Raoul Wallenberg in Israel recovered memory and mediocre commemoration

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many Historical events and persons have been forgotten for decades, centuries, even millennia before recovery. Until the 1980s, Raoul Wallenberg's efforts to rescue the Jews of Budapest from Nazi atrocities were rarely commemorated, even obscured, and largely forgotten, whether in Hungary, his home country of Sweden, or i9n Israel, where many of the people he rescued lived. This essay explores how political and social shifts enabled belated recognition of Wallenberg's deeds in Israel, primarily through the efforts of local agents working from below, with implications for understanding how historical memory is belatedly recovered more generally.