The Washington Oxi Day Foundation announced today that the first recipient of the annual Metropolitan Chrysostomos Award — recognizing action to stop anti-Semitism or discrimination — will be received by Ms. Photini Tomai, director of the Greek Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic and Historical Archives. She has been, for a number of years, the leader of official Greece’s activities regarding the Jewish community and the Holocaust.

This award will be presented by Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, on Friday, October 28th at 10:30 am at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, DC. Former U.S. Ambassador to Greece and prominent member of the Jewish community in the United States, Ambassador Thomas Miller, will introduce Ms. Tomai at this cereremony. This presentation will take place before leaders of the Jewish community in the US. This event is part of the First Annual Washington Oxi Day Celebration, October 27-28.

This award is named after Metropolitan Chrysostomos, the Greek Orthodox church leader on the island of Zakinthos during the German occupation of Greece, who is credited with saving hundreds of Jewish lives. German forces, preparing to deport Jewish citizens of Zakinthos to camps in Poland, ordered Metropolitan Chrysostomos to prepare a list of all of the Jewish people on the island. The Metropolitan told the Mayor of Zakinthos to burn the list of Jewish names and implored the German commander to not deport these citizens, as they were Greek citizens and had done no harm. When the Germans would not listen and ordered him to produce the list, Chrysostomos took a piece of paper, wrote his own name on it and handed it over, saying “here is the list of Jews your required.” In addition, he told the Jewish residents on the island to leave their homes and go into hiding in the mountains, promising them that Greek islanders would provide them with food and shelter. Those that followed his instructions were saved.

In 1978 Chrysostomos was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem organization for risking his life to save the lives of Jewish people during the Holocaust. According to Yad Vashem, upon receiving this award, “Metropolitan Chrysostomos declared that he was following the example of Archbishop Damaskinos of Greece, who on 23 March 1943, after the first deportation trains left Thessaloniki for Auschwitz, published an outspoken condemnation of the deportation of Greece’s Jews. Damaskinos was known to have said: “I have taken up my cross. I spoke to the Lord, and made up my mind to save as many Jewish souls as possible.'”

The first recipient of the Metropolitan Chrysostomos Award, Tomai has devoted much of her professional life to researching, documenting and publicizing the fate of Greece’s Jewish population during World War II and has published several volumes of work on the subject.

This presentation will be preceded by an Oxi Day Doxology beginning at 10:00 am also at St. Sophia Cathedral.