On December 17, I received an invitation and the privilege to attend a presentation organized by The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. The presentation was titled—Under Beslenei’s Sky: A Tale of Courage.
This story is about good people doing what was right despite their differences. It was the rescue of the Leningrad Jewish children in Beslenei on August 24. 1942, in all of Beslenei, Cherkess Autonomous Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR, when the local Circassian villagers adopted evacuated children from the Leningrad orphanage, most of whom were Jewish, and managed to forge documents with the purpose, to prove to Nazis that the children were of local descent. The majority of Circassians are Muslim.
Following is the recording of the presentation of the unknown heroic story of Beslenei, a small village at the heart of the Caucasus. During the Holocaust, the Circassian-Muslim people of Beslenei adopted orphaned children, some of whom were Jewish, who had fled the siege of Leningrad, putting their entire community at risk.
The panel members were Yigal Cohen, museum CEO and former principal of the Anne Frank High School in Galilee; David Shawgen, academic advisor and researcher at the Circassian Museum in Kfar Kamal; Zoher Thawcho, a Circassian-Israeli who was similarly drawn to this story; and Lana Harshuk, a Circassian-Israeli educator at the Anne Frank High School.
Source
History of Sorts 
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