Righteous gentiles of Albania honored

TIRANA, Feb. 10 – The first plaque honoring Albanians who rescued Jews from the Holocaust was unveiled in Tirana, Albania’s capital, arranged by the Manhattan resident whose earlier suggestion led to the erection of a memorial stone for the country’s Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust Memorial Park in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
The English-Albanian plaque in the Jewish Corner of Tirana’s National Museum lists the names of 33 Muslim Albanians who have been honored by Yad Vashem, and leaves space for other people “whose names remain unrecorded,” said travel writer Jack Goldfarb.
In 1994, Goldfarb discovered the then-little-known story of Albania’s record under Nazi occupation: the country, where several hundred Jews fled during World War II, ranks, with Bulgaria proper, as the only ones in Europe where not a single Jew was turned over to the Nazis. More than 2,000 Jews survived the war here, protected by the citizens who operated under the Besa code of honor, Goldfarb said.
“This grabbed my heart. I felt I could not do enough to help them,” he said.
About 60 people attended the event, he said, including members of Albania’s small Jewish community, aged rescuers, the Israeli ambassador and a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.