The late Sovereign "protected the Jews and provided moral support for these persecuted populations," Satloff told MAP on the sidelines of the premiere screening of the documentary "Among the Righteous", an adaptation of a book of the same title.

    The "Sultan protected the Jews and offered moral support to the Jewish communities during a very difficult and dangerous period," he said, underlining that the late Monarch publicly defied the Vichy government by taking “political and strategic” risks.

    The late Sovereign provided a “large royal umbrella” that protected the Moroccan Jews against the genocidal persecution of Nazi Germany and its executants, by proxy, the Vichy government.

    Satloff said in his book, published in 2006, that HM the late king Mohammed V publicly entered into dissidence according to a note of the French Foreign ministry, when he told Jewish notables, invited to the Throne Day “I absolutely do not agree with the new anti-Jewish laws and I refuse to be involved in a measure that I disagree with. I would like to inform you that as it used to be in the past, the Jews remain under my protection and I refuse any distinction among my subjects.”
 
+The Jews, fully-fledged Moroccans with equal rights and duties as Muslims+
 
    Satloff said that for HM the late king Mohammed V “both (communities) were his children” and the “Jewish subjects of His Majesty are defined by their faith and not by race, an ancestral principle which makes them full Moroccans with equal rights and duties as Muslims.”

    The writer deemed that there is no doubt that the late Sovereign “eased the suffering and persecutions” that the Jews in North Africa and elsewhere were subject to. For “these reasons, the Sultan was a righteous in the memory of the Jewish communities.”

    The documentary also recalls the suffering endured by Jews in North Africa, then under Vichy laws.

    Supported by several testimonies of Muslims and Jews, the documentary shows the role played by Muslims in protecting the Jewish community against the Vichy regime and the harmony and the spirit of tolerance and coexistence that prevailed in the Maghreb societies.

    HM the late king Mohammed V considered the Jews as his children, said the Advisor of HM King Mohammed VI, Andre Azoulay, recalling in this respect that the late sovereign had strongly opposed the distribution of yellow stars to discriminate against the Jewish subjects.

    Itinerant Ambassador, Serge Berdugo, whose father was the president of the Jewish community of Meknes during the 2nd World War when France was under German occupation, recalled, by citing the testimonies of former prisoners in forced labor camps in North Africa that were created and administered by the Vichy regime, that the “only glimmers of humanity came from Muslims."

    This documentary film will be aired in the coming days on many U.S. and European channels.