I follow that story about Italian rescuer Gino Bartali with one told by Eva Weisel in yesterday's New York Times. Weisel sets out the details of how she and her family were saved by 'an influential local man' and then reports on the effort, so far unsuccessful, to have him honoured by Yad Vashem:
During the horrors of the Holocaust, non-Jews saved many thousands of Jews from death and depravity at the hands of Germans and their allies. Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial museum, has recognized more than 23,000 of these brave men and women as "The Righteous Among the Nations." Our family's rescuer deserves to be among that number. And in his case, the impact of recognition would have powerful reverberations, striking a blow against Holocaust denial in a part of the world where such denial is widespread.
That is because my hometown is Mahdia, on the eastern shore of Tunisia, and our rescuer, Khaled Abdul Wahab, was an Arab Muslim. (He passed away in 1997.)
So far, however, Abdul Wahab has been denied the recognition he deserves. Nearly five years ago, in January 2007, the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem nominated him to be a "righteous," the first Arab ever to be formally considered for this honor. This nomination was based on witness testimony from my late sister, Anny Boukris. In March of that year, however, the official Commission for the Designation of the Righteous, a body presided over by a retired Israeli judge and created by Israeli law to decide who merits recognition as a "righteous," voted to reject the nomination. That decision was kept secret for two years.
In 2010, that same jurist, Justice Jacob Tuerkel, sent the Abdul Wahab file back to the commission for a second review. This time, the case was bolstered by two fresh testimonies - a video interview of my cousin Edmee Masliah, who was with me at the farm and now lives outside Paris, and a notarized letter I wrote recounting my own experience. Yad Vashem now had three firsthand accounts of the story. But to my complete dismay, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous once again voted to reject the nomination. Abdul Wahab was a noble man, I was told by Yad Vashem, but his actions did not rise to the statutory level required to merit the "righteous" designation - that is, he didn't "risk his life" to save Jewish lives.
While that may be the wording of the law, I am told by experts that Abdul Wahab would not be the first rescuer of Jews not to have suffered physical harm, let alone life-threatening danger. Many in France who have won that designation were honored because they acted to save Jews without knowing for sure what fate would await them if they were caught. In addition, some of the famous diplomats honored as righteous were never arrested, injured or threatened with death for aiding Jews.
Not being a party to the deliberations of those who decided to withhold the award in the case of Khaled Abdul Wahab, of course I don't have the information they have, and can only go on what I've read here (though see also this earlier normblog post). On that basis, however, it appears to me that Eva Weisel has a point. The criteria for the Righteous Among The Nations award do include the running of some risk: 'Risk to the rescuer's life, liberty or position'. Yet, except where rescuers actually lost their lives or suffered incarceration or some other grave consequence for trying to save Jews from the Nazis, the inference that they took a significant risk must arise from the overall context as well as from the details of their particular rescue initiative. The very fact that someone acted to thwart a German attempt, during wartime, to round up Jewish families surely suggests they might have been incurring some danger by doing so. As Weisel indicates, there were rescuers in Europe who have been recognized as Righteous Among The Nations although the level of risk they took seems not to have been very high.
Naturally, those deciding on the award will not want to devalue it; but it is better in this matter to err on the side of recognition where the risk was low than on the side of withholding the award when it might be fully merited.
