Arab in line for Jewish honor
Khaled Abdelwahhab, who saved a group of Jews in Tunisia from Nazi troops during World War II, nominated for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations
Now he has become the first Arab person nominated for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution.
The nomination of Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997, has reopened a little-known chapter of the Holocaust in the Arab countries of North Africa.
Abdelwahhab was nominated by Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a US think tank.
Took Jews to his farm outside town
Satloff said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he went to Morocco to research what happened during the Nazi genocide in hopes of countering Holocaust denial in the Arab world.
"I asked, 'Did any Arabs save Jews in the Holocaust?' " Satloff said. "If they did, these are stories about which Arabs could be proud. It would also entail accepting the context, because it would mean there was something to save Jews from."
The search led to Abdelwahhab, the son of an aristocratic family who was 32 when German troops arrived in Tunisia in November 1942. The nation was home to about 100,000 Jews at the time.
When he heard German officers planned to rape a local Jewish woman, he gathered her family and several other Jewish families in Mahdia -- about two dozen people -- and took them to his farm outside town. He hid them for four months, until the occupation ended.
"Khaled is the finest example, though not the only one, of an Arab who saved Jews from persecution during the German occupation," Satloff said.
Abdelwahhab still has to be approved by the Yad Vashem commission that grants the honor. Since the war, Yad Vashem has conferred the status on 21,700 people, including some 60 Muslims from the Balkans. But no Arab person had been nominated.
