Rachel Benrubi, who was honored as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” because her Christian Greek Orthodox family sheltered seven Jews from the Nazis during World War II, died Wednesday, July 27, 2011. She was 86.

Mrs. Benrubi was born as Elenista Maka, part of a Christian Greek Orthodox family in Naoussa, in the province of Macedonia in Greece. When she was 15 in 1940, Nazi German soldiers were occupying Greece, and threatened the nation’s ancient Jewish community with deportation and death, a fate that more than 60,000 Greek Jews would suffer. A Greek police officer knocked on the door of her family’s home. With him were a young Jewish widow and her 15-year-old son. The policeman told Mrs. Benrubi’s father, “Give them a room and don’t ask them anything.” The young widow and her son were hidden in the family’s attic, despite the risk of death to the father, who worked as a security guard at a large textile factory.

The father encouraged the widow to contact other family members who might be in need of protection. The widow’s husband had already been killed by the Nazis. The widow’s father-and mother-in-law and their younger children soon came to the home and were protected throughout the Holocaust.

After the war, Elenista Maka met and fell in love with Ruben Benrubi, a cousin of one of the Jews the family had hidden. She married that man, changed her first name to Rachel and converted to Judaism. The couple came to the United States in 1951, settling in Indianapolis. Later, after her husband died in 1980, Rachel Benrubi moved to St. Louis, where her son, Asher Benrubi, better known as the radio personality Smash, and her daughter, Rena Benrubi Abrams, former longtime marketing director at Plaza Frontenac, resided. Another of her daughters, Esther Gurman, resides in Denver.

On Sunday, April 19, 2009, at the annual Yom HaShoah Day of Remembrance, hosted that year at Shaare Zedek Synagogue, Rachel Benrubi, accompanied by her son Asher and daughter Rena, was honored as one of the “Righteous of the Nations” for her role as a member of the family who hid Jews from the Nazis in Greece at great personal risk. As reported by Susan Fadem in the St. Louis Jewish Light in 2009, Rachel Benrubi “never set out to be a hero with an unforgettable love story. Instead, she saw herself as a loyal daughter, the third eldest of nine siblings born to a Christian Greek Orthodox family in northern Greece.”

In 1974, Rachel and Ruben Benrubi gave their daughter Rena a graduation gift of a trip to Greece, where she could spend a summer in their homeland. It was during that trip, for which Rena was not at first enthusiastic, that she met her maternal grandmother and other relatives who shared with her their memories of the period when the family hid Jews from the Holocaust. “These were stories and facts never mentioned to us as we grew up in suburban Indianapolis,” said Rena Abrams. “But then again, we didn’t know to ask.”

Rena Abrams took part in the Yom HaShoah service in which she paid tribute to her mother and her family for their role in protecting seven Jews during the Nazi occupation of Greece. “What a risk to my mother’s family if they’d been discovered,” said Abrams. She added that if people asked about the seven people who were boarding with her mother and grandparents, they responded that they were “distant relatives who had fallen on hard times in Albania, and were not related to the family.”

Mrs. Benrubi’s courage and that of her family served as an inspiration to her granddaughter, Sadie Gurman, who paid tribute to her heroism in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She described the hiding of the seven Jews by her grandmother’s family as a “clandestine arrangement (that) saved lives, risked even more and ended in the creation of my Jewish-American family.”

Sadie Gurman noted that, at the time, 2009, “my grandmother – I call her Nana – still has vivid memories. She speaks of German soldiers routinely knocking at her door in search of Jews. Of pretending the seven refugees were relatives visiting from Albania when strangers wondered why they couldn’t speak Greek. Of shuffling the Jews to and from a neighbor’s house during the months when young German soldiers also shared their home.”

“This story has always given me a sense of my own place in history,” Gurman added. “The atrocities my relatives witnessed remain beyond my comprehension. But more striking to me is that their courage and compassion in protecting innocent strangers outweighed their sense of danger…I owe my existence to my family’s courage.”

In addition to her son, Asher Benrubi (Deborah) of St. Louis, and daughters Rena Benrubi Abrams (Todd) of St. Louis and Esther Benrubi Gurman (Dr. Alan) of Denver, survivors include six grandchildren.

A private family service was held.

Contributions in Mrs. Benrubi’s memory can be made to the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, 12 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, Mo. 63146.