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<\/a>The April 27 event, titled Jews Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, was presented by Rinat Dushansky-Werbner. She was introduced by Moshe Gromb, author of a 15-volume series with the same title, which Dushansky-Werbner and Pnina Jacobi-Yahid translated into English from\u00a0<\/span>Hebrew. In her talk, Dushansky-Werbner, a member of the Action Committee for Recognizing Jews Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, highlighted several Jewish heroes during the Shoah \u2013 their names not widely known.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThere were operations inside the death camps. There were\u00a0<\/span>people smuggling people across borders. They were hiding children in monasteries. They were falsifying documents,\u201d Dushansky-Werbner said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Jews were very, very creative, and tried to think of any possible way to save their brethren. Sadly, many of these Jewish rescuers were caught and murdered by the Nazis. Even though they could have escaped and saved themselves,\u201d she said, \u201cmost of them decided not to do so. [They] decided to stand where they are, and try and rescue as many people as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n The people discussed represented a range of backgrounds, ages, geographic locations and levels of religious observance, and were but examples from a much larger number of Jews who took on tremendous risks and used remarkable ingenuity to rescue other Jews during the Holocaust. Thus far, Dushansky-Werbner\u2019s action committee has collected information on more than 2,500 Jewish rescuers and documented more than 50 rescue methods. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Many of the Jewish rescuers, Dushansky-Werbner said, did not see themselves as great heroes, but rather as people who did what they were compelled to do, and saddened they could not do more.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is something very humble about these people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Jews rescued other Jews wherever the Germans operated \u2013 throughout Europe, North Africa and even the Philippines \u2013\u00a0 <\/span>and their operations began once the Nazis rose to power and continued throughout and after the war. Often, their operations involved collaborations with non-Jews.<\/p>\n In Belarus, four brothers named Bielski \u2013 Tuvia, Zus (Alexander Zeisal), Asael and Aron \u2013 founded a partisan unit, a wandering communal rescue army, that established a family camp in the Naliboki Forest. The camp operated for more than two years during the war, moving occasionally from place to place in the forest, and included a synagogue, a school, a courthouse, a clinic, an armoury and more. It is estimated that the Bielski brothers rescued 1,236 Jews in what became known as the \u201cJerusalem of the Forests.\u201d Their story is among the more celebrated of Jewish rescuers and was turned into a 2008 film, Defiance<\/i>, starring Daniel Craig. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In France, the Loinger family, led by George, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 108, smuggled hundreds of Jewish children across the border to Switzerland, while his wife, Flora, managed the houses in which they hid Jewish children.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n George would play soccer with the children. When the ball flew over to the other side of the border, one or two children would be sent to safety to the other side without the local guard noticing, Dushansky-Werbner explained.<\/p>\n George\u2019s sisters also helped. Fanny hid children in monasteries; Emme prepared abandoned monasteries for Jewish orphans and ran one of the children\u2019s houses; the youngest, Ivette, 13, rode with Jewish children on trains, hiding their money and keeping them calm during the journey.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n French pantomime Marcel Marceau and his brother Alain \u2013 who were George\u2019s cousins \u2013 forged papers for Jews on the run and helped George smuggle Jewish children out of France.<\/p>\n \u201cMarcel would help keep them calm and would just basically be the clown. He would be like a mother, a father, a brother, and he would make them laugh. And this is how many of them stayed calm and agreed to go from one place to another,\u201d said Dushansky-Werbner, who went on to share another story of heroism.<\/p>\n In Volos, Greece, Rabbi Moshe Shimon Pesach was ordered by a German commander to draw up a list of all the Jews in the city. He turned to his friend, Metropolitan Joachim Alexopoulos, who recommended the Jews leave the city immediately.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the age of 74, the rabbi gathered the members of the community and led them to the hills surrounding Volos with the help of the metropolitan and the city\u2019s mayor, and hid them in homes and other buildings. This effort would save 746 of the 882 Jews in Volos.<\/p>\n Dushansky-Werbner ended her talk with the words of Marion Pritchard, a non-Jew who rescued Jews in the Netherlands: \u201cIf we do not acknowledge the bravery of those Jewish rescuers who, if caught, were in graver danger than the Righteous Among Nations, that would be a distortion of Holocaust history. It also adds to the false notion that the Jews were led like lambs to the slaughter as cowards. This is far from the truth,\u201d said Pritchard.<\/p>\n