It is perhaps a mark of the thawing of Egyptian-Israeli relations that the family of Dr Mohamed Helmy has agreed to accept a certificate from Yad Vashem honouring the Egyptian-born doctor for risking his life to rescue a Jew in wartime Berlin. The family had refused to do so in 2013. i-24 News reports: (with thanks: Lily)
Dr. Mohamed Helmy, an Egyptian-born medical doctor who lived in Berlin, will be officially recognized by the Israeli Holocaust museum and memorial for risking his life to shelter four Jews during World War II.
Helmy’s family will accept the award on his behalf at a ceremony to take place at the German Foreign Ministry on Thursday.
Helmy will be the first Arab to be honored as Righteous Among the Nations—a title given to non-Jews by the Israeli Holocaust Museum who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
To date, more than 26,000 individuals from 44 countries have received the honor.
Helmy, who died in 1982, was first nominated as Righteous Among the Nations in 2013 but his family at the time refused to accept the honor since it came from an Israeli institution.
Four years later, a relative of Helmy has agreed to accept the honor on his behalf.
Nasser Kutbi, an 81-year-old professor of medicine from Cairo whose father was Helmy’s nephew and who knew him personally, will travel to Berlin to accept the award, which will be presented to him by Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff.
Helmy was born in Khartoum in 1901 and settled in Berlin in 1922 where he studied medicine and eventually became the head of urology at the city’s Robert Koch Institute.
Helmy was fired from his position in 1937 after the Nazis came to power, and as a “non-Aryan”, was barred from working in the public health sector. Helmy was arrested by the Nazis in 1939 along with other Egyptians and was released a year later account of poor health.
When the Nazis began deporting Jews from the city, Helmy hid a Jewish family friend, Anna Boros, 21, as well as her mother Julie, stepfather Georg Wehr, and grandmother Cecilie Rudnik, in a cabin he owned in the city for the duration of the war.
Helmy provided for all of the family’s needs and arranged alternative hideouts when he himself was under Nazi investigation. He arranged for Anna a certificate from the Central Islamic Institute in Berlin, headed by the Grnad Mufti of Jerusalem, attesting that she had converted to Islam, as well as a fake marriage certrificate saying that she had married an Egyptian man in a private ceremony at Helmy’s home.
“A good friend of our family, Dr. Helmy … hid me in his cabin in Berlin-Buch from 10 March until the end of the war,” Boros, who latter married and took the last name Gutman, wrote in letter to the Berlin Senate after the war.
“He managed to evade all their interrogations. In such cases he would bring me to friends where I would stay for several days, introducing me as his cousin from Dresden. When the danger would pass, I would return to his cabin. … Dr. Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart and I will be grateful to him for eternity,” she wrote.
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