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The president of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, Moisis Constantinis (R) presents on July 24, 2008 in Rhodes an award to Mehmet Ülkümen (L), son of Selahattin Ulkumen, a Turkish consul general on the island who in 1944 saved 40 Jews from being deported to Nazi concentration camps.
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RHODES (AFP)---Dozens of families from the US, Italy, South Africa, Argentina and Belgium gathered Saturday on the Greek Aegean island of Rhodes to pay tribute to the man who in 1944 saved 40 Jews from being deported to a Nazi concentration camp.
Selahattin Ulkumen, Turkish consul general on the island in 1943, is remembered for his role in saving the Turkish Jews by persuading a German general to release them the day before they were due to be transported to Auschwitz.
Nearly 2,500 Jews from Rhodes and the nearby island of Kos were deported on July 24, 1944. All but 150 perished in the Nazi gas chambers or concentration camps.
However, some months later Ulkumen persuaded the German general on the island to release the 40 Turkish Jews, by reminding him of Turkey's neutrality.
"I was 13 years old and I can still picture the long discussions in front of us between Selahattin Ulkumen and the German general," said Sami Modiano, one of the deportees who survived.
Ulkumen's 64-year-old son, Mehmet, joined the commemmoration and was presented with a plaque by the president of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, Moises Constantinis.
Ulkumen was arrested at the end of 1944 by the Germans after Turkey sided with the Allies. The Turkish consulate on Rhodes was subsequently bombed and his wife, pregnant with Mehmet, and two employees were wounded. His wife died a week after giving birth.
None of the Holocaust survivors ever returned to live on the island.
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Selahattin Ulkumen was declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, on 13 December 1989, with his name being inscribed and a tree planted in his honor at the "Garden of the Righteous." Ulkumen died on July 7, 2003 in Istanbul. He was 89.
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An attempt to re-establish the Jewish community there in the 1950s by settling families from different Greek regions did not have much success and the island's Jewish population currently stands at no more than 40, said secretary of the Rhodes Jewish community Carmen Levi.
Concentration camp survivor Stella Levi said she made the journey to her birthplace from her home in New York every year.
This tribute "is a historic moment for the Jews of Rhodes," she said.
Once dubbed "Little Jerusalem" Rhodes took in several hundred Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century who joined those already on the
island.
Between the two world wars, the Jewish population of the island reached about 6,000.
Some 67,000 Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust, 86 percent of the country's entire Jewish community.
The Jewish community of Greece today numbers around 6,000 people.