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Friday April 28, 2000

Street in Rome honors a fascist who saved Budapest Ghetto Jews

ROME (JTA) -- On the eve of Passover, the city of Rome named a street after a late fascist sympathizer who masqueraded as a Span
Businessman Giorgio Perlasca had volunteered to fight on the side of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War in th

Using his citation from Spain, he passed himself off as a Spanish diplomat and, working alongside Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats from neutral nations, he signed thousands of phony passports and identity documents that protected Jews from deportation.

Perlasca's heroism remained unknown until the late 1980s. He stated that he had found nothing unusual in his actions and did not consider himself to have been a hero.

Streets in several provincial Italian towns have already been named for Perlasca, who died in 1992.

Naming a street after him in the Italian capital was the necessary recognition "of a totally normal person who considered it totally normal to put his own life at risk" saving others, Rome official Gianno Borgna said April 18 at a ceremony in Rome's main synagogue.

Said Edith Bruck, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is well-known in Italy for her memoirs and other books about the Shoah, "For everything that he did, Giorgio Perlasca doesn't simply merit streets named after him, but squares and entire cities. I hope that one day all the oppressed people in the world will have their own Perlasca."

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