Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Honors First Arab ‘Righteous Among the Nations’

TEL AVIV – Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem has for the first time recognized an Arab as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery in rescuing Jews from Nazi Berlin.

A family member of Egyptian-born Mohamed Helmy will accept the award at a ceremony in Berlin.

Raised in Khartoum, Helmy moved to Germany to study medicine. He risked his life when he hid four Jews for the duration of the Second World War. Deemed a “Hamite” – or descendant of Ham, Noah’s son – Helmy was forbidden from marrying his German fiancée and was fired from the hospital he worked at. However, he continued to speak out against Nazi policies.

Anna Boros’ testimony, in which she claimed that Helmy helped her and a family friend hide, brought Helmy to the attention of Yad Vashem. In the 1960s, Boros traveled to meet Helmy.

“Dr. Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart and I will be grateful to him for eternity,” she said.

However, even though the honor was first awarded in 2013, some 31 years after Helmy’s death, his family refused it because Yad Vashem is an Israeli institution.

“If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it,” Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy’s grandnephew, told the Associated Press during a 2013 interview at her Cairo home. After a four-year search, a relative was eventually found who agreed to accept the award.

81-year-old Nasser Kutbi, a professor of medicine from Cairo whose father, Helmy’s nephew, was close to his uncle, will travel to Berlin to accept the award. In light of Helmy’s family’s reluctance to accept an Israeli honor, Kutbi will receive the award from Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff at the German Foreign Ministry and not at the Jewish state’s embassy.