The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF) is a non-governmental organization which researches Holocaust rescuers and advocates for their recognition. The organization developed educational programs for school to promote peace and civil service. Founded by Baruch Tenembaum, it has offices in Buenos Aires, New York, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem.
The organization bears the name of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved Jews and other persecuted people in Hungary during the Holocaust. He was captured by the Soviet Union and his death has been the source of controversy and secrecy.
On 27th October 2023, the Foundation revoked the Honorary Membership of António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, following his declaration whereby the heinous terrorist massacre perpetrated by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, 2023, "did not come in a vacuum".
IRWF is primarily a historical research organization, collecting information on different cases of rescuing during the Holocaust. As part of the research, the foundation gathers survivors saved by Wallenberg and others like him to interview them for the purposes of research and historic memory preservation. IRWF posts the transcripts online for others to read and use.
IRWF also identifies and commemorates safe houses.
It recently has pushed for researching more women saviors, dedicating a special section on their English language website for them. IRWF aims for its research subjects and honorees to gain official recognition by their local governments and organizations.
In addition to Wallenberg, the IRWF has researched and honored numerous Rescuers of the Holocaust, such as:
The organization has many humanitarian campaigns. Aimed to put pressure on the Russian government to release an official statement of what happened to Wallenberg, IRWF created two campaigns. The 'Bring Raoul Home' campaign asks dignitaries to address Wallenberg’s case in the correspondence and official meetings with the Russian Government; and the '100,000 Names for 100,000 Lives' campaign, which aims to get 100,000 people to sign the petition who then will be conveyed to the Russian President. As of August 12, 2010, IRWF has gotten 27,204 signatures for its '100,000 Names for 100,000 Lives' campaign. [1]
Dignitaries that have written letters on Wallenberg's behalf include Argentine Congressman Federico Pinedo, American Researcher on the German resistance to the Third Reich Greg McClelland, the Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry Paul J. Crutzen, Yuan T. Lee and Herbert A. Hauptman, President of the Republic of Croatia Stjepan Mesic, and Mayor of Or Yehuda (Israel) Itzhak Buchovza. [2]
IRWF also campaigns for public sites to be named after Wallenberg. Parks, streets and schools across the globe bear his name in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Ecuador, Uruguay and others.
IRWF has an art gallery in its New York City Headquarters, where it exhibits work done by Holocaust survivors or those who have been inspired by Rescuers of the Holocaust. The Foundation will often co-organize film screenings and theatre productions based on Wallenberg and other rescuers.
In April, 2010, the IRWF commissioned an exhibit by painter Peter Bulow. The exhibit "Blessings May Break from Stone" featured statues of Raoul Wallenberg and Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas. Bulow's mother is a Holocaust survivor from Budapest, Hungary.
IRWF has created many different educational programs for different student levels. For middle school to higher education, there are resources for both students and teachers that are free for public use and easily accessible online. The program emphasizes the values of courage and integrity. [3]
The organization has advocated for having October 5, the date in which Wallenberg became an Honorary American citizen, proclaimed as Raoul Wallenberg Day across the U.S. The purpose of the commemorative day is to promote peace and the values that come with humanitarianism, while remembering Wallenberg and his deeds. [4] The day is recognized annually in the State of New York and the IRWF campaigns had led to Wallenberg Days proclamations in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.
Suzanne Spaak, néeAugustine Lorge known as Suzette Spaak was a World War II French Resistance operative. On 21 April 1985, Yad Vashem recognized Spaak as Righteous Among the Nations, for helping to smuggle several Jewish children to safety, by providing them with ration cards and clothing.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
Ángel Sanz-Briz was a Spanish diplomat and humanitarian. Sanz is credited with saving more than 5,200 Jews in German-occupied Hungary from the Holocaust in the later stages of World War II.
İsmail Necdet Kent was a Turkish diplomat, who claimed to have risked his life to save Jews during World War II. While vice-consul in Marseilles, France between 1941 and 1944, he allegedly gave documents of citizenship to dozens of Turkish Jews living in France who did not have proper identity papers, to save them from deportation to the Nazi gas chambers. These claims, first published in an appendix to Stanford J. Shaw's book Turkey and the Holocaust (1993), have not been independently verified; no survivors or their descendants have confirmed the account. Marc David Baer and other historians have documented several inconsistencies in Kent's story; Baer concludes that it is "manufactured" and Uğur Ümit Üngör calls it a "complete fabrication".
Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas was a Brazilian diplomat who was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in June 2003, for his actions during World War II in helping Jews in France escape The Holocaust. It is estimated he saved 800 people, 425 confirmed to be Jewish. His actions were not limited to saving Jews, but also other persecuted groups, such as communists and homosexuals.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
Baruch Tenembaum, the grandson and son of Jewish gauchos, he studied in Buenos Aires and Rosario.
The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, was a U.S. executive agency to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers. The Board was, in the words of historian Rebecca Erbelding, "the only time in American history that the US government founded a non-military government agency to save the lives of civilians being murdered by a wartime enemy."
The Shoes on the Danube Bank is a memorial erected on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer to honour the Jews who were massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. They were ordered to take off their shoes, and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.
Harald Feller (1913–2003) was a Swiss diplomat who saved Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, for which he was honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1999.
Père Marie-Benoît was born Pierre Péteul. As a Capuchin Franciscan friar he helped smuggle approximately 4,000 Jews into safety from Nazi-occupied Southern France. On 1 December 1966, he was honored with the Medal of the Righteous among the Nations for his courage and self-sacrifice. His actions to save Jews during the Holocaust were the reason for his epithetFather of the Jews.
On three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population during the Holocaust. In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust which helped the Jews escape some concentration camps.
Gilberto Bosques Saldívar was a Mexican diplomat and before that a militant in the Mexican Revolution and a leftist legislator. As a consul in Marseille, Vichy France, Bosques took initiative to rescue tens of thousands of Jews and Spanish Republican exiles from being deported to Nazi Germany or Spain, but his heroism remained unknown to the world at large for some sixty years, until several years after his death at the age of 102. For about two decades after World War II, Bosques served as Mexico's ambassador to several countries. Since 2003, international recognition has been accruing to him. In 1944, he described his efforts thus: "I followed the policy of my country, of material and moral support to the heroic defenders of the Spanish Republic, the stalwart paladins of the struggle against Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Petain, and Laval."
José Arturo Castellanos Contreras was a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with a Jewish-Romanian businessman named György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews, most of them from Hungary, from Nazi persecution by providing them with fake Salvadoran citizenship certificates.
The Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity (RWIMH) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the education of the work of Raoul Wallenberg
A monument to Raoul Wallenberg stands at Great Cumberland Place in London's Marble Arch district, outside the Western Marble Arch Synagogue and near the Swedish Embassy. The 10 ft bronze monument was sculpted by Philip Jackson and is a larger-than-life representation of Wallenberg, standing against a bronze wall made up of 100,000 Schutz-Passes, the protective passes used by Wallenberg to rescue Hungarian Jews.
Paul A. Levine was an American–Swedish Holocaust and genocide historian, co-author of a widely used Swedish textbook on the subject.