It was 57 years ago last month, on January 17, 1945, that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg - credited with saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazi Holocaust - vanished into the pages of history. Last seen riding out of Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet troops and never heard from again.

Aside from a ceremony held at the Israeli Knesset, and a few other scattered events, the anniversary of Wallenberg's disappearance largely passed by unnoticed, with most Jews unaware of the date or its significance. Consequently, few, if any, voices were raised to demand a final accounting of what befell this hero of the Jewish people. Though Sweden and Russia released a joint report about Wallenberg last year, its findings were far from conclusive, and the mystery surrounding him endures.

There is something wrong, something terribly wrong, about the fact that we Jews have essentially given up on determining what became of this giant of a man, a person who did more to save Jews during World War II than nearly all the Jewish organizations put together. It is perhaps the ultimate act of ingratitude on our part that little effort is devoted to keeping his fate at the top of our people's agenda.

If we truly appreciated what Wallenberg did by defying his own government, by placing himself at grave personal risk to grant Swedish identity papers to thousands of Hungarian Jews whom the rest of the world had abandoned, then we would not allow ourselves to rest until his fate were known. We would press the Russian government and the Swedish government, and yes, the Israeli government too, to dig deeper and harder, and to keep on pressing forward with an active investigation until the truth can finally be known.

Sadly, though, that is unlikely to occur. Yesterday's heroes seem to count for little, as two other recent examples so amply demonstrate.

Less than five years ago, a young Swiss night watchman named Christoph Meili garnered international acclaim when he discovered a trove full of documents headed for the shredder at Zurich's Union Bank of Switzerland. The papers included records of bank accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, records the Swiss had cruelly withheld from their heirs.

Meili, a non-Jew, saved the documents from destruction and passed them along to Jewish organizations, thereby forcing the Swiss banking system to come clean with regard to its handling of Holocaust assets. Meili lost his job, was vilified in the Swiss press as a traitor, and was eventually forced to move to the United States.

Initially, Meili was the toast of world Jewry. He was invited to speak by Jewish organizations, hailed in the Jewish press, and received numerous accolades for his actions. But, as a January 13 Jewish Telegraphic Agency story indicates, that is largely a thing of the past. Money promised him for his revelations has not come through, and Meili says that various Jewish groups which used him as a speaker to raise funds have failed to share the proceeds with him.

And so, yet another friend of the Jewish people received a pat on the back, a couple of thank-yous, and was then quickly shoved aside, largely forgotten by those whom he had helped.

Similar treatment was accorded by Israel to members of the South Lebanese Army (SLA), Israel's former allies in the battle against Hizbullah. After Israel beat a hasty retreat from Lebanon under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the SLA was essentially left to fend for itself. Those given refuge in Israel have been largely overlooked or ignored by the authorities. A recent television report showed a family of an SLA soldier living in a bus stop in northern Israel. Conditions for some have been so bad that they have voluntarily chosen to return to Lebanon, where they face arrest and imprisonment, if not worse, for having "collaborated with the Zionists".

The treatment meted out to people such as Raoul Wallenberg, Christoph Meili and SLA soldiers is simply shameful. Judaism places immense emphasis on hakorat ha-tov, on demonstrating appreciation to those who have shown you kindness. This pattern of forgetting our friends in their time of need is neither moral nor just. In addition, it is shortsighted, because it hardly provides potential allies of the Jewish people with much of an incentive to help us in the future.

Indeed, if this is how we treat our friends, then perhaps we should no longer be surprised if our list of enemies continues to lengthen.