21,700 people have been nominated for the "Righteous Gentile" award given by the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem since the award's inception. Sixty of those have been Muslim.

But up until this week, no Arab Muslim from an Arabic-speaking country had ever been nominated as a Righteous Gentile for their actions during the Holocaust.

Until now, that is.

From The Jerusalem Post:

At the height of the Second World War, Khaled Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm in a small Tunisian town, saving them from the Nazi troops occupying the north African nation.

More than six decades later, Abdelwahhab has become the first Arab nominated for recognition as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial. The honor is bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution....

"I asked, did any Arabs save Jews in the Holocaust?" [Washington Institute For Near East Policy Head Michael] Satloff said. "If they did, these are stories about which Arabs could be proud. It would also entail accepting the context, because it would mean there was something to save Jews from."

That search led Satloff to Abdelwahhab, the cosmopolitan son of an aristocratic family who was 32 when German troops arrived in Tunisia in November 1942. The north African nation was home to some 100,000 Jews at the time.

According to Yad Vashem, the Germans instituted anti-Semitic policies in Tunisia, imposing fines on Jews, forcing many to wear Star of David badges and confiscating property. More than 5,000 Jews were sent to forced labor camps, where 46 are known to have died. Around 160 Tunisian Jews who happened to be in France were dispatched to European death camps. Most Tunisians, according to the material compiled by Yad Vashem, did not attempt to intervene.

Abdelwahhab, an amateur archaeologist and architect with something of a hedonistic bent, served as an interlocutor between the population of the coastal town of Mahdia and the German occupation forces, Satloff said. He was also a country farmer, a sometime Tunisian civil servant and an avid traveler.

When he heard one evening that German officers were planning to rape Odette Boukris, a local Jewish woman, he gathered her family and several other Jewish families in Mahdia - a total of around two dozen people - and took them to his farm outside town. He hid them for four months, until the German occupation ended.

Mr. Abdelwahhab should be counted among the Righteous of the Nations of the World and his soul should be elevated by the recounting of his deeds. Ken yirbu kamohu.