With Jew-hatred spiking throughout Europe, Kesher Israel, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, hosted Joachim Holger Waldemar Christian, a Danish prince, to speak about his great-grandfather’s role in protecting Jews in Denmark during the Holocaust.
His great-grandfather, King Christian X, defied Hitler, making Denmark one of only two Nazi-occupied countries to oppose the Nazi leader. The king also paid for the country’s Jews to flee to Sweden in 1943 after the Nazis began full planning of their efforts to exterminate Jews.
Some 7,200 Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives were saved, per the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (One of the Danish fishing boats used in that rescue is on view at a Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.)
Rabbi Hyim Shafner, of Kesher, told JNS that the event on Sunday was “really incredibly inspiring.”
“It wasn’t just about saving Jews,” he said. “It was really about a sense of dignity and equality.”
The prince, whose brother Frederik X is the Danish king, told Kesher congregants that the Nazis told King Christian X that for every Jew he gave up, the Germans would give him a communist or other Dane whom they had arrested and whose incarceration the king might find objectionable, according to Shafner.
“The king said, ‘Danes are Danes. There’s no difference between the Jewish and non-Jewish Dane,’” the prince said, per the rabbi.
“That really just feels so unprecedented in the time of the Holocaust and now with the rising tide of antisemitism, just incredible to look back at Danish history and how they really sacrificed themselves as a nation, as individuals, and certainly, as the leadership to save Jews,” Shafner said.
The rabbi told JNS that he didn’t know much about Danish Jewish history and was surprised to learn the extent to which antisemitism was absent in the country’s history.
“It wasn’t for an ulterior motive,” he said of King Christian X’s actions during the Holocaust. “It was really just a sense that all people are equal.”
“We live in times when that is sorely needed to be heard,” Shafner told JNS. “I think it holds up a mirror to all of us.”
It was the prince’s idea to speak at the synagogue, which is located not far from his home, according to the rabbi.
A brigadier general, who is fifth in line to the Danish throne, the prince serves as the defense industry attaché and deputy defense attaché at the Danish Embassy in Washington.
