The man who saved more Jews than Schindler
December 23, 2022

John Sciulli/Getty Images
Photos of Aristides de Sousa Mendes from a Sousa Mendes Foundation exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
As a journalist in Israel in the 1980s, I'd covered the Lebanon War and violence in the West Bank. But I'd always felt like an outsider. Last month, I returned to Jerusalem after nearly 35 years away. This time, though, I wasn't just an observer. Dancing around a Torah scroll at a tiny Haredi yeshiva, I was a participant.
That Torah was saved thanks to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese official who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis - including my grandparents.
For two days in November, Sousa Mendes was posthumously honored by the city of Jerusalem and Yad Vashem, Israel's o...
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