Tomorrow night and the following day, we'll be celebrating the festival of Purim. We'll remember the events described in the book of Esther, which records the first warrant for genocide, Haman's decree to destroy, slay, and exterminate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day. That plan was averted, which is why we celebrate. But it was revived not that long ago, in the Wannsee conference in January 1942, when Germany adopted the so-called "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem by eliminating all the Jews of Europe.

It's against that background that I'm going, this morning, to a ceremony to honour the memory of one of the true heroes of the 20th century, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was sent, at the age of 32, to be part of the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest in July 1944. By then the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews was under way. 400,000 of them had already been killed in Auschwitz.

With courage, imagination and a single-minded sense of purpose, he resolved to do what he could to save at least some of those who remained. He printed and handed out Swedish protective passports. He created safe houses where Jews could take refuge. In some cases, he even rescued people who'd already boarded the transportation trains. And he managed to delay Eichmann's planned massacre of the Budapest ghetto, so that when the Russians reached the city two days later they found over 90,000 Jews still alive. One way or another he saved more than 100,000 lives.

We don't know what happened to him. He was taken to Russia, suspected of being an American spy, and there all traces of him disappear. He remains the hero without a grave. But as long as humanity remembers those days, his name will live as a symbol of courage in the face of seemingly invincible evil. He stood firm; he refused to be intimidated; he resisted, knowing that in dark times, what we do makes a difference. The good we do lives after us, and it's the greatest thing that does.

2000 years ago the sages said, a single human life is like a universe. Save a life, and you save a world. Change a life and you begin to change the world. That was Raoul Wallenberg - and in an age like ours of religious hate and global terror, his message could not be clearer. To love G-d is to recognize his image in a human face, especially one whose creed, colour or culture is different from ours. May his memory inspire us.

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