1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2017 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl was born in Hungary on October 25, 1903, later moving to Slovakia to study under Rabbi Shumel Dvoid Ungar in Nitra. (2) During his time in Nitra, he quickly became a senior figure within the local Jewish community and Yeshiva. (3) Weissmandl was responsible for some of the daring efforts to save the Jewish people of Slovakia from the Holocaust, which include the establishment of a Working Group , an underground organization that raised funds to negotiate ransom with German and Slovakian officials in order to delay mass deportations. (4) During the Nazi regime, Weissmandl used his contacts from England to obtain visas, becoming one of the first to actively protect people of Jewish ancestry in Europe. (5) Weissmandl also wrote telegrams to generate awareness of the Jewish people’s plight and encouraged other strategic approaches to stop the Holocaust, including the bombing of railroad tunnels to prevent the transportation of persons to concentration camps. (6) Weissmandl established a Working Group—a wide variety of people from different political and ideological spectrums—whose common goal was to save people from the Final Solution . (7) The Working Group was one of the first to document in writing the accounts of Auschwitz Escapees in a document widely referred to as the Auschwitz Protocols . (8) Weissmandl himself later translated the initial documentation from German to Hebrew and included a widely known addendum that pleaded for action. (9) Weissmandl wrote the first known appeal for the use of Allied air resources to disrupt the Holocaust. (10) In 1942 when Slovakia started deportation for resettlement , Rabbi Weissmandl was the first to inform the Working Group that people were being murdered and not sent to work as originally claimed. (11) Rabbi Weissmandl also played an instrumental role in Solomon Schoenfeld