Baruch Tenembaum

On July 9, 2014, the United States Congress presented the Congressional Gold Medal to Raoul Wallenberg, following an initiative by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. The ceremony took place at the Capitol Rotunda, with the presence of living relatives of Raoul, including his half-sister, Nina Lagergren, and Matti von Dardel (widow of his late half-brother, Professor Guy von Dardel). In a previous luncheon ceremony at the Congress, a distinguished group of dignitaries, senators, congressmen, and diplomats recognized the distinctive role played by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

In 2009 world gambling operator Ladbrokes gave Baruch Tenembaum a 1/40 odds to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as opposed to 1/20 to the actual winner, US President Barack Obama.

The Wallenberg Foundation aims to pay tribute to the "Saviors of the Holocaust", recognizing those who "risked their lives and freedom to save thousands of Jews from a certain death in hands of the Nazis during the Second World War", the site of the foundation explains. Since 2005 the foundation's charter has expanded to highlight the legacies of rescuers in other major conflicts, such as the victims of the Armenian Genocide.

So outstanding was the impact of this mural that on 2004, in a moving ceremony, the Vater-Unser Church in Berlin inaugurated a replica of this memorial.

In October 2003, United States Congressman Tom Lantos made a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives to honor Tenembaum, and had a fuller tribute inserted into the Congressional Record Wallenberg apparently was instrumental in saving Lantos from the Nazis. Tenembaum also received the Royal Order of the Polar Star from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Tenembaum has had an audience with the Pope. He frequently has letters to the editor published.

In 2001, under the auspices of Casa Argentina en Israel - Tierra Santa and the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, the website www.bialikencastellano.com was created, which became the most comprehensive and important online source on the life and work from the famed Israeli national writer and poet.

Baruch Tenembaum promoted the idea of installing a memorial mural dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust inside the Buenos Aires Cathedral. This mural is the first monument of its kind, it contains Jewish religious texts and was inaugurated by the then Cardinal of Argentina and Archbishop of Buenos Aires Antonio Quarracino and unveiled by Baruch Tenembaum and Lech Wałęsa, Nobel Peace Prize, in April 1997. In February 1998 Cardinal Quarracino died and a unique homage of survivors of the Holocaust over the grave of a Primate Cardinal in a Catholic Cathedral was held on April, that same year.

Baruch Tenembaum was invited by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to a meeting specially held on the day of the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. During the meeting, that took place at the Secretary General's residence in New York, Tenembaum presented a Commemorative Medal specially commissioned and coined to mark the anniversary. Mrs. Nane Annan, the wife of the world leader and niece of the Swedish diplomat, also attended the event. This was the second time Kofi Annan met the founder of the IRWF.

On January 31, 1976, Baruch Tenembaum was kidnapped by rightwing extremists belonging to the Triple-A (Argentine Anti-subversive Alliance) a clandestine state terrorist organization founded under the aegis of José López Rega, a sinister character of great influence during the government of President Isabel Perón. Together with members of the military and police, the Triple-A supposedly began the "disappearance" of people in Argentina which, by the end of the military dictatorship in 1983, came to a total of 30,000 persons. The kidnappers allegedly accused him of "infecting the Catholic Church with the virus of Judaism" and "of spreading ideas of alleged coexistence so as to destroy Christian principles" through his inter-faith work, which they claimed, "leads to the destruction of the Creole republic". Additionally, they accused him of being a part of the sinister "conspiracy" known as the Plan Andina.

He launched the idea of establishing interfaith monuments by promoting the creation of a fresco by the Argentine master painter Raúl Soldi at the main church in Nazareth, which was completed in 1968.

In 1965, he was a Latin American promoter of the first visit by a Pope to Jerusalem. Granted an award for his work by the Vatican, he was invited to a ceremony at the Vatican City and was received by Pope Paul VI on January 13, 1965. At a separate public ceremony, Monsignor Antonio Caggiano, Cardinal Primate of Argentina, presented him with an Argentine Church award, granted for the very first time for a Jew Jew in Argentina.

In 1952, Tenembaum graduated from the Higher Institute of Judaic Religious Studies. As a teacher and a professor he taught Hebrew and Yiddish language and literature, the Torah, the Prophets and Mishnah. In 1955, he was appointed Director of the Moises Ville Teacher's Seminar in the province of Santa Fe where he taught the Old Testament and philosophy.

Baruch Tenembaum (born 9 July 1933, in Argentina at Las Palmeras colony, a Santa Fe provincial settlement for Jewish immigrants escaping from the Russian pogroms of 1880), the grandson and son of Jewish gauchos, he studied in Buenos Aires and Rosario.