Perth Voice Interactive

THE “Montgomery Bible” from the Battle of El Alamein will be on display in Perth this month.

WA-born historian Kelvin Crombie will give a talk on the Hebrew bible, presented by Palestinians to General Montgomery after his Allied forces stopped the Holocaust from occurring in the Middle-East.

The British general halted Rommel’s forces at El Alamein, only 100km from Alexandria in Egypt, on July 1, 1942.  

“In late June and early July 1942 the Nazi high command in Berlin, led by SS commander Heinrich Himmler, instituted a new formation known as Einsatzkommando Egypt,” Crombie says.

“The Einsatz were specialised squads which were used to murder political opponents and Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe.  

“By mid-1942 the Einsatzgruppen had already murdered close to one-million Jewish people in Europe.

“The Einstazkommando Egypt would join with local collaborators in the Middle-East in order to destroy the Jewish communities in that region.  

“The implementation of this policy depended upon whether Rommel’s forces could defeat the British-led Eighth Army and reach the Suez Canal.” 

Accompanying the bible is a parchment with a note of gratitude written in both Hebrew and English: “Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery, the gallant leader of the victorious British forces, by whose hand God has placed salvation in Zion in the days of El Alamein.”

On returning to England, “Monty” gave the bible to Rochester bishop Christopher Chavasse, after which its whereabouts became nebulous.

Crombie and Dr Alex Carmel eventually tracked it down in the 1980s, to the UK office of a Jewish church.

It’s now on loan to Mr Crombie for a world tour to coincide with 2012’s 70th anniversary of the battle of El Alamein.

So far he has given talks at the House of Lords and the NSW parliament.

“The message conveyed by the bible and the book is that the principles which lay behind the Holocaust are still present today, and Australians and New Zealanders need to be as vigilant today as we were back in 1942,” says Crombie, who spent several years in Jerusalem working at a hospital for children, and as a church guide.   

“Today we must work against racism and incitement to genocide.  

“Unfortunately, there are those today who again want to perpetrate genocide against the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.”

The talk will have personal significance for South African-born Mt Lawley MP Michael Sutherland. 

“I have a very personal interest in what happened in North Africa in WWII,” he says. 

“My father was a warrant officer in the South African army in Egypt for five years and my mother lived in Alexandria at the time. 

“As a child I was often told the story of how the fate of Egypt and the Allied forces in the Middle-East depended on what happened at El Alamein.

“The good thing that happened that my father and mother met in Alexandria and married after the war.

“ I have visited El Alamein, the Allied war cemetery and German and Italian monuments to the fallen.

“To think about the loss of life there is disturbing.” 

Crombie’s talk is at parliament house on June 25.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK