Muhammad V and Yad Vashem

Ha'aretz reports on a quiet campaign to have Morocco's King Muhammad V listed with the "Righteous Among the Nations,", those non-Jews who worked to save Jews during the Holocaust:

"Whether Mohammed V, who died in 1961, will become a member of the Righteous remains uncertain, given Yad Vashem's strict eligibility rules. Among the 22,000 Righteous, some 70 are Muslims, most of whom are from Turkey and the Balkans. There are no Arabs among them, according to Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari, who added that no formal request had been submitted for the late Moroccan monarch.

"The trickiest criterion is determining whether the late king actually risked his life to save Jews during the rule of the pro-Nazi French authorities from mid-1940 to November 1942, when American troops arrived and changed the balance of power. Citing testimonies of the king's quiet resistance campaign against the French antisemitic edicts, Berdugo claims that the king had indeed done so.

"When the Vichy regime extended its anti-Jewish laws to Morocco in October 1940, the king maneuvered to limit their implementation. A 1941 telegram from the French foreign ministry, uncovered in the mid-1980s, discussed the worsening tensions between the French authorities and the king because of Mohammed V?s unwillingness to distinguish among his subjects. Some Moroccan Jews even claim that he asked the French authorities to bring him yellow stars for his family to wear. Some observers have expressed doubt over the episode, which illustrates the near-mythical aura of the king among Moroccan Jews, the vast majority of whom immigrated to Israel and Europe after Israel's independence and the 1967 war."