Rachel Oestreicher Bernheim

Rachel Oestreicher Bernheim is the chairwoman of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States, a human rights organization in New York. She is married to Charles Alexander Bernheim, a managing director of Bear, Stearns & Company, the New York investment bank. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Her previous marriage ended in divorce. She is the daughter of Bert and Irvin Oestreicher of Salisbury, North Carolina. Her father owned Dave Oestreicher Inc., which was a department store in Salisbury. [New York Times; May 14, 1995] [New York Times; November 13, 2001; Taking Time to Recognize a New Age of Heroes]

She wrote in 2001:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia should indeed set the record straight about Raoul Wallenberg's fate. For two decades, we have advocated the former Soviet Union's release of all historical records concerning Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis and vanished in 1945 on his way to the Soviet Army's headquarters outside Budapest. Corroborated reports of his movements inside the Gulag demand no less. A study of his case inevitably leads to the educated presumption that he neither died nor was murdered in 1947. Wallenberg's legacy is a monument to human courage and heroism, recognized by United States honorary citizenship. Pressing for information about his fate is not an act of antiquarian curiosity, but of historical fidelity to one of our own. We must replace ignorance of Wallenberg's fate with a full accounting of the facts and, if he is dead, the return of his remains to his family in Sweden. [New York Times; December 1, 2000]

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