Israel pays tribute to Wiesenthal, scourge of the Nazi criminals

Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who made it his life's work to hunt down Nazi war criminals, has been buried in Israel.

Wiesenthal, who died in Vienna on Tuesday aged 96, was laid to rest at a ceremony in Herzilya attended by several hundred people, including Holocaust survivors, along with Israeli and foreign dignitaries and admirers. Representing the Israeli government in the absence of cabinet members, Rabbi Michael Melchior, the Deputy Education Minister, said that instead of being embittered by his experience he drew on it to find hope and optimism.

"Simon Wiesenthal taught an entire generation that you learn from the past and use your knowledge to build the past, so there will be hope in the future, hope for the Jewish nation and for the entire humanity," Mr Melchior said. Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, who praised him as "the conscience of the Holocaust", told how the young Wiesenthal had run after the cattle car that took his mother to her death.

"She never heard his desperate cries, the cries of a loving son," Mr Hier said, and added that at their last meeting he told Wiesenthal: "Because of your life's work, the whole world has heard you."

Rabbi Hier said Wiesenthal had wanted to celebrate his 90th birthday at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. Asked why, he had replied: "Because it was Hitler's favourite hotel." Rabbi Hier said Wiesenthal, who arranged kosher catering and a Jewish prayer service at the celebration, said he wanted to show "that the Jews have outlived the Nazis".

Rabbi Hier said Wiesenthal, whose best-known success was his role in finding the Holocaust's logistical organiser Adolf Eichmann, tried and executed after being seized in Argentina by Israeli agents in 1960, was "the victims' permanent representative."