Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Irish Quaker Woman Named Nation’s First Righteous Gentile for Aiding Jews

A non-Jewish woman from Cork who risked her life to save Jewish children from the Nazis has become Ireland’s first Righteous among the Nations.

Mary Elms, who died in 2002, helped “a large number of Jewish children” escape the Rivesaltes detention camp in France in August-September of 1942, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority in Israel.

Elms was in Perpignan, France, as a regional delegate of the Religious Society of Friends, a Christian stream known also as Quakers. As a citizen of Ireland — which was neutral during World War II, the pro-Nazi, collaborationist French authorities allowed Elms to stay after all the British citizens in the region were kicked out.

The Irish Times on Wednesday quoted one of the children she saved, Ronald Friend, as saying the award was “a long overdue recognition of Mary Elms’ courageous and selfless actions in rescuing me and many other children when convoys were regularly departing to the death camps.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.