Arab and Muslim rescue efforts during the Holocaust

A number of Arabs and Muslims participated in efforts to help save Jewish residents of Arab lands from the Holocaust while fascist regimes controlled the territory. From June 1940 through May 1943, Axis powers, namely Germany and Italy, controlled large portions of North Africa. Approximately 1 percent of the Jewish residents, about 4,000 to 5,000 Jews, of that territory were murdered by these regimes during this period. The relatively small percentage of Jewish casualties, as compared to the 60 percent of European Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, is largely due to the successful Allied North African Campaign and the repelling of the Axis powers from North Africa.^[1]

No occupied country in Africa or Europe was free of collaboration with the genocide campaign against the Jews, but this was often more common in European countries than Arab ones.^{[citation needed]} The offer made to Algerians by colonial French officials to take over confiscated Jewish property found many French settlers ready to profit from the scheme, but no Arab participated and, in the capital, Algiers itself, Muslim clerics openly declared their opposition to the idea.^[2] While some Arabs collaborated with the Axis powers by working as guards in labour camps^{[citation needed]}, others risked their own lives to attempt to save Jews from persecution and genocide.

Arab rescue efforts were not limited to the Middle East– Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, according to different sources, helped from 100^[1][3] to 500 Jews disguise themselves as Muslims. There are examples of non-Arab Muslim populations assisting Jews to escape from the Holocaust in Europe, in Albania for example. In September 2013, Yad Vashem declared an Egyptian doctor, Mohammed Helmy, one of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving the life of Anna Gutman (née Boros), putting himself at personal risk for three years, and for helping her mother Julie, her grandmother, Cecilie Rudnik, and her stepfather, Georg Wehr, to survive the holocaust. Helmy is the first Arab to have been so honoured.^[4]