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FRIDAY
DECFMRER 4 1987
VISA
LA Plans Statue
To Honor Wallenberg
TOM TUGEND
Special to The Jewish News
L
os Angeles — The Los
Angeles City Council
has unanimously ap-
proved plans to erect a statue
in honor of Raoul Wallenberg,
the Swedish diplomat who
save thousands of Hungarian
Jews from deportation to Nazi
death camps during World
War II.
The statue will be 18 feet
tall and stand at the corner of
Fairfax Ave. and Beverly
Blvd., the crossroads marking
the traditional Jewish section
of Los Angeles.
Italian artist Franco Asset-
to has designed and sculpted
the monument at his studio
in Turin. It features two
stainless steel wings, sym-
bolizing an angel of mercy,
surrounding a brass and gold
silhouette of a man, repre-
senting Wallenberg and the
spirit of compassion in
mankind. The base will be
covered with thousands of
pebbles, each representing a
life that was saved.
The statue is intentionally
abstract because it would be
inappropriate to erect a
lifelike statue of Wallenberg
without clear evidence that
he is dead, according to Paul
Brooks, who is leading the
monument effort.
Brooks, whose parents sur-
vived in Nazi-occupied
Budapest thanks to Wallen-
berg, says that $50,000 have
been raised toward the cost of
the monument. He hopes that
the remaining $100,000 will
be collected in time for a
dedication ceremony next
spring.
Wallenberg was sent to
Hungary by the Swedish
Foreign Ministry in July,
1944. While at this post, he is
credited with saving some
20,000 Jews by providing
refuge for them in houses pro-
tected by the flags of neutral
Sweden, Switzerland and
Portugal.
He is also given credit with
saving the lives of about
70,000 additional people
when he persuaded a German
officer to ignore orders to
destroy the Budapest ghetto.
Wallenberg vanished after
Red Army troops took Buda-
pest and arrested him on Jan.
17, 1945. The Russians later
reported that he died in
prison in 1947, but there have
been subsequent reports that
he had been sighted in prison
camps and mental hospitals.
One volunteer in raising
funds is Suzanne Zada, a sur-
vivor of Auschwitz, who spoke
on the significance of the
monument for her.
"He (Wallenberg) didn't
save me from anything, but in
retrospect, he saved my soul,"
she said. "Even though I
didn't meet anyone who was
decent, he has reminded me
that there was at least one. It
is important that we remind
the new generation that there
were some decent people, not
just all the horrors."
To help in the fund raising,
programs depicting high-
lights of Wallenberg's life and
deeds will be shown over
three cable television chan-
nels during the next few
months.
Chabad To Keep
Rebbe9 s Library
New York (JTA) — The Ap-
peals Court for the Second
Circuit in Manhattan
unanimously upheld a federal
district court decision that
awarded the library that
belonged to the sixth Lubavit-
cher rebbe, Rabbi Joseph
Schneersohn, to the
Lubavitch movement.
The imbroglio pitted Barry
Gourary, grandson of the
sixth rebbe, against the
organized Lubavitch, or
Chabad, community.
Gourary, a Montclair, N.J.,
businessman who is not a
member of Chabad, had
claimed part of the library
had been left him by virtue of
a will his grandmother,
Nechama Dina Schneersohn
— the sixth rebbe's widow —
left at the time of her death
in 1970.
In it, she wrote • that the
500,000-book library was the
property of herself, her two
daughters, and her grandson.
Chabad, however, claimed it
was entitled to the library
because it was communal
property.
Labor Parties
Score Big
Rio de Janeiro (JTA) — The
Zionist Labor Movement and
Mapan captured nearly 45
percent of the votes in Brazil's
elections for the 31st Zionist
Congress, and will send five of
Brazil's ten delegates to the
Congress in Jerusalem Dec. 6.
Likud and Mizrachi will
both have two delegates. The
tenth delegate is being claim-
ed by both the Reformists list
and the Likud, and is to be
decided by the Zionist Court
in Jerusalem.