Mr.Bernardo Jerochim
Via The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation
Argentina
_______________________________________Berlin, March 10th, 2006
Dear Mr. Jerochim,
first of all I convey to you my deepest condolence for the death of your brother. I am so ashamed that the bureaucracy of our country prohibited you to meet him still alive.
I think that there is nothing to celebrate today, since you and your family are geting back what the National Socialist regime has stolen you: your citizenship.
We are looking forward to your visit. Allow me to renew my invitation to our Church where a replica of the Holocaust Memorial Mural of the Buenos Aires’ Cathedral is exhibited.
It is amazing how many factors had to intertwine to bring you back the basic right of citizenship. This is not a reparation, because nothing can give you back your stolen rights and lost opportunities. And even for this step has been necessary nearly a miracle, a fragile building of interaction of different facts. And it started in Budapest – with a young diplomat who risks his existence to save people from the murderous Nazi system: Raoul Wallenberg.
This missing and abandoned gentleman is remembered by Baruch Tenembaum, the founder of the Wallenberg Foundation who had the idea of bringing the Mural to the place where the Nazi regime get started, installing a replica inside our church in Berlin.
He met on that occasion with an old and prestigious Rabbi, whom he saved from being forgotten and abandoned. Then, he met the Argentine Ambassador in Berlin, Enrique Candioti, a person of humanity and righteousness as well, whose son, Alejandro, is your lawyer and experienced your suffering in his flesh. All the efforts of the Argentine Ambassador to help you ended without success because the German administration declared that you didn’t have merits to apply for the stolen citizenship. So the Ambassador asked the Wallenberg Foundation for help.
Let us all today pray, at the very same day that you will receive (so late!) a document that will enable you to meet your family, that all of us, including yourself and the diplomats involved in the ceremony, will join the Wallenberg Foundation to claim to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ”Let us bring home Raoul Wallenberg”, the hero who needs to meet his family too. Let us not just exist! Let us be alive!
I wish you a Pessach Sameach and hope not the ”next year in Jeruschalaim, but this year in Berlin.”
Best regards,
Pastor Annemarie Werner
Vaterunser Kirche
March 10, 2006
