In 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Mohamed Helmy as belonging to the Righteous among the Nations for hiding a Jewish family friend in his Berlin home for the duration of World War II. Helmy died in 1982 and had no children, but Yad Vashem managed to track down some of his relatives—who refused to accept a certificate and medal on his behalf, due to their hostility toward Israel. But now Helmy’s nephew has come forward to receive the honors due his uncle, the first Arab ever to be so recognized. Ofer Aderet writes:

Helmy was born in Khartoum in 1901, in what was then Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He went to Germany to study medicine in 1922, settling in Berlin. After completing his studies, he was hired by the Robert Koch Institute in the city, where he eventually became head of urology. Helmy saw Jewish doctors fired from the hospital in 1933, after the Nazis came to power, and was himself fired in 1937 [on “racial” grounds]. A 2009 study by the institute showed that it was heavily involved in Nazi medical policy. . . .

When the Nazis began deporting Jews from Berlin, [Helmy] hid Anna Boros, twenty-one-years-old and a family friend, in his cabin in the city’s Buch neighborhood. She remained there for the duration of the war. Whenever Helmy was under police investigation, he would arrange for her to hide elsewhere. Anna lived as a Muslim under an assumed name, wore a hijab, and even married a Muslim in a fictitious marriage. . . .

Helmy also helped [Anna’s] mother Julie, stepfather Georg Wehr, and grandmother Cecilie Rudnik. Providing for them and attending to all their medical needs, he arranged for Rudnik to be hidden in the home of a German woman, Frieda Szturmann, who was herself later recognized as Righteous among the Nations. For over a year, Szturmann hid Rudnik, sharing her meager food rations.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.