Hi, Rodel. Our Bookshop was privileged to have launched the book of Frank Ephraim : Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror (University of Illinois Press, 2003) when it first came out. The author and his wife and some living descendants of the Manila Jews were present at the launching. We are saddened to hear that Frank Ephraim passed away some years later. Born February 19, 1931, Berlin, Germany, he diied August 27, 2006 in the East Coast. His book inspired the creation of the Open Doors monument through the initiative of the late Philippine Ambassador to Israel Antonio Modena who unfortunately died in Manila in February 2007. The Open Doors Monument in honor of the Philippines was unveiled in 2009 at Israel's Rishon Lezion Memorial Park to honor the Philippines' open doors policy for thousands of Jews in 1939. Thank you, Rodel for keeping their memory alive by writing about them. BTW, the book is still available at our Bookshop. Best,
Linda --- Philippine Expressions Bookshop The Mail Order Bookshop dedicated to Filipino Americans in search of their roots. PO Box 4201, Main Post Office Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA 90274, USA Tel (310) 514-9139 www.philippineexpressionsbookshop.com (still under production) [email protected] ---- "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson. We have blazed the trail in promoting Philippine books in America. 2010 marks our 26th year of service to the Filipino American community. Mabuhay. ---- ________________________________ From: "AC GARCHITORENA, Victoria P." <[email protected]> To: Rodel Rodis <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, August 19, 2010 2:24:21 PM Subject: [Fil-AmNetwork] RE: PHILIPPINE SCHINDLER'S LIST What a fascinating piece, Rodel! I had no idea! Vicky G. Victoria P. Garchitorena President Ayala Foundation, Inc. 32/F Tower One, Ayala Avenue Makati 1260 Philippines www.ayalafoundation.org T +632 759 4347 F +632 848 5764 C +63917 818 1191 Ayala Foundation USA 255 Shoreline Drive Ste 428 Redwood City 94065 CA USA www.af-usa.org T +1 650 598 3126 F +1 650 508 8988 C +1 510 334 0384 From:Rodel Rodis [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 5:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: FYI: PHILIPPINE SCHINDLER'S LIST Thanks to Steven Spielberg, the whole world knows about Oskar Schindler's "List" which saved the lives of 1200 German Jews in World War II. But few know about the Philippine List compiled by the Frieder brothers and endorsed by Philippine Commonwealth Pres. Manuel L. Quezon which saved an exactly similar number of German and Austrian Jews in 1939. It was a shameful time in US history when US policy barred 936 Jewish refugees from disembarking from their ocean liner (MS St. Louis) in 1939 in Miami, Florida forcing the ship to return back to Germany, dooming its hapless passengers to extermination in Nazi concentration camps. Their plight was immortalized in a 1976 film, Voyage of the Damned. While the US and the rest of the world turned their backs on the Jews, the Philippines stood out as the only country to openly accepts Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. This proud moment in Philippine history was celebrated on February 12, 2005 in Cincinnati, Ohio with a reunion of Jewish refugees from the Philippines who had gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of the destruction of their Manila synagogue, Temple Emil. Organized by the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion of Cincinnati, the event culminated a weekend that reunited 98 Frieder relatives and seven surviving members of the 1939 List who gave testimony to the courage of the four Frieder brothers who organized the rescue effort in the darkening days before World War II. The event also honored Manuel L. Quezon, the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth for getting his government to endorse and support the Jewish rescue plan. The story of the Manila rescue of Jews was recounted by Frank Ephraim in his book, Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror (University of Illinois Press, 2003). Ephraim's book is based on his interviews with survivors and on his own eyewitness account as a child as one of 1200 Jewish refugees who arrived in Manila in 1939. The history of the rescue begins with the decision of the Frieder brothers in 1918 to relocate its two-for-a-nickel cigar business from Manhattan to Manila, where production would be cheaper. Alex, Philip, Herbert and Morris Frieder took turns overseeing the business in the Philippines for two years each, joining a community that had fewer than 200 Jews. In 1937, Philip and Alex Frieder met European Jews who had straggled in to Manila's port from Shanghai and heard harrowing accounts from them about the fate of the17,000 Jews in Shanghai who were seeking to flee the Japanese after they had fled the Nazis. The Frieders decided to ask the help of their poker buddies to allow the Philippines to become a haven for the fleeing Jews. Fortunately, their poker buddies were a distinguished lot. One of them was Paul V. McNutt, the American High Commissioner for the Philippines; another was Manuel L. Quezon, the president of the Philippine Commonwealth and yet another was a young up-and-coming officer named Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the aide of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then Field Marshall of the Philippines. McNutt succeeded in convincing US State Department bureaucrats to turn a blind eye and to quietly allow Jews to enter Manila at a rate of 1,000 a year. (It was slightly increased to 1200). But President Quezon had a more difficult task as many anti-semitic Filipino Catholics in his administration opposed the proposal because they considered Jews to be "Communists and schemers" bent on "controlling the world". In a letter written in August of 1939, Alex Frieder wrote of President Quezon's response: "He assured us that big or little, he raised hell with every one of those persons. He made them ashamed of themselves for being a victim of propaganda intended to further victimize an already persecuted people." Quezon even donated some of his own personal land to help the Jewish refugees get settled in the Philippines. At the February 12, 2005 Cincinnati event, Quezon was posthumously honored with the "Righteous Person" title which, in the tradition of Israel and those commemorating the Holocaust, is the one given to Gentiles (non-Jews) who helped the Jewish people in their time of persecution. Accepting the honor on behalf of the late President Manuel L. Quezon was his grandson, Manuel L. Quezon III, a Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist, who told the New York Times reporter "We're a very hospitable people and we had experienced exile and imprisonment during the Spanish colonization and the early American occupation, so someone of my grandfather's generation would have been conscious of the plight of refugees. We're a sucker for anyone who's suffering." Also at the Cincinnati celebration was Alex Frieder's daughter, Alice Weston, who described his father and uncles as "the right persons in the right place at the right time." Alice, now 78, was a young girl in Manila in 1939 when her father and her uncle Philip organized the rescue. "My father wasn't an exceptional person," she said. "He was an ordinary businessman and he saw this horrible situation and he thought of a way to help a little bit." The invasion of the Philippines by the Japanese Imperial Forces following their attack on Pearl Harbor ended the Jewish rescue plan. The Japanese who occupied the Philippines, interestingly enough, did not intern the German Jews as they initially treated them not as Jews but as Germans, then as stateless persons. In his book, Ephraim explained that the Japanese "had a dim view of German racial doctrines - they weren't Aryans." The survivors at the Cincinnati gathering recounted their war-time experience of subsisting on "cracked wheat and coconut milk" during the Japanese occupation. In response to the arrival of the American liberation forces in the Philippines in 1945, the retreating Japanese burned much of Manila. Eva Asner, a 1939 Manila refugee, told the audience in Cincinnati that when her father, Bernhard Susskind, returned to the fire-engulfed city to rescue a nurse, he was shot to death. He was one of the sixty-seven Jewish refugees who were among the 100,000 Manilans killed by the retreating Japanese and the Americans who bombed the hell out of the city instead of risking more American lives in armed combat with the Japanese soldiers. In the course of the American bombing, Temple Emil burned to the ground on February 11, 1945. At the Cincinnati celebration, Philippine Ambassador to the US Albert F. del Rosario announced that Philippine President Gloria Arroyo will present the National Legion of Honor, Commanders Class, to writer Frank Ephraim and posthumously to all the Frieder brothers and to McNutt. "We recall today not only the justice in the face of tyranny," del Rosario said, "but just as importantly, the common humanity that we can share, even in the darkest of times." Send comments to [email protected]. __._,_.___ Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (2) Recent Activity: * New Members 7 * New Files 1 Visit Your Group ****************************************** The opinions, postings, and articles in this group do not necessarily reflect the orientation of Filipino-American_Network, but have been approved due to their relevance to Filipino-Americans. 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