By JOEL GREENBERG
MAAGAN MIKHAEL, Israel — When Lamija Jaha and her husband were driven out of their apartment and herded with thousands of ethnic Albanians to trains that would take them from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, she took a memento of her dead father in her pocket.

Trudging into exile on that first day of April, she had no idea that the simple souvenir from her lost home — a copy of a certificate bearing her father’s name — would help pluck her family from the Balkan flames and bring it to this kibbutz on the northern Israeli coast.

That piece of paper would take the Jaha family, in a way, full circle. It was the copy of a certificate, issued by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, commending her parents, Dervis and Servet Korkut, both Muslims, for risking their lives to save Jews during World War II, and honoring them as “righteous among the nations.”

In World War II, Mrs. Jaha’s parents lived in Nazi-controlled Sarajevo, where she was later born and her mother remains today. Not only did the Korkuts hide several Jews from the local pro-Nazi regime, but Dervis Korkut saved the precious Sarajevo Haggadah, concealing it in his home and thus keeping the 14th-century volume, the best known illuminated Hebrew manuscript, intact.

Now it was Mrs. Jaha who was expelled from her Kosovo home and herded onto a crowded train in scenes that have evoked comparisons with the Holocaust.

After arriving in Macedonia, Mrs. Jaha showed her father’s commendation to officials of the Jewish community in the capital, Skopje.

They helped Mrs. Jaha and her husband, Vllaznim, to join a planeload of Kosovar Albanian refugees accepted by Israel.

More than 50 years after her parents sheltered Jews in their home, she found shelter in the Jewish state.

“I don’t know how to express how much this means to me,” Mrs. Jaha, 44, said in an interview at a hostel in Maagan Mikhael, where the 115 refugees are being housed. “My father did what he did with all his heart, not to get anything in return. Fifty years later, it returns somehow. It’s a kind of a circle.”

Mrs. Jaha’s father was a museum curator and a prominent figure in Sarajevo, an expert on the ethnic history of Bosnia-Herzegovina who knew several languages and took a special interest in Jewish contributions to the cultural mosaic of his country. In published articles, he wrote about the culture and art of Bosnia’s Jews, defending them against anti-Semitic attacks and asserting that they were an integral part of Bosnian society.

As thousands of Jews were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps, Korkut took the deadly risk of hiding several in his home. Mira Bakovic, a Jewish survivor who was traced by Yad Vashem, recalled that the Korkuts put her up for half a year after she sneaked back to Sarajevo following a stint as an anti-Nazi partisan fighter.

She was was presented to visitors as a housemaid with the Muslim name Amira and served guests, including German officers, veiled according to Muslim custom.

Mira Bakovic died last year at age 76, but her son, Davor Bakovic, 50, who immigrated to Israel from Yugoslavia in 1970 and lives near Jerusalem, greeted Mrs. Jaha when she and her husband arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport on April 12.

“It was an amazing discovery,” Bakovic recalled. “I felt as if a sister had appeared from a faraway place. I felt close to these people even though I didn’t know them at all. The circle of my life had become linked with Lamija and her family. To me it proved that people can’t be divided up into nations and sects. They’re human beings who can touch each other.”

The meeting was also a revelation for Mrs. Jaha. She said that her father, who died when she was 14, never mentioned to her that he had sheltered Jews, and that her mother told her briefly about it only a few years ago. “My father didn’t do it so he could tell us about it later,” Mrs. Jaha said. But in the end, “anything my father did brought me good.”

For the Jahas, Israel is a new beginning after days of hell.

In the crush at the Pristina train station, they climbed through a window to get into a packed passenger car. Two bags in which they had tucked mementos of their life — family photos, a picture of Korkut, his books, a daughter’s diary — were lost in the chaos.

Dumped on the Macedonian border in darkness, the Jahas marched along the tracks into a teeming no man’s land where they spent 11 hours before gaining entry with a small group of refugees at a Macedonian checkpoint.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get permission to go to Sweden, where her brother-in-law lives, Mrs. Jaha went to the offices of the Jewish community in Skopje and showed the certificate awarded to her parents. A few years ago, her mother had been evacuated from Sarajevo in a convoy organized by Jews there during the Bosnian war, and Mrs. Jaha hoped she might get similar help. The president of the Jewish community in Skopje, Victor Mizrahi, promised help.

Asked whether she was willing to go to Israel on a refugee flight organized by the Jewish Agency, an organization that usually brings Jewish immigrants to Israel, Mrs. Jaha readily agreed.

“I told them that it was no problem, and that we wanted to go somewhere safe,” she recalled, noting that she was unconcerned by the occasional outbreaks of Arab-Israeli violence. “The problems here are nothing compared to the situation in Kosovo. You can find terrorism all over the world.”

The Jahas’ two children, Fitore, 20, and Fatos, 16, were smuggled out under false Serbian identity to Belgrade and later to Budapest before their parents’ expulsion.

They were brought to Israel on a separate Jewish Agency flight that carried Serbian Jewish youngsters who had fled the NATO air attacks to Hungary.

Reunited in Maagan Mikhael, living in white stucco guest rooms overlooking the kibbutz’s fish ponds and the Mediterranean, the Jahas feel “like we’re on vacation, not refugees,” Jaha said. The Jewish Agency has provided Hebrew classes and lectures for the refugees, sightseeing trips, three meals a day and medical care. There are also plans to start employing the newcomers at the kibbutz and in neighboring industries.

Many of the refugees, who have been accepted by Israel for six months, say they would like to return to Kosovo, but the Jahas say they have resolved to settle in Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally assured Mrs. Jaha that her family can stay, and in recognition of her parents’ deeds, the family is eligible for Israeli citizenship.

“This was a big thing for us, because we have no home, we have nothing, and we’ve come to a country that won’t turn us back,” said Mrs. Jaha.

“We have left our house for good. We wanted to go far away, where we and our children could live without war.”

Mrs. Jaha, an economist, and her husband, an electrical engineer, say they plan to find work and permanent housing after learning Hebrew, and their daughter, a college student, is determined to resume her computer studies at an Israeli university.

“We’re doing this for the children, not for us,” Jaha said of the decision to stay in Israel. “We lived one life. Now we’re beginning another.”