Lecture
Leon Duval
Tuesday 14.04.2026
Leon Duval
“In Commemoration of Yom Hashoah, We Vindicate the Righteous by Rewarding Them for Their Righteousness”
Tuesday 14.04.2026
How to watch
This lecture starts on 14 April at 7:00pm (UK).
Summary
In 1953 the Israeli Knesset created the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority to be known as Yad Vashem. Within its mandate was an injunction “to honour the righteous among the nations”—non-Jews who actively saved Jewish lives between 1939–1945. The pursuit of “righteousness” has always been a foundation concept within the teachings of Judaism; the quotation from Chronicles used in the presentation title dates back around 2,500 years. The Knesset however did not define what “righteous” meant for the purposes of the Yad Vashem act; that task was delegated to a special commission convened in 1963. In this session we discuss the criteria developed for defining the term “righteous among the nations” before going on to explain how the awardees are acknowledged. We then present three emotional stories about the extraordinary acts of chesed—human kindness carried out by these very special people.
Leon Duval
Leon Duval was born in Johannesburg but moved to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1975. The Victorian culture confronted in the days before Australia became ethnically diverse prompted them to shorten their surname to Duval. An accountant by profession, Leon discovered that many of the clients he looked after were Holocaust survivors which prompted him to search for a greater understanding of his Jewish inheritance and the underlying causes driving antisemitism. After retiring from professional life and moving to Jerusalem, Leon undertook an extensive course to train as a guide for the Yad Vashem history museum and is now a committed amateur historian spending many hours researching the history of the Jews in Europe and that of his own family’s Lithuanian roots. His occasional blog appears on the Times of Israel platform and he recently published a book telling the story of a Kindertransport survivor.