A STAMP WORTH HAVING

Stamp to honor wartime rescuer (JTA)

The United States Postal Service will issue a stamp next week honoring an American diplomat who helped Jews escape the Holocaust. The stamp will honor Hiram Bingham IV, who provided fake visas to journalist and scholar Varian Fry, who helped Jews pass into safety. Bingham also hid Jews in his home after he was posted in southern France in 1940. After German and French officials complained his activities, Bingham was transferred to Argentina.

In 1946, he resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service in protest over the U.S. refusal to investigate how war criminals were being given safe haven in the South American country.

Bingham is the only U.S. diplomat “that we know of who risked his career, indeed sacrificed his career, in order to save Jews from the Holocaust,” Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, told The Washington Post.