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Recorded Jewish history in the Philippines started during the Spanish period.
The Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century forced many Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity or to flee. These Jewish "New Christians" were known as "marranos" or "conversos", a term which included converted Muslims. Sephardi Jews are those Jews coming from the Iberian Peninsula and settled in the Philippines, particularly, in Northern Samar. Some, called Crypto-Jews, [1] observed their Jewish rites in secret. The Inquisition investigated and persecuted many of the Conversos, accusing them of practicing in secret, some without substantial basis. Thus many of the original Jews and Marranos fled to the new Spanish colonies including the Philippines. Two "New Christian" brothers, Jorge and Domingo Rodríguez, [2] arrived in the Spanish Philippines in the 1590s. By 1593 both were tried and convicted at an auto-da-fé in Mexico City because the Inquisition did not have an independent tribunal in the Philippines. The Inquisition imprisoned the Rodríguez brothers and subsequently tried and convicted at least eight other "New Christians" from the Philippines. Such was the precarious status of Jewish settlers in the Philippines. Jewish presence during the subsequent centuries of Spanish colonization remained small and unorganized. Spanish Christianized laws would not have permitted the presence of an organized Jewish community.
The first permanent settlement of Jews in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial years began with the arrival of three Levy brothers from Alsace-Lorraine, [3] who were escaping the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. [1] [2] As entrepreneurs, their business ventures over the years included jewelry retail, a general merchandising business, and import trade in gems, pharmaceuticals, and eventually automobiles. [2] Along with them was another notable Jew from the Alsace region, Leopold Kahn, who became president and general manager of La Estrella del Norte and Levy Hermanos, Inc. Kahn also held positions such as the French consul-general to the Philippines, and president of the French Chamber of Commerce. The opening of the Suez Canal in March 1869 provided a more direct trading route between Europe and the Philippines, allowing businesses to grow and the number of Jews in the Philippines to increase. [2] The Levy brothers were subsequently joined by Turkish, Syrian, [1] and Egyptian Jews, creating a multi-ethnic Jewish population of about fifty individuals by the end of the Spanish period. It was not until the Spanish–American War at the end of the 19th century, when the United States took control of the islands from Spain in 1898, that the Jewish community was allowed to officially organize and openly practice Judaism.
When the Philippines became an American colony, American Jewish citizens took advantage of this new frontier. The arrival of American military forces to the Philippines brought Jewish servicemen who decided to remain in the islands after their military discharge and become permanent residents. Jewish teachers from the United States also arrived with a contingent of "Thomasites," a delegation of volunteer teachers, who gave public instruction to Filipino children. In addition to education, new markets for import-export businesses attracted young Jewish businessmen, who set up new shops in the Philippines or extended businesses from the U.S. mainland.
Three important names appear in the Jewish community around the start of the 20th century: Emil Bachrach and Morton I. Netzorg. Emil Bachrach arrived in Manila in 1901 and soon built a sizable commercial empire. [2] Because he is regarded as the first American Jew who permanently settled in the Philippines, the synagogue and cultural hall, which the Bachrach family financed in subsequent decades, bore his name: Temple Emil [4] [5] and Bachrach Hall. Joseph Cysner became the caretaker of the Temple. [6] Bachrach's economic successes allowed him to be a generous philanthropist, who supported both Jewish and Christian causes. Economic prosperity, along with a high level of societal interaction, apparently precluded the need for strong Jewish institutions. Theirs was a 19th-century lifestyle of the very rich. Although the Jewish families did go to the Temple for special occasions, and the existence of an adjacent social hall did serve to centralize and focus Jewish cultural life, it was still very low-key. Even though Temple Emil was built in the 1920s primarily through the generous contributions of the Bachrachs, Netzorgs, and Frieders, the only services conducted on an annual basis were the High Holidays, when a visiting Rabbi or Cantor from Shanghai officiated the services. [7] By 1936, the Jewish community in the Philippines had a distinctly cosmopolitan makeup with a total population of about 500 persons. The threat to European Jewry by the Nazi government in the 1930s sparked a renewed Jewish consciousness. The small, decentralized and secular-minded Jewish community of Manila took steps to save fellow Jews from certain death, only becoming Jewish-conscious in a deep way when the Nazi threat came out of Europe, and there were thousands of Jews in desperate need of help.
It was during the era of the Philippine Commonwealth (1935–1946) that Jewish refugees from Europe sought a safe haven in Manila. The migration of Jews escaping Europe between 1935 and 1941 was the last major immigration of Jews to the Philippines. The first German Jews to arrive in Manila actually came from the Jewish community in Shanghai. With the occupation of Peking by the Japanese in 1937, the four million inhabitants of Shanghai were endangered. Germany's shift of alliance from China to Japan at this time alarmed German Jews in Shanghai, fearing German pressure on Japan to adopt Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Fearing for them as well, the Jewish community in Manila, led by the Frieder Brothers of Cincinnati, [8] organized the Jewish Refugee Committee of Manila (JRC) with the intention of rescuing German members of the Shanghai Jewish community. [9] These Jews had already been deprived of their German citizenship, and the Gestapo presence that was taking root in Japanese areas threatened Jewish existence in Shanghai as well. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the JRC received a telegram from Shanghai asking for assistance for Shanghai's refugee Jews. With the help of Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese Consul-General in Austria, Austrian Jews were able to escape to other countries, including the Philippines, [10] when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria to Germany in 1938. [1] Manila then received 30 German Jewish refugee families from Shanghai, which then started a larger program that would eventually rescue 1,300 refugee Jews from Europe between 1937 and 1941, the largest influx of Jews in Philippine history.
It is important to realize that the mechanics of the refugee rescue plan in Manila involved many different people and agencies in the Philippines, the United States, and in Germany. The refugee rescue plan also had some opponents. In 1938, Emilio Aguinaldo was quoted to hold antisemitic beliefs in his opposition to Quezon's plan to shelter Jews in the Philippines. [11] While it was important to have the cooperation and consent of President Quezon in this refugee rescue plan, [2] [3] [8] [9] all issues of Philippine foreign affairs were still totally in the hands of the U.S. State Department and would be until the Philippines was granted independence in 1946. What is unique to the rescue of refugee Jews in the Philippines is that the Jewish community in Manila was granted authority by High Commissioner Paul McNutt and Philippine President Quezon to operate a selection committee to choose those who would be granted visas by the U.S. State Department. [1] By an application and review process, Jewish refugees in Germany and Austria obtained visas for immigration from U.S. consular officers who had been instructed by the U.S. State Department to issue visas based on recommendations from the JRC in Manila. This successful Frieder-McNutt selection rescue plan led to the larger resettlement rescue plan that focused on the island of Mindanao as a destination for the mass resettlement of 10,000 refugee Jews. [12] For the refugees who did manage to settle in the Philippines, the JRC organised committees to aid in finding employment and new homes for them in Manila.[ citation needed ] Though relatively modest in numbers when compared to the number of refugees worldwide, the newly arrived refugees nearly overwhelmed the small Jewish community of Manila, multiplying its numbers relatively overnight.[ citation needed ] An ironic turn of events occurred when all rescue plans halted with the invasion and occupation of the Philippines during WWII.
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(April 2018) |
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 1,300 Jews from Europe had immigrated to the Philippines. [13] The Jewish community of Manila reached its maximum population of about 2,500 members by the end of 1941, having increased eightfold since it first received refugees in 1937. This once American-dominated Jewish community that had saved the lives of well over 1,300 European Jews from probable extermination in the Holocaust, faced an unexpected persecution of its own. An amazing turn of events put the fate of the American Jews into the hands of the German refugee Jews when the Japanese entered Manila in December 1941 and summarily interned all "enemy alien" civilians in University of Santo Tomas Internment Camp (STIC), and later at the Los Baños Internment Camp and the old Bilibid prison in Manila.
The Japanese did not perceive a difference between German nationals and German Jews so the majority of the Jewish community in Manila, hundreds of German and Austrian Jews, did not face internment at Santo Tomas University. [2] However, about 250 other members of the Jewish community, including the more influential American members, were immediately incarcerated, as well as Americans of other faiths and "enemy alien" civilians. Having spent five years freeing hundreds of German Jews from Nazi oppression, the Manila American Jewish community now faced its own incarceration. Their fate was now in the hands of the German refugee Jews who aided their interned benefactors with food and supplies. Several firsthand accounts about the details of camp life have been written over the years, but few of them discuss specifics concerning the experiences of the Jews in camp. It can only be assumed that the general state of affairs at the camp pertained to all. The Japanese left the camp members to their own designs to solve their housing, food, and sanitation problems. Most prisoners were interned for the full three years until the end of the war in 1945.
While inmates at STIC battled malnutrition, disease, and exposure, residents of Manila tried to adapt to life under Japanese occupation. Houses and businesses were searched and seized without warning, providing lodging for the Japanese forces while making their owners jobless and homeless. Japanese penalties for violations of imposed civilian restrictions were both swift and brutal, administered through beatings, hangings, imprisonment, starvation, torture, and executions. In January 1943, antisemitic propaganda targeted the non-interned German Jews, as Japanese leaders began to be influenced by their Nazi allies. Rumors about forcing the German Jews into a ghetto began to circulate. This imminent danger to the German Jews was averted by the more influential leaders of the Jewish community, who negotiated with the Japanese leaders. While the Japanese could not be bothered by Nazi plans to establish a Jewish ghetto in the Philippines, they did not object to episodes of abuse randomly waged against members of the Jewish community by their own soldiers. The Japanese also used the synagogue and its adjacent hall to store ammunition, and they were totally destroyed in the war. [14] Dozens of incidents of German Jews, along with other civilians suffering at the hands of the Japanese during these years of occupation, illustrate the horror of the time.
After the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese occupation by the U.S. and Philippine Commonwealth Armed Forces, the freed internees of STIC joined with the remaining refugees in Manila to try to rebuild their devastated community. Temple Emil and Bachrach Hall had been totally destroyed. [2] [15] All had been victimized by the Japanese occupying forces, which resulted in the death of 70 members of the Jewish community. The American military took steps to assist the Jewish community in its recovery. U.S. and Filipino soldiers provided not only food, water, supplies, and medicine for the victims, but also donated $15,000 for the rebuilding of the synagogue.
But the destruction was so widespread that nearly all of the refugees and their American and British benefactors left the Philippines and the community membership had decreased by 30% by the end of 1946. Fewer than 250 European Jewish refugees could be counted among the estimated 600 Jews who remained in the Philippines by the end of 1948. By 1954, the Jewish community of Manila counted a total of 302 members. By rescuing over 1,300 Jewish refugees, this American Commonwealth saved them from the fate of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
As of 2005 [update] , Filipino Jews numbered at the most 500 people. [2] Other estimates[ citation needed ] range between 100 and 18,500 people (0.000001% and 0.005% of the country's total population).
As of 2011 [update] , Metro Manila has the largest Jewish community in the Philippines, which consists of roughly seventy families. The country's only synagogue, Beth Yaacov, is located in Makati, as is the Chabad House.[ citation needed ] There are, of course, other Jews elsewhere in the country, like the Bagelboys of Subic and Angeles City [2] but these are obviously fewer and almost all transients, [16] either diplomats or business envoys, and their existence is almost totally unknown in mainstream society. There are a few Israelis in Manila working at call centers and a few other executives. There are also a number of converts to Judaism.[ citation needed ]
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
Shortly prior to and during World War II, and coinciding with the Second Sino-Japanese War, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were resettled in the Japanese Empire. The onset of the European war by Nazi Germany involved the lethal mass persecutions and genocide of Jews, later known as the Holocaust, resulting in thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing east. Most ended up in Japanese-occupied China.
Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation suffered greatly during the Holocaust and World War II.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
The Shanghai Ghetto, formally known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, was an area of approximately one square mile in the Hongkew district of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The area included the community around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Shanghai was notable for a long period as the only place in the world that unconditionally offered refuge for Jews escaping from the Nazis. After the Japanese occupied all of Shanghai in 1941, the Japanese army forced about 23,000 of the city's Jewish refugees to be restricted or relocated to the Shanghai Ghetto from 1941 to 1945 by the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees. It was one of the poorest and most crowded areas of the city. Local Jewish families and American Jewish charities aided them with shelter, food, and clothing. The Japanese authorities increasingly stepped up restrictions, surrounded the ghetto with barbed wire, and the local Chinese residents, whose living conditions were often as bad, did not leave. By 21 August 1941, the Japanese government closed Shanghai to Jewish immigration.
David H. Kranzler was an American professor of library science at Queensborough Community College, New York, who specialized in the study of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
On three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population during the Holocaust. In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust which helped the Jews escape some concentration camps.
The history of the Jews in Kobe, Japan, is recorded from the 19th century onwards.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and enacted policies that would culminate in the Holocaust, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe and the United Kingdom was one of the destinations. Some came on transit visas, which meant that they stayed in Britain temporarily, while waiting to be accepted by another country. Others entered the country by having obtained employment or a guarantor, or via Kindertransport. There were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who were accepted into Britain by the start of World War II on 1 September 1939, and an additional 10,000 people who made it to Britain during the war.
Israel–Philippines relations refers to the bilateral ties between the State of Israel and the Republic of the Philippines.
German settlement in the Philippines began during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines when the German Empire attempted to acquire the Philippines. This article also refers to the choice of Filipino citizenship and/or settlement in the Philippines by persons of either pure or mixed German descent who continued to reside in the country for a significant number of years or decades. The German community in the Philippines is the largest central European community in the country. The community comprises expats and immigrants.
The history of the Jews in Japan is well documented in modern times, with various traditions relating to much earlier eras.
The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum is a museum commemorating the Jewish refugees who lived in Shanghai during World War II after fleeing Europe to escape the Holocaust. It is located at the former Ohel Moshe or Moishe Synagogue, in the Tilanqiao Historic Area of Hongkou district, Shanghai, China. The museum features documents, photographs, films, and personal items documenting the lives of some of the more than 20,000 Jewish residents of the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, better known as the Shanghai Ghetto, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.
After Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933, Jews began to escape German-occupied Europe.
Emanuel Maurice "Emil" Bachrach was a Russian Jewish-born American entrepreneur and philanthropist in the Philippines.
Quezon's Game is a 2018 Philippine biographical drama film directed by Matthew Rosen. The film centers on Philippine President Manuel L. Quezon and his plan to shelter German and Austrian Jews in the Philippines who were fleeing Nazi Germany during the pre-World War II era.
Prior to joining the Allied Powers late in the war, Turkey was officially neutral in World War II. Despite its neutrality, Turkey maintained strong diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany during the period of the Holocaust. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad; 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor; and several hundred interned in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish citizens, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality. Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war. Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali, more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey. Since the war, Turkey and parts of the Turkish Jewish community have promoted exaggerated claims of rescuing Jews, using this myth to promote Armenian genocide denial.
Portugal was officially neutral during World War II and the period of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. The country had been ruled by an authoritarian political regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar but had not been significantly influenced by racial antisemitism and was considered more sympathetic to the Allies than was neighbouring Francoist Spain.
Although Japan was a member of the Axis, and therefore an ally of Nazi Germany, it did not actively participate in the Holocaust. Anti-semitic attitudes were not significant in Japan during World War II and there was little interest in the Jewish question, which was seen as a European issue. Furthermore, Nazi Germany did not pressure Japan on the issue.
President Manuel L. Quezon admitted roughly 1,200–1,300 Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, German-occupied Europe, and Shanghai in Japanese-occupied China to the Philippine Commonwealth from 1937 to 1941.
History of Jews in the Philippines" by Bonnie M. Harris, Ph.D.
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