Israel Matzav

Family of Arab honored for saving Jews rejects prize

The family of Mohamed Helmy, an Egyptian doctor who was honored posthumously by Yad VaShem recently for saving Jews during the Holocaust, has turned down the prize, saying that Israel is the one country by which Helmy did not want to be honored.

The Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy was honored posthumously last month by Israel's Holocaust memorial for hiding Jews in Berlin during the Nazis' genocide, but a family member tracked down by The Associated Press this week in Cairo said her relatives wouldn't accept the award, one of Israel's most prestigious.

"If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it," Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy's great-nephew, told The Associated Press during an interview at her home in Cairo this week.

Mohamed Helmy was an Egyptian doctor who lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. Last month, he was honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as "Righteous Among the Nations" -- the highest honor given to a non-Jew for risking great personal dangers to rescue Jews from the Nazis' gas chambers.

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Hassan said the family wasn't interested in the award from Israel because relations between Egypt and Israel remain hostile, despite a peace treaty signed more than three decades ago. But, she cautioned, "I respect Judaism as a religion and I respect Jews. Islam recognizes Judaism as a heavenly religion."

"Helmy was not picking a certain nationality, race or religion to help. He treated patients regardless of who they were," she said. 

Dressed in a veil, the 66-year-old woman from an upscale neighborhood of Cairo was pleased to talk about her husband's great-uncle. She and her husband, who did not want to give his name to the AP, say they visited Helmy regularly in Germany.

Helmy was born in 1901 in Khartoum, in what was then Egypt and is now Sudan, to an Egyptian father and a German mother. He came to Berlin in 1922 to study medicine and worked as a urologist until 1938, when Germany banned him from the public health system because he was not considered Aryan, said Martina Voigt, the German historian, who conducted research on Helmy.

The Arabs loved the Nazis, but at the end of the day, the Nazis had no use for the Arabs. 

Labels: Arab anti-Semitism, Egyptian anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Yad Vashem

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:47 AM