SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE
64 avenue Marceau - 75008 Paris - Tel. +33147237637 - Fax: +33147208401 http://www.wiesenthal.com

Wallenberg Weeps on a Paris Street Corner: A Wiesenthal Centre Comment
By Dr Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations, Paris

Paris, 26 March 2007

Almost sixty-two years after his disappearance, the City of Paris, this Saturday, named a street in honour of this "Righteous Gentile" who, as a Swedish diplomat in wartime Budapest, rescued over 35,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi deportation to the death camps.

Due to the ceremony being held on a Sabbath morning, the official Jewish institutions and the Embassy of Israel were unrepresented.

The invitation listed Sweden's Ambassador to France among the speakers.
Ironically, on the same day, the Swedish Foreign Minister announced his forthcoming meeting with the Hamas terrorist led "government of Palestine".

This visit may be viewed as a slap to the memory of Wallenberg for, by implication, it endorses the Hamas Charter which calls for the extermination of the Jewish people, including the descendants of those saved by a truly just son of Sweden.

Rue Raul Wallenberg runs along a short stretch of dingy tenements leading into the ring road expressway at the very edge of Paris. Without GPS, several taxi drivers were unable to even find its cross streets.

The plaque on the site is most intriguing:
"Rue Raul Wallenberg. A Swedish Diplomat born in 1912, disappeared in 1945 into the Soviet Union. A Just Among the Nations."

The words "Jew" and "Holocaust" are marked by their absence. Perhaps the oversight considered the sensitivities of putative Islamist radicals in the neighbourhood.

As Wallenberg weeps on a Paris street corner, one wonders what was the point of this sad exercise.

For further information, please contact Shimon Samuels at +33.609.77.01.58.