An international hearing in the case of the missing Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, which was to have begun in Stockholm tomorrow has been called off until the fall because of a strike of public employes that has shut down all communications and transportation in Sweden, including incoming and outgoing flights.
Lena Biorck-Kaplan of New York, chairman of the U.S. Working Group for the Free Wallenberg Committee, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Swedish Wallenberg committee asked that the meeting be postponed because of the strike. She said there was no grounds to believe that there may have been pressure from the Swedish government not to hold the hearing which is aimed at proving that Wallenberg, who was arrested by Soviet troops who liberated Hungary in January, 1945, may still be alive in a Soviet labor camp.
Mrs. Biorck-Kaplan said that because the participants come from all over the world and have busy schedules it was decided to try to reschedules the hearings for late October. She said they meeting.
POSTPONEMENT MIGHT BE ADVANTAGEOUS
Annette Lantos, of Hillsborough, California, Western states secretary for the Wallenberg committee, told the JTA that the postponement might work out to the group’s advantage since she believes additional witnesses may be located by then who have seen Wallenberg alive in Soviet prisons. She said the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust. Studies at the Yeshiva University of Los Angeles recently agreed to help the committee.
Wallenberg, who, if still alive, would now be 67 years old, is credited with saving about 100,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz.
British Labor MP Greville Janner, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is expected to discuss the Wallenberg case at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress’ European Executive in Paris this weekend. Elie Wiesel, chairman of President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, who was scheduled to lead the American delegation to Stockholm, will also attend that meeting. Janner and Wiesel were also planning to go to Stockholm as was Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Israeli MK Gideon Housner, head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
