Royal Deed Crowned : Fullerton Rabbi Honors Son of Bulgarian King Whose Actions Saved 50,000 Jews

Nearly 2,500 worshipers listened as a rabbi read Scripture at the Crystal Cathedral on Sunday morning.

“God has blessed us with salvation,” read Rabbi Haim Asa, who wore a yarmulke and prayer shawl during a service complete with a gospel choir and bells.

Indeed, salvation was what the service was all about. For Asa, however, the term has direct meaning. He was among the estimated 50,000 Bulgarian Jews--virtually the country’s entire Jewish population--saved from almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis by the courageous actions of King Boris III, then leader of Bulgaria.

The rabbi and a smattering of other grateful former subjects were on hand over the weekend to honor the now-deceased king in the person of his son, King Simeon II. The festivities included a dinner Friday at Sephardic Tifereth Israel Temple in Los Angeles and the taping of Sunday’s service, part of Crystal Cathedral pastor Robert H. Schuller’s internationally known television show, “Hour of Power.” A tour of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance with Branko Lustig, the Academy Award-winning producer of “Schindler’s List” and a Holocaust survivor, is scheduled for today. The commemoration will culminate in a ceremony tonight in Beverly Hills when King Boris is posthumously awarded the Jewish National Fund’s Medal of the Legion of Honor, becoming the first non-Jew to be given what is one of the highest honors bestowed by the Jewish community.

“We thank you for the gift of life that your father gave my people,” Asa said at Sunday’s service. Asa, the spiritual leader of Fullerton’s Temple Beth Tikvah, said his family fled Europe shortly after their lives were saved by the king.

That occurred in 1943 when King Boris III--whose country was aligned with Germany--refused Adolf Hitler’s direct orders to deport Bulgaria’s Jewish population to Germany for extermination.

Instead, the king urged the Jews to move to the countryside and blend in with the general population, telling the Fuehrer that he needed the Jews to help build roads.

On Aug. 14, 1943, Boris was summoned by Hitler to Germany, where the two had a meeting described by witnesses as a tense and angry showdown over the king’s lack of cooperation in The Final Solution and his refusal to supply Bulgarian troops for the Russian front. Two weeks later, the 49-year-old king died under mysterious circumstances in what some believe was a poisoning ordered by Hitler.

King Simeon II, who was 6 years old when his father died, was deposed by the Communists who took over after the war. He has lived in exile in Spain ever since.

Asa said his efforts to gain recognition for King Boris’ courage began 32 years ago when he wrote his master’s thesis on the subject.

But his effort hit two major obstacles: Bulgaria’s Communist regime, which was not eager to glorify the monarch it had deposed, and some in the American Jewish community, who were unwilling to admit or unaware that a German ally could have saved so many.

That resistance eroded, the rabbi said, after two recent events. In 1990, Bulgaria’s Communist regime gave way to a democratic form of government. And earlier this year, he said, “Schindler’s List”--Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie about a German who saved Jews--dispelled public perceptions that a member of the Axis establishment, by definition, had to be an anti-Semite.

“When you find a man who saved 50,000 Jews, how can you not honor him?” said David Horne, Los Angeles chairman for the Jewish National Fund. “It’s critical for people to know that someone who was the head of a state did something so important.”

Jack Mandel, president of the American Congress of Jewish Concentration Camp Survivors, based in Los Angeles, agrees.

“He should have been recognized a long time ago,” Mandel said of King Boris. Unfortunately, he added, human nature “is never to find somebody who saved, but only to persecute the ones who did wrong.”

King Simeon, who seemed near tears during Sunday’s service, said he is deeply moved by the public recognition of his father’s efforts.

“For a son to see such genuine and good-hearted recognition is gratifying,” he said. “But what my father did was only what any decent person would have done.”

Not necessarily so, according to Asa.

“This is important because history has to be made an instrument of good, not only evil,” the rabbi said. “History must teach that there was as much good in certain places as there was evil in others.”