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Hubert Pollack Helped Save 10,000 Jews from the Nazis
(Times of Israel) Yaakov Schwartz - Dr. Hubert Pollack is to posthumously receive the Jewish Rescuers Citation along with 12 other Holocaust-era heroes on Thursday, which marks Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. The award was created in 2011 by the B'nai B'rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust (JRJ) to honor the Jewish rescue of fellow Jews. Yad Vashem honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. In the 1930s, Pollack worked in Berlin as a statistician for the German government, and also for Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal. Together with Wilfrid Israel, a wealthy businessman, as well as Cpt. Francis Foley, an MI5 agent who worked at the British Embassy in Berlin, Pollack helped execute a plan to issue thousands of exit visas for German Jews seeking to escape the Nazi regime. It involved Pollack bribing Gestapo officials with money given to him by Israel. Foley issued visas allowing the refugees into British territory - including British Mandate Palestine. Pollack left Germany with his family in August 1939, just one month before World War II broke out, and came to pre-state Israel. Except for giving testimony in 1944 to an organization that would become Yad Vashem, he is not known to have spoken about the rescue operation again.