Tunisian becomes first Arab nominated as Righteous Gentile

Khaled Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm in a small Tunisian town.

By MATTI FRIEDMAN
At the height of World War II, Khaled Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm in a small Tunisian town, saving them from the German troops occupying the North African nation. More than six decades later, Abdelwahhab has become the first Arab nominated for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. The honor is bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. The nomination of Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997, has reopened a little-known chapter of the Holocaust, one that unfolded 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. Satloff said that after the September 11 attacks, he moved to Morocco to research what happened in Arab lands during the Holocaust in hopes of countering Holocaust denial in the Arab world and tempering some of the sentiments he thought helped pave the way for the attacks. "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." That search led Satloff to Abdelwahhab, the cosmopolitan 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. The Germans instituted anti-Semitic policies in Tunisia, imposing fines on Jews, forcing many to wear Star of David badges and confiscating property. More than 5,000 Jews were sent to forced labor camps, where 46 are known to have died. Around 160 Tunisian Jews who happened to be in France were dispatched to European death camps. Most Tunisians, according to the material compiled by Yad Vashem, did not attempt to intervene. Abdelwahhab, an amateur archaeologist and architect with something of a hedonistic bent, served as an interlocutor between the population of the coastal town of Mahdia and the German occupation forces, Satloff said. He was also a country farmer, a sometime Tunisian civil servant and an avid traveler. When he heard one evening that German officers were planning to rape Odette Boukris, a local Jewish woman, he gathered her family and several other Jewish families in Mahdia - a total of around two dozen people - and took them to his farm outside town. He hid them for four months, until the Germans left. "Khaled is the finest example, though not the only one, of an Arab who saved Jews from persecution during the German occupation," Satloff said. Satloff first heard Abdelwahhab's story several years ago from Anny Boukris, a 71-year-old resident of a Los Angeles suburb. An 11-year-old in 1943, Boukris is Odette Boukris' daughter and was also hidden by Abdelwahhab. Satloff traveled to Mahdia and talked to Boukris' childhood friends, who confirmed the story. Just weeks after Boukris recorded her 83-page testimony, she passed away. He 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.