May 23, 2012

(JTA) – Unknown vandals defiled a monument in Budapest to Raoul Wallenberg by hanging bloody pigs’ feet on a statue of the Swedish diplomat, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.

A group of tourists visiting the site on Tuesday discovered the defacement, according to the Hungarian media.

Pictures showed four or five severed pigs’ feet strung on rope hanging on the statue, one of them positioned by Wallenberg’s head.

Budapest authorities promised “immediate action” on the case, according to the media.

This year, the centenary of Wallenberg’s birth, is being marked in Hungary as Raoul Wallenberg year. While a neutral Swedish diplomat in Budapest after the German occupation in 1944, Wallenberg issued Swedish travel documents – known as “Wallenberg passports” — to at least 20,000 Jews and also set up more than 30 safe houses for Jews. He disappeared while being escorted out of Hungary toward the Soviet Union in January 1945.
 

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