Geertruida “Truus” Wijsmuller, a Gentile born in the Netherlands, is the subject of newly released documentary that relates her efforts to rescue Jews from Europe on the eve of World War II—most importantly her role in arranging for the Kindertransport, in which a large number of Jewish children were brought from Germany and Austria to Britain. In 1938, Wijsmuller walked into the office of Adolf Eichmann, then the German official in charge of getting Jews out of Germany, and made a proposal, as Francine Wolfisz writes:

Leaning over the SS-Obersturmführer’s desk inside the Gestapo headquarters—formerly the Palais Rothschild in Vienna, [Wijsmuller] told Eichmann the British government was happy to take youngsters under the age of seventeen from Nazi countries for a temporary stay. “Let’s arrange it,” she said.

He, in turn, was astounded. “So Aryan and so insane,” he retorted. Snarling at her, Eichmann proposed an impossible task—if she could successfully take 600 children, she could have all 10,000. But it had to be done that Saturday. Logistics were one problem; convincing the most observant parents to let their children travel on the Jewish Sabbath . . . was a very different obstacle. But Wijsmuller proved Eichmann wrong and became a key part of not only the Kindertransport, but many other child refugee rescues throughout Europe during the Second World War.

While those she liaised closely with—including the late humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton—rightly received recognition for their efforts, Wijsmuller’s contribution is far from well-known, despite the fact she saved thousands of lives, often at great personal risk.

But it wasn’t just the Jewish community she helped. She saved the life of Thomas Benford, Jr, the son of a famous African American drummer in Paris, who was just days old when she took him to Amsterdam.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.