30 Oct Exhibit About Muslims Who Saved Jews to Open
This is a wonderful story:
For the first time, Yad Vashem will inaugurate an exhibition this week on Muslims who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, focuses on more than a dozen of the scores of Muslim Albanians previously recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” – the Holocaust center’s highest honor – for risking their lives to save Jews during World War II.
The exhibit, titled “BESA: A Code of Honor – Muslim Albanians Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust,” is a collection of photographs by the American photographer Norman Gershman of the Albanian Righteous and their families, accompanied by short texts.
Before World War II, only about 200 Jews lived in Albania. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, hundreds of Jews fleeing the Nazis crossed the border from Yugoslavia, Germany, Greece, Austria and Serbia.
When the Germans occupied Albania in 1943, the Albanian population refused to comply with the Nazis’ orders to turn over lists of Jews residing in the country.
The lifesaving assistance the Jews received in the predominantly Muslim country was based on Besa, a code of honor which literally means “to keep the promise.” Nearly all the Jews living within Albanian borders during the German occupation were saved; in fact, there were more Jews in Albania at the end of the war than before it started, Yad Vashem said.
“The extraordinary story of Albania, where an entire nation, both the government and the population, acted to rescue Jews is truly remarkable,” said exhibition curator Yehudit Shendar. “Many, if not all, were heavily influenced in their choice by Islam… This very human story, told through these sensitive portraits, combine to highlight a little-known but remarkable aspect of the Holocaust.”
“This is a story that has rarely been publicized,” said Holocaust survivor Ya’acov Altarat, 74, from Tel Aviv, who escaped to Albania with his parents as a boy of eight in 1941 and found refuge there for the duration of the war.
“It is a story of a nation saving all of its Jews because of a code of behavior,” he said.
“Why did my father save a stranger at the risk of his life and the entire village?” asked Enver Alia Sheqer, son of Righteous Among the Nations Ali Sheqer Pashkaj, who is featured in the exhibition. “My father was a devout Muslim. He believed that to save one life is to enter paradise.”
The exhibit will be on display at Yad Vashem for two months and will then travel to New York, where it will be displayed at the United Nations headquarters on January 27 for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
I’ve posted about similar stories before, but I never get tired of them.
It is a great story, and Yad Vashem deserves credit for putting it on. My only gripe with the story is the bit about honor codes and the “heavily influenced in their choice by Islam.” As Christopher Hitchens has argued, religious justifications are at best superfluous and at worst reveal selfishness. This is a great example of human beings showing solidarity in the face of potential brute force. I realize that the fact that a Muslim population helped out a Jewish population is significant for all sorts of historical reasons, but I’m never convinced by the religious duty arguments.
“X” raises a topic we’ve discussed on this blog before with some posts by Roger, but here I simply want to note several things: It’s notoriously difficult to discern precise motives and reasons for explaining such behavior, which suggests we give presumptive deference to avowed motives and reasons and/or “folk psychological” explanations unless we have persuasive reasons for not taking them at face value. Christopher Hitchens, however intelligent and clever he is on any number of subjects, is hardly an expert in the study of religions. If we’re going to quote putative experts here, let’s at least draw upon, in the first instance, from the relevant disciplinary domain, which happens to go under several names: Religious Studies, Study of Religions, Comparative Study of Religions, and History of Religions, to cite the more prominent. Now I don’t mean to dismiss Hitchens’ arguments in his recent book, but that work does not serve to christen him an authority in the field, however much we may be drawn to what he has to say about religions. It certainly is possible for someone to be a devout Muslim and act on his or her beliefs, believing such action increases the likelihood of entering Paradise.… Read more »
Leaving aside the general question of religious motivation for righteousness, I am skeptical as to the validity of attributing the saving of the Jews by the Albanians to the influence of Islam. A central theme of Islam is brotherhood with other Muslims and discrimination against non-Muslims. To take but two examples, Islamic charities are almost always for the exclusive benefit of Muslims. Many Muslim authorities consider it improper to pray for non-Muslims except for their conversion to Islam. It is much more likely that, beyond the inherent decency of the individuals involved, the moral influence here was that of the Albanian tradition of hospitality, which antedates the Islamization of Albania and is shared by Muslim and non-Muslim Albanians.
In claiming skepticism “as to the validity of attributing the saving of the Jews by the Albanians to the influence of Islam,” your can hardly be “leaving aside the genereal question of religious motivation for righteousness,” for that is precisely what you are denying here: Islam, being an instance in this case of religious motivation for righteousness! Which is not to deny the possibility that an Albanian tradition of hospitality could not buttress or complement or coincide with a religious (i.e., Islamic) motivation for righteousness. The putative skepticism serves here to mask an animus or bias against Islam in general, as the generalizations invoked as evidence can be readily countered with other generalizations which testify to Muslim imperatives to pursue justice, act with goodness and compassion, and so forth, regardless of the religious identities (or lack thereof) of the recipients or beneficiaries of such justice, compassion and goodness. On cannot possess a deep knowledge of the history of Islamic civilization to claim otherwise. Cherry-picking self-serving generalizations don’t suffice as a plausible argument against the possibility, likelihood and historical fact that Muslims can work, have worked, and do work on behalf of the common good of all human beings qua human… Read more »