ISRAEL MOURNS HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR LANTOS

Agence France Presse
Feb 11 2008

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel on Monday hailed the late US congressman Tom
Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who played a key role in
rallying US support for the Jewish state.

Israel "expresses great sorrow" over the loss of the 80-year-old
Lantos, who died earlier the same day from cancer of the esophagus,
the foreign ministry said.

Lantos "was a leader in promoting Israeli-US ties in Congress. His
commitment to human rights and the commemoration of the Holocaust
were the pillars of his public work," it said.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that "Israel owes a great debt to
Lantos for dedicating himself to promoting Israeli-US ties and his
activities for the Jewish people."

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family in February 1928, Lantos was 16
when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. As a teenager, he was a member
of the anti-Nazi resistance and later of the anti-Communist student
movement.

After the Soviets invaded Hungary, he discovered that most of his
family had died in the Holocaust. By 1947, he was in the United
States on an academic scholarship and became an economics professor
in San Francisco.

He was elected to Congress in 1980 where he served as the chairman
of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 elections,
Lantos used his committee to launch strident appeals for greater US
action on human rights in China, Darfur, Myanmar and Russia.

Under his stewardship, the committee voted in October to describe the
mass slaughter of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as "genocide"
— plunging US relations with Turkey into crisis.