PARIS (AFP)---Outgoing President Jacques Chirac has
conferred France’s highest civilian honour, the Legion d’Honneur, on 160 French citizens recognised by Israel as "Righteous among the nations" for their efforts to save Jews from the Nazis in World War II, officials said
Friday.

"By contributing, during one of the darkest hours of our history, to saving three quarters of the Jews of France from deportation, these men and women embody the values upon which the nation and the republic are based," said a statement from the president’s office.

The "Righteous" are nominated by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel according to strict criteria. There are 2,725 in France, the largest number after Poland and the Netherlands, and 16,000 in Europe as a whole.

Among French bearers of the title is the entire village of
Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of the Massif Central, whose Protestant pastor organised shelter for scores of Jewish refugees.

Even though more than 72,250 Jews died after being deported from France, some three-quarters of the 300,000 Jews in France during the war survived -- a higher proportion than in other countries occupied by the Germans.

First to recognise

Shortly after taking office in 1995, Chirac was the first president to
recognise the role of the French state in the war-time deportation of Jews, almost all of them to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps.

In January this year, Chirac, whose second and final term in office ends next month, led a ceremony in Paris honouring France’s "Righteous among the nations."

The ceremony was held in the Pantheon, the converted church in the Latin Quarter that serves as a mausoleum for France’s national heroes.