain to have Wallenberg’s name.

The legacy of the Jewish community in the City of Monforte de Lemos is vast and rich. It is thus presented in this way by Aira Pardo in his history Monforte, the Hebrew community and the Converts, research carried out at the request of Mayor Pin Fernandez.

A document from the year 9l5 A.D. which belongs to the Saint Vincent Benedictine Monastery stands out within that research paper. The document refers to the Jewish presence in the community at large. Moreover, it tells the history of the powerful Counts of Lemos who, in the XIV century depended on the services of Jews in important positions in the State.

According to historical documentation, it is known that in the year l334 A.D., the feudal Lord of Monforte had Don Samuel as his treasurer. He was a good Hebrew friend of the powerful noble. Furthermore, Don Samuel’s brother, Cagaben Bueno, was a tax collector for Don Pedro during those years. The son of that noble, Fernan Ruiz de Castro, loyal to the pro-Jewish policy of his sovereign Peter I, ”The Cruel”, had a great friendship with the Hebrew community and hired distinguished Jews within the House of Lemos, with its capital in Monforte, Aira Pardos’ research points out.

Rua de Raoul Wallenberg enlarged the online index Wallenberg Around The World, published by the Wallenberg Foundation.

• It renders homage to those who protected thousands of Jews during the Holocaust
• The work will be comprised of ceramic bricks and concrete
• Interesting use of water, light and earth

A monument rendering homage to the 15,670 non-Jews of different nationalities (the ”Righteous Gentiles”) who, risking their lives and loss of freedom, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews form extermination, will be constructed at the University Complex. The work possesses high poetic content and was planned by architects Claudio Vekstein and Nora Vitorgan Maltz (with the assistance of architects Ariel Jacubovich, Frank Arnorld, Santiago Bozzola, Malca Mizrahi, Pablo Peirano and Atilio Pentimalli, the last mentioned being in charge of scale model publication), and was requested by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (in agreement with the municipality of the City of Buenos Aires), through Casa Argentina en Jerusalem, a non-governmental organization that works in favor of inter-religious dialogue, founded in 1966 by Monsignor Ernesto Segura, among others, in order to build closer ties among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, believers and Agnostics. (http://www.casa-argentina.org.ar).

At the present time, the project is in its final planning phase and it is calculated that in one year’s time, construction will begin. Once finished, it will be the only monument dedicated to the Righteous Gentiles in the world.

It will be situated on a triangular plot of land at the mouth of the river Vega, bordered on two sides by the waters of the De la Plata river, the third side by the land of the future Coastal Walkway of the Joint Park of Remembrance (where the monuments to the Victims of State Terrorism, the Monument to Peace and the Monument to Co-existence will be put up). The work will be arranged so that it suggests distance and suggestive places through the arrangement of the forms, materials and light. From the entrance of the monument one can take various paths, which could serve as a metaphor for everyone’s commitment to the essence of the piece: an existent footbridge skids the monument on a tangent and connects with the Coastal Walkway, or a path formed by the soft embankment of earth forming steps until they reach the highest point of the entire structure, a suspended concrete platform (pointed towards Jerusalem), that serves as a look out point. A ramp then connects to a more restricted and semi-buried chapel (named ”Precinct of the Righteous”), which almost finds itself in the shadows and is vacant, a space for true self-communion.

This space is wide and not very elevated at its entrance and becomes narrow and high with a pronounced slope towards its interior. A small break in the ceiling (composed of successive brick arches) allows a thin ray of light to enter, which, together with the river (when it rises), bathes the concrete mural on which one can read the 15,670 engraved names.

A low reinforced concrete wall that as it increases in size, becomes one of the fundamental pieces of the project, divides the side footbridge and the Footpath of the Righteous.

To Walk Among the Righteous

Past the first footbridge, under the concrete platform, one finds an open-air ecumenical chapel in front of the river, with cement benches and a holding capacity for 200 people, where meetings and ceremonies can take place. Continuing on that path, however, one will come to a beach composed of stones that extends its low walls into the depths of the river.

On the other hand, the 15,670 bricks of the embankments will be large (40 cm in length, specially baked to obtain different color tones in order to emphasize individuality). The continuation of the embankments onto the grassless ground will be covered with tiny stones, resting on a base of clay.

”Together with Nora we have built a series of relationships in order to symbolize the unity between the religions”, says Vekstein, ”and the project in front of the river suggested the theme of the brick steps that form a series of horizons that, before reaching the platform, transform into Catalonian arches. Amancio Williams in his Pavilion for Bunge & Born or in his other works in front of the river, creates a projection where umbrellas or other vertical forms contrasts the horizon; we in turn, have developed a project based on horizon, river, and earth, basically with two elements: the concrete platform and the earth in its various states, emphasizing the horizontal lines.”

The architects believe that, ”the work looks to situate itself alongside the river, with its distinctive character, to feed off its inexhaustible force, its immanent, stirring personality of a seemingly solid tranquility, of a slow yet secure and definitive motion; that gives one the feeling of being on the border, of putting on the edge the real danger of oneself against the danger of the other… and all that appears to be the texture of the water is nothing more than the river’s own text: the text of remembrance”.

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Yesterday, a dedication ceremony baptized a charming downtown terrace tucked behind Christ Church Cathedral as Raoul Wallenberg Square.

Wallenberg illustrated how peace ”cannot be found in ignoring injustice against any human being in the world,” the Most Rev. Andrew Hutchison, Anglican Archbishop of Quebec and Eastern Canada, told a mostly Jewish audience peppered with diplomats.

That lesson is especially relevant in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the archbishop told the consul-generals of Israel, Hungary, Russia and France, as well as the ambassador of Sweden.

The attacks marked the ”end of an era of invulnerability for the United States and, more importantly, the end of an era of impunity” that had been taken for granted since World War II, Hutchison said.

”The consequences of actions taken or failure to act in other parts of the world have indeed come home to the heart of North America,” he said.

The talented and privileged Wallenberg was only 32 when Sweden appointed him to its Hungarian embassy. As one observer noted yesterday, he became ”almost intoxicated with a mission” to save Jews bound for Nazi concentration camps.

His direct actions – and his example, which inspired others to join the fight – are credited with saving about 100,000 lives.

In January 1945, he was arrested by Soviet troops and has not been seen since. He would have been 90 this year.

Wallenberg, who was not a Jew, has been made an honorary citizen of Canada, the United States and Israel.

In the late 1990s, the Canadian Friends of Raoul Wallenberg asked the city to recognize Wallenberg by various measures, including planing an oak grove in Montreal’s Botanical Garden. A city committee was asked to look at parks suitable for renaming but the process didn’t yield positive results.

© Copyright 2002 Montreal Gazette
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The meeting was organized by the Montevideo City Council and the Israel Central Committee of Uruguay (ICCU) sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with the adhesion of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. National, municipal, diplomatic, communal and religious authorities participated in the ceremony.

Juan Kerekes, President of the Israeli Hungarian community, and Mariano Arana, Mayor of Montevideo spoke.

Saúl Gilvich, President of the ICCU, and Sigmund Sternberg, President of the Sternberg Center in London unveiled the plaque.

The IRWF is an educational enterprise of the non-governmental organization Casa Argentina en Jerusalem. Gerald Ford, former president of the United States of America; Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic and Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize, are among its members.