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The exhibit is being presented at Arch Street Meeting House. (Courtesy of Mid-Atlantic \u2014 Eurasia Business Council)<\/p>\n The exhibit is being presented at Arch Street Meeting House. (Courtesy of Mid-Atlantic \u2014 Eurasia Business Council)<\/p>\n
The Swiss were famously neutral in World War II, but Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz was not.<\/p>\n
Lutz served as Swiss vice-consul in Budapest from 1942 to 1945, and helped save over 60,000 people from the Nazis in part by establishing safe houses throughout Budapest. Lutz is largely responsible for saving half of Budapest\u2019s Jews from being killed in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t the only diplomat who aided this effort, and at the Arch Street Meeting House at Independence Mall, there is now an exhibit memorializing the work of those important figures.<\/p>\n
A collaboration between the Mid-Atlantic \u2014 Eurasia Business Council and the Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia called \u201cVisas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats\u201d opened last month and runs through the end of March, with the possibility of it being brought to another location and extended into the summer, too. It is not just a uniquely Jewish exhibit, but a uniquely Philadelphian one, too. Lutz served at the Swiss consulate in the City of Brotherly Love in the late 1920s and early 1930s.<\/p>\n
Val Kogan is the president of the Mid-Atlantic \u2014 Eurasia Business Council, and he said that the exhibit holds a story that is incredibly important for the Jewish community to learn.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis exhibition holds profound significance for the Jewish community as it preserves and honors the memory of those who risked everything to save Jewish lives during humanity\u2019s darkest chapter. For Jews, the \u2018Visas for Life\u2019 exhibition serves as both commemoration and inspiration,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The exhibit was created by Eric Saul, founder and executive director of Visas for Life and the Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust. It celebrates the courage of more than 300 diplomats from 40 countries who contributed to protecting various people \u2014 Jewish and not \u2014 from the Nazis.<\/p>\n
It includes a variety of items and media that detail the work of Lutz and his contemporaries, who used their status and pull to protect people across Europe. Lutz is credited with negotiating with Nazi and Hungarian officials to allow Jewish refugees to move to Palestine, providing documents for some Jews to travel through parts of Europe with safe passage and setting up safe houses that acted as extensions of Swiss diplomatic territory and therefore off-limits to Nazis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe exhibition also addresses a particular form of forgetting \u2014 the erasure of non-Jewish and Jewish rescuers from Holocaust memory. While Jewish suffering remains central to Holocaust education, the stories of those who risked everything to help illuminate crucial truths about human nature, moral choice and the possibility of resistance,\u201d Kogan said. \u201cThese diplomat-heroes prove that \u201cordinary\u201d people embedded in systems can choose conscience over complicity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kogan plans to help create a memorial for Lutz and other diplomats in Philadelphia, with the goal of opening it on Lutz\u2019s birthday of March 30, which is also the day that he arrived in Philadelphia in 1926. The event will include an appearance by Lutz\u2019s stepdaughter Agnes Hirschi, who will discuss her stepfather\u2019s character and legacy. The directors of the documentary \u201cDangerous Diplomacy,\u201d which details Lutz\u2019s work, will also be there.<\/p>\n
\u201cDangerous Diplomacy\u201d was shown at the exhibit\u2019s Dec. 17 opening, with a bevy of Philadelphia figures in attendance to watch and learn from the exhibit. The list of speakers included Michael Newmuis, 2026 director in the Philadelphia mayor\u2019s office; Zabeth Teelucksingh, president of Global Philadelphia Association; Jeffrey Lasday, senior chief of external affairs at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia; and Sean Connolly, executive director of Arch Street Meeting House.<\/p>\n
The event was a reminder of the greater themes discussed in the exhibit: bravery in the face of tyranny, and how the actions of one person or a small group can have a large effect on many more people.<\/p>\n
The 80th anniversary of Lutz\u2019s heroism comes at a time when being Jewish in America is difficult. In 2024, the ADL reported the most antisemitic incidents it has ever tracked since it began doing so in the 1970s. More than 9,300 incidents represented a 344% increase over the past five years and a 893% increase over the past 10 years.<\/p>\n
Lutz\u2019s bravery and this exhibit are a reminder of the importance of solidarity between people right now, and forever.<\/p>\n
Kogan said that this exhibit is as important today as it ever has been.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re living through what historians may someday call a crisis of democratic values worldwide. Authoritarianism is resurgent, human rights are under attack and refugee populations face unprecedented hostility. The lessons embodied by these diplomat-rescuers \u2014 about bureaucratic courage, about prioritizing human dignity over nationalist ideology, about creative resistance to unjust laws \u2014 have direct application to contemporary political challenges,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For more information on the exhibit, contact Kogan at 484-467-7444 or [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n