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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.

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The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

81 years later, Chiune Sugihara's humanity continues to enable new lives

A Jerusalem ceremony highlights the ever-widening impact of the only Japanese citizen honored as Righteous Among the Nations… and the folly of obtuse adherence to bureaucracy

Nobuki Sugihara and family at a ceremony honoring his late father Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania in 1940 who issued transit visas that saved thousands of Jews (Times of Israel)

As his son revealed at an extraordinarily moving ceremony in Jerusalem on Monday, Chiune Sugihara may only have realized toward the very end of his blessed life quite how many people, how many worlds, he had saved.

For a few frenetic weeks in 1940 before he was required to close down the Japanese consulate in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, as the Soviets moved in, Sugihara churned out transit visas for local Jews and, mainly, for Polish Jews fleeing the Nazis, who began to gather in crowds outside the consulate as word of his humanity spread.

In all, his son Nobuki estimated in a brief conversation with me, his father issued 2,340 visas — for individuals and families — giving them the chance to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan and safety. Sugihara did so often in defiance of Tokyo's policy, which required that such papers only be given to applicants who already had visas guaranteeing them entry to a destination beyond Japan.

Integral to the process was the activity of a second heroic diplomat, Dutch honorary consul in Kovno Jan Zwartendijk, who issued a similar number of official third-destination passes for the fleeing Jews to Curaçao and Surinam, two Dutch-controlled territories.

Transit visa issued in 1940 by Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania. (Huddyhuddy, CC-BY-SA, via Diaspora Museum)

Monday's ceremony inaugurated a square in Chiune Sugihara's memory in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood, and was attended by over 100 people, many of them descendants of those who had the immense fortune, 81 years ago, to find their desperate way to this noble diplomat.

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Faigenblum family members at a ceremony inaugurating Chiune Sugihara Square in Jerusalem on October 11, 2021 (ToI staff)

Members of the Faigenblum family, alive thanks to Sugihara, brought a much-photocopied typewritten "Sugihara's List," with the names of the beneficiaries of his visas. Saving Cyrla (Celia) Fajgenblum, they calculated, Sugihara made possible 33 great-grandchildren, two great-great-grandchildren, and counting.

The Rothner-Slonim-Pomerantz family held up the framed life-saving documentation itself.

Descendants of teachers and students from the Mir Yeshiva — whose entire student body was saved thanks to Sugihara's and Zwartendijk's documentation — introduced themselves to Nobuki and posed for photographs with him.

Michal Pomerantz with framed Sugihara documentation at a ceremony inaugurating Chiune Sugihara Square in Jerusalem on October 11, 2021 (Times of Israel)

Also present was US diplomat Jonathan Shrier, deputy chief of the US mission here, whose father was included in a visa Sugihara issued to his grandparents and family.

In the first decades after the war, Nobuki said, his father never really talked about what he had done — disobeying policy, saving lives. The story only began to emerge in the late 1960s, when he was contacted by Yehoshua Nishri, a Polish-born Israeli diplomat stationed in Tokyo, who tracked down the man who had helped him flee. Sugihara came to Israel the following year, and was ultimately recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1984 — still the only Japanese national ever to be so honored.

By then, though, he was too infirm to travel, and the honor was accepted by his late wife and by Nobuki. And even then, the true impact of what he had done eluded him.

Nobuki, 72, his father's last living son, told the audience on Monday that Chiune felt that if "even two or three people" would find their way to safety — from Lithuania, through the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberia Railway, across to Japan, and on to other destinations, requiring a great deal of further assistance and good fortune — that would be "a miracle. But the real miracle, he didn't know."

Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

It was only in 1985, Nobuki continued, when "there was a ceremony to plant trees [in Sugihara's honor] in Beit Shemesh, and "maybe 15 survivors came… and told the story of their transit, traveling to Japan, how they had a good life in Kobe, and the Japanese people were kind… [that was] the first time I heard about these stories. My father didn't know."

Sugihara paid quite a price for his actions. When he finally made it back to Japan in 1947 — having served in Konigsberg, Prague and Bucharest, and been captured by the Soviets in the last of those locations and held in a POW camp for 18 months — he was summoned to the Foreign Ministry. "We have no place for you with us," his boss told him, according to Nobuki. "You know why."

In the following years, he worked a series of menial jobs, including in a port, and spent many years living in the Soviet Union, separated from his family.

Chiune Sugihara (seated, center) with family and then foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir in Tokyo, 1985. (courtesy Nobuki Sugihara)

A bureaucratic morality tale

Monday's ceremony marked one more in a series of well-intentioned, though not-unblemished, Israeli gestures and efforts to show appreciation.

Among the positives, Nobuki was invited to study at the Hebrew University in the late 1960s, and lived not far from the square he inaugurated on Monday. "The view is different, the trees are bigger, people grew, survivors made children and grandchildren," he said in his brief and beautiful speech.

But that Beit Shemesh forest whose inauguration he attended in 1985 was secretively uprooted — a real-life horror story that outdoes even the comedic cynicism of the classic 1964 Israeli movie "Sallah Shabati," in which plaques are rotated to honor each naive visiting benefactor. Sugihara's plaque — "In appreciation of the humane and courageous actions that saved 5,000 Jews from World War II" — was tossed aside, and the area redeveloped as a residential neighborhood.

Changing forest benefactors' plaques: Stills from the classic 1964 Ephraim Kishon comedy Sallah Shabati, starring Chaim Topol (Courtesy)

The story only came out when Nobuki went looking for the forest, in vain, after hearing from Japanese tourists who couldn't find it. (KKL-JNF held a second event in Kiryat Hayovel with Nobuki and his family, on Wednesday, dedicating a new park in Sugihara's memory.)

Even Monday's ceremony, or rather Nobuki's arrival as guest of honor, was curiously complex. He was denied an entry visa by Israel's bureaucrats, because he had not completed all the COVID-related paperwork, including a clause that required him to specify where he would quarantine if he tested positive while in Israel — a detail he not unreasonably explained would need to be provided by his hosts.

You would have thought the sheer irony of the situation would have been sufficient to prompt a very rapid rethink: The Jewish state was refusing to issue a travel visa to Nobuki Sugihara, to attend an event to honor his father, a diplomat who bent and disobeyed his country's supremely authoritarian bureaucracy to issue thousands of travel visas, saving thousands of lives and enabling life for hundreds of thousands of descendants.

But it was only when The Times of Israel was contacted by Altea Steinherz, whose grandfather Itche Topola was saved by Sugihara, and reported on the impasse, four days before the event, that officials, prompted by an outcry that reached ministerial levels, cut through the red tape and provided Nobuki with his documentation. (I'm glad ToI was able to play a role in resolving the deadlock, and sorry that we had to.)

Students of the Mir Yeshiva's primary school, in Shanghai after escaping WWII Europe through visas issued by Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. (Courtesy of the Bagley Family)

'We learn, and we teach'

It was only after Sugihara died, in 1986 at age 86, and a large group of Jewish mourners, including Israel's ambassador, attended his funeral, that official Japan began to rehabilitate, honor, and exemplify him. (My colleague Amanda Borschel-Dan, who visited Sugihara's ostensible birthplace in Yaotsu in 2018, has written at length about the varying Sugihara historical narratives, some of them punctured by Nobuki, and the more recent mythologizing and commercializing of his life and deeds.)

The Japanese ambassador to Israel, Koichi Mizushima, was among the speakers Monday, and expressed pride "to have such a determined senior colleague" as Sugihara.

When I asked US envoy Shrier if there are any lessons he has taken from Sugihara's actions, which so directly affected him, Shrier answered that he tells his family at the Passover seder, a commemoration of miraculous liberation from hardship, that "miracles happen because of people."

Waiting at the gates of Chiune Sugihara's consulate, Jewish refugees in Kovno, Lithuania, circa 1940. (courtesy Nobuki Sugihara)

Sugihara's young sons, Shrier went on, "saw the crowds of Jews outside the consulate, and one of the sons said to him, 'Father, we must help them.' As his wife later wrote, she could see at that moment that Chiune had decided to help. To me, that's a miracle, mediated by the action of children."

Nobuki Sugihara addresses participants at a ceremony in Jerusalem's Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood dedicating Chiune Sugihara Square to his father, the WWII Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews when serving as consul-general in Kovno, Lithuania. (Times of Israel)

Nobuki followed a similar theme in his elegant address, which I'll quote more fully: "My father came to visit me in Jerusalem in 1969," he recalled. "I asked him: How many do you think you saved? He didn't like to hear 'saved.' He just did what he could do. He thought if two or three people could survive then it's a miracle. But the real miracle he didn't know: a few hundred thousand survivors' descendants are all over the world, many in Israel.

"Today," he concluded, "I met many survivors' descendants — they have memories from their father, grandfather, grandmother; they are telling to their children. This is the most important thing: We learn, and we teach."

Personal letters by rabbi known as 'Hazon Ish' come to National Library of Israel

teacher and expert in Jewish law, Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz left an enduring mark on ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought and culture.

Letters by the "Hazon Ish," Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz (1878-1953). Credit: The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

(October 14, 2021 / JNS) Fourteen letters penned in the 1940s by the legendary rabbi known as the "Hazon Ish" have been donated to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem by the family of their recipient, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, one of the rabbi's students.

The "Hazon Ish" (Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, 1878-1953) is considered to be one of the most influential rabbis of the 20th century. The letters reveal a very personal side to the revered spiritual leader.

In one example relating to Yehuda's decision to join the army and enroll in secular studies, Karelitz responded: "I am rich with love for others, particularly toward you, a young person armed with talents and with an understanding heart. … But when I saw the sudden change in you recently … I had to wait and process my great pain."

Born in what is now Belarus, in 1933 Karelitz moved to what was then British Mandatory Palestine with the help of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi there and a formative figure in the modern religious Zionist movement.

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The "Hazon Ish," Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz (1878-1953). Credit: From the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel.

Countless visitors flocked to Karelitz's humble home in Bnei Brak during the last two decades of his life, from simple devout Jews to the leaders of the secular Zionist movement, including Israeli founding father and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, despite the fact that Karelitz was an opponent of Zionism.

A teacher and expert in Jewish law (halakhist), he left an enduring mark on ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought and culture.

The letters have been donated to the National Library by Yehuda's widow, Hassia, and their children: Rachel Yehuda, Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum and Gil Yehuda.

A free online event celebrating the arrival of the collection will be held on Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. Israel time/1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, moderated by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda's daughter, Professor Rachel Yehuda, vice chair of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

FEATURED COLUMNMELANIE PHILLIPS

The real reason for Western support of the Palestinians

What actually binds these groups together is an ultimately incomprehensible animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

October 14, 2021 / JNS) Michael Oren, Israel's former ambassador to the United States who is now a candidate to head the Jewish Agency, has rightly said that the decline in support for Israel among American Jews has reached a crisis point. The Jewish Agency, he said, "needs to bring young American Jews back from the brink."

However, the Jewish Agency won't address this problem by simply tackling American Jews. The roots of this crisis are broader and deeper.

At a conference at the Al Quds University in Ramallah in June, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a recorded speech with the title, "The Zionist Narrative: Between Reversal and Cancellation."

In a piece for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser has written that Abbas "proudly noted" in this speech that international public opinion had recently undergone a gradual shift towards accepting the Palestinian narrative.

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As Kuperwasser wrote, this "narrative" is a tissue of demonstrable and idiotic lies designed to promulgate the fiction that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inheritors of the land of Israel rather than the Jews.

But as Kuperwasser also observes, the Palestinian position is that the Jews of Israel must return to the places from where they allegedly came—not the land of Israel, their actual original homeland, but Europe, where they were scattered in exile, persecuted and murdered in great number.

"The narrative," he writes, "also emphasizes that the Palestinian struggle is national and Islamic at the same time and ultimately states that in light of all this, all of Palestine is included, and Israel should not be recognized in any way as the nation-state of the Jewish people, which, at any rate, does not exist. At most, it is possible to temporarily accept the existence of an 'Israeli people' which is a new concept referring to Israel as the state of all its citizens."

And this narrative also holds that no one has the right to object to the Palestinians' use of terrorism to achieve their aim of annihilating Israel and driving the Jews out.

So the claim made by the Palestinians' supporters that they are backing a state of Palestine side by side with Israel is totally contradicted by the Palestinians' own exterminatory narrative.

Kuperwasser rehearses all this because he is appalled at the behavior of Israel's defense minister, Benny Gantz, who has promised a "loan" to the P.A. Kuperwasser says this is a "circuitous deal that makes Israel's protests about the P.A. paying terrorists' salaries ridiculous in the eyes of the world and Israeli law."

The broader question, though, is how Western liberals in general can support such an obviously odious, bigoted and murderous Palestinian agenda.

The latest such useful idiot is the bestselling novelist, Sally Rooney. She has refused to have her new novel published by Modan, the Hebrew-language Israeli publisher of her first two books, because she supports a cultural boycott of Israel.

Rooney happens to be Irish; and the Irish Republic—one of the most anti-Israel countries in Europe—is a boiling cesspool of Jew-bashing.

The dogged British anti-Semitism researcher David Collier has just published a 202-page report in which he chronicles horrific anti-Jewish attitudes in Ireland driven from the top down by Irish politicians and echoed by journalists, academics and other cultural leaders.

There are many plausible explanations for this Israel animus in Ireland and the West. Ireland sees itself as the victim of English colonialism and so identifies with the Palestinians' false narrative of Jewish colonialism.

Rooney is a self-confessed Marxist. Israel is being demonized through a perfect intellectual storm: a combination of Marxist identification of capitalism with oppression; liberal internationalist hostility to the Western concept of the nation-state; and the Palestinian propaganda program cooked up in the 1960s with the former Soviet Union to turn the Arab war of annihilation against Israel into Israel's oppression of the newly-minted "Palestinians."

This propaganda narrative is now the signature cause of "progressive" folk who astoundingly therefore make common cause with deeply regressive Islamists, who endorse throwing gay people off rooftops and stoning women to death.

What actually binds these groups together, however, is a deadly animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

The Palestinians' hatred of Israel is based on hatred of the Jews founded upon Islamic theological sources. Medieval and Nazi-style anti-Semitism pour out of the P.A. in an unstoppable torrent.

Even those Palestinian supporters who harbor no ill-will towards Jews as people therefore promote a Palestinian narrative that is based on Jew-hatred. So it's no surprise that threaded through pro-Palestinian western discourse are unambiguous anti-Semitic tropes.

The deeper question, though, is why it's always the Jews who get it in the neck from so many different groups. No other people has ever had this experience.

Many decent folk in the West who know nothing about Judaism or Jewish history simply cannot understand why anti-Semitism, which they don't understand at all, takes up so much global energy.

Many Jews ask themselves the same question. In an anguished piece for Tablet, the Reform Rabbi Amiel Hirsch writes: "Of all the savageries in the sordid history of human affairs, what explains the singling out of the Jews for unique odium? … No other supremacist ideology is as singularly fixated on one group of people. It is not only the hatred of a Jew. Many antisemites have never met a Jew in their lives. It is the obsession with Jewry, the Jewish people" as "… the source of evil in the world."

Again, there are many obvious explanations. These include jealousy of the "chosen people," a term that is widely misunderstood; cultural suspicions fueled by observant Jews keeping themselves apart; the Jew-hatred embedded in dominant interpretations of Christianity and Islam over the centuries.

But the Jews were singled out long before Christianity and Islam. They have always been used as society's scapegoats. The question is why?

The point is that anti-Semitism isn't just a form of prejudice or racism. Plenty of other people are victims of that. Anti-Semitism is qualitatively different—and ultimately mysterious.

For there is no other people which is obsessively demonized and delegitimized by double standards, systematic falsehoods and being airbrushed out of its own history. No other people has been subjected to the repeated aim of eradicating it from the face of the earth, to the general indifference of everyone else. No other group has been the victim of a mindset that ascribes to people who form some 0.2 percent of the global population the malign power of a conspiracy to manipulate the world.

And it's this uniquely deranged, paranoid and incomprehensible mindset that's been given rocket fuel by the Palestinian narrative.

For people don't care about the Palestinians. What does animate a terrifying number of their supporters is a deep desire for the Jews to vanish from their world. Palestinianism is not just about the eradication of Israel. It has weaponized Israel against the Jewish people.

Many Jews are frightened of acknowledging the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Partly, this comes from a principled concern not to denigrate the suffering of others. Partly, lining up Jewish suffering alongside that of others is a panicky attempt to prevent the world from abandoning the Jews once again. Mainly, though, it comes from a deep reluctance to acknowledge the uniqueness of the Jewish people out of fear that this will increase anti-Semitism.

The result is now all around us. For without acknowledging the uniqueness of the Jews and the uniquely unhinged animus against them, there is scant chance of increasing public understanding of Judaism, anti-Semitism and the State of Israel.

This is the nettle, however difficult and painful, that the Jewish Agency should now grasp.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy." Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.