Fittingly, articles about Rachel Oestreicher Bernheim and Vincent Bertollini were juxtaposed on this newspaper’s front page last week.

Bernheim and Bertollini share a passion for their causes and both recently returned to the Inland Northwest after an absence.

The similarity between the two ends there.

Bernheim, founder of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States, based in New York City, has spent most of her adult life passing on the values of Swedish diplomat Wallenberg, who disappeared into the Soviet Union prison system after saving thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II. She last visited this area in 1987 after her organization bestowed its first community service award on the city of Coeur d’Alene for its stand against the Aryan Nations.

Bertollini, by contrast, returned to North Idaho in handcuffs after being on the run for nearly five years, from a felony drunken driving charge. In the 1990s, Bertollini and another wealthy Californian, Carl Story, moved to Sandpoint to launch 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, a Christian Identity organization that bankrolled racist mass mailings and supported two supremacist churches, including Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations. Bertollini, who was utterly rejected by his adopted community in a run for Sandpoint mayor, fled rather than face a felony DUI count and possible prison for his third drunken driving charge in two years.

Bernheim and Bertollini have traveled two different roads.

He used his great wealth to try to rekindle the racial hatred that ignited a civil war in this country in the 19th century and that set the world at war between 1939 and 1945. In the end, he became a fugitive, living off the grid until the FBI caught him trying to cash a $1,000 check in Santa Fe, N.M. Bernheim, meanwhile, has traveled the country freely extolling the humanitarian virtue of her organization’s namesake and other heroes who have made a difference by fighting hatred and prejudice, including Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Last week, Bernheim was one of two Wallenberg representatives who visited Orient, Wash., to present a character education program, “A Study of Heroes,” to parents and teachers.

Nineteen years ago, Bernheim was instrumental in spotlighting Coeur d’Alene’s determined battle to stop racist Butler from expanding the beachhead he’d established in the 1970s at his 20-acre compound on the rimrock above Hayden Lake. Months earlier, the city had rallied around the late Bill Wassmuth, the leader of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, after his home was bombed by bigots with ties to the Aryan Nations. In a ceremony in New York City Hall, Wassmuth, the late Undersheriff Larry Broadbent and then-Mayor Ray Stone told the world’s media about Coeur d’Alene’s fight against racism. And civil rights giant Bayard Rustin hailed Coeur d’Alene in a stirring speech as a white town in rural North Idaho that could teach New Yorkers how to get along.

Bernheim, who has fought hatred for decades, received a warm welcome upon her return to the Northwest. Bertollini has embraced hatred, thumbed his nose at the law and found a jail cell waiting in his former hometown. One life has blessed others. The other has been wasted.