This year’s Raoul Wallenberg Memorial event scheduled for January 17, 2024 will be an in person event to be held at the Toronto Holocaust Museum. Invitations will be sent out shortly by the Swedish Embassy in Ottawa. I hope that as many of our first generation survivors and families will be able to attend.
Secondly, I would like to speak about the role we, the survivors, can still play in shedding light on what actually happened in Hungary during the Shoah and what the take home lessons are, now that the Jewish community unfortunately again is facing perilous times.
Advocacy in Raoul Wallenberg’s name is hugely important. It cannot be overstated how important this is. But it must not overshadow Raoul Wallenberg’s original work. It’s one thing to advocate from the safety of your pulpit for a good cause, it’s quite another to go to a rail yard to yank off deportees from a freight train, maintaining that they are Swedish citizens, risking one’s own life in the process. That takes chutzpah.
From chutzpah to mitzvah. A mitzvah broadly speaking is a good deed. Our rabbis tell us saving just one life can change the course of the universe. Raoul Wallenberg was a righteous gentile, who saved the lives of not one, but tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest – the sad irony is that in the end he lost his own life at the hands of the dreaded KGB.
Having said this, in Jewish thought the concept of mitzvah has two sides: the first side is of course the person who does the mitzvah. The second side is the person benefiting from the mitzvah, in this case the person being saved. Without that person, the mitzvah would not be possible. Some Jewish authorities maintain that consequently the person making the mitzvah should to be grateful to the person being saved, because without that person the mitzvah is not possible.
Either way, Raoul Wallenberg was the greatest humanitarian in our time. We must in small or preferably in large ways emulate his example by talking to younger generations about the Shoah. Who better than us, who lived it? And we must actively counter the present wave of hateful antisemitism, lately acceptable in mainstream media.
Please share this post with your friends and family and other survivors and I hope you will come to the January 17, 2024 event.
Shalom ve lehitraot,
George Preger/Preger Gyuri
Co-Founder and CEO
