Honoring a 'Righteous' Arab

I was going to mention here tomorrow that the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a rare ceremony planned to commemorate Yom Hashoah on Monday, but The Jewish Journal beat me with a cover story that hits newstands in the morning.

The Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi hunter, will posthumously honor Khaled Abdelwahab, a Tunisian man who saved the lives of Jews under German occupation in 1942. His daughter will accept the award on his behalf, and the daughter of one of the men he helped, Jacob Boukris, lives in Southern California and will be there.

Abdelwahab is the first Arab to be nominated by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as "Righteous Among the Nations." Here's a portion of the Journal's article:

The Nazi takeover immediately affected Jacob Boukris (wedding photo, right), an affluent household appliances manufacturer, as well as his wife, Odette, and their 11-year-old daughter, Anny. German troops gave the family one hour to evacuate their spacious house in the coastal town of Mahdia, then the soldiers turned it into a barrack and took all the valuables. The family and two dozen Jews found shelter in a nearby olive oil factory, but a few days later, another visitor appeared at midnight.

He was Khaled Abdelwahab (the transliterated Arab name is also spelled Abdelwahhab), a notably handsome man of 32, whose father was Tunisia's most eminent historian. The visitor told the startled Jews that they must leave immediately and explained why. Young Abdelwahab served as liaison between the local population and the Nazi occupiers. He used the position to ingratiate himself with the Germans and, like Oskar Schindler in Poland, frequently treated the officers to meals and endless rounds of wine.

The Germans had set up a brothel and impressed a number of local women, among them Jewish girls. One evening, a drunken officer confided that he had his eye on a particularly beautiful Jewish woman and planned to take her to the brothel and rape her the next night. The intended victim, Abdelwahab quickly realized, was Odette Boukris.