The Australian Jewish News reports a Christian author’s claim that the Allied victory in the battle of El Alamein in 1942 saved the Jews of the Middle East from the Holocaust. The author, Kevin Crombie who lived in Israel for 25 years and served as a guide, historian and researcher at Christ Church, an evangelical Anglican church inside the Old City of Jerusalem, is in Australia to launch his book El Alamein: Halting a Possible Holocaust in the Middle East.

“This is part of our national history,” he said. “We helped stop the Holocaust entering the Middle East.”

El Alamein Commonwealth cemetery

“The Jewish community understood full well the significance of the victory,” Crombie said. The German High Command had ordered the formation in 1942 of an Einsatzkommando Egypt, an SS killing squad that would have worked with local collaborators to murder Jews. 

Crombie brought with him an ornate silver and ivory Tanach (Jewish Bible) which had been presented to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery after the war by the Vaad Leumi, the general council of the Jewish community of Palestine. It records the “everlasting gratitude of Palestine Jewry to the gallant leader of the victorious British forces by whose hand God has placed salvation in Zion in the days of El Alamein”.

Crombie’s book was launched last week in Parliament house, Canberra by the Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services Kevin Andrews

For more: http://www.jewishnews.net.au/lessons-from-el-alamein/29841