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A Filipino-American Effort to Harbor Jews Is Honored
By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: February 14, 2005
CINCINNATI, Feb. 12 - It was a time when Jews were frantic to get out
of Germany, risking voyages to places they were not sure would accept
them and finding doors closed almost everywhere.
In Manila, though, a vigorous expatriate cigar manufacturer from
Cincinnati had been playing poker and bridge with the likes of Col.
Dwight D. Eisenhower; Paul V. McNutt, the American high commissioner;
and Manuel L. Quezon, the first Philippines president. When the
manufacturer, Alex Frieder, saw refugees straggling to the ****t
pleading for entry, he cajoled his poker cronies to let the Philippines
become a haven for thousands more.
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Through his efforts and those of three of his brothers, about 1,200
German and Austrian Jews eventually found sanctuary in the Philippines
in the late 1930's, then an American protectorate, even as the liner
St. Louis was turned away from Miami with a boatload of 900 Jews in a
more typical example of American policy.
Over the weekend, 98 of Mr. Frieder's relatives came together here with
a half dozen refugees and a grandson of Mr. Quezon to celebrate this
little-known tale of one of the war's unlikely rescues.
"They were the right persons in the right place at the right time,"
said Mr. Frieder's daughter, Alice Weston, 78, who was a young girl in
Manila in 1938 and 1939 when her father and her uncle Philip Frieder
masterminded the rescue. "My father wasn't an exceptional person. He
was an ordinary businessman and he saw this horrible situation and he
thought of a way to help a little bit."
Filipinos from the Cincinnati community serenaded the relatives with
love songs in Tagalog as well as "Hava Nagila." Mrs. Weston, among
others, sang along with the Tagalog lyrics she remembered from
childhood. There were Filipino dishes like chicken adobo. Refugees led
a Sabbath eve prayer service, and Manuel L. Quezon III, a 34-year-old
journalist in the Philippines, introduced the blessing over the
challah.
"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," Mr. Quezon said. "We're a sucker
for anyone who's suffering."
The reunion, organized by the Center for Holocaust and Humanity
Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion here,
was held on the 60th anniversary of the Japanese destruction of
Manila's synagogue, Temple Emil.
The story of the Manila rescue begins in 1918 with the decision of the
Frieder family to move much of its two-for-a-nickel cigar business from
Manhattan to the Philippines, where production would be cheaper. Alex,
Philip, Herbert and Morris took turns living in Manila for two years
each, Mrs. Weston said, in a community that had fewer than 200 Jews.
Frank Ephraim, who as a child was one of the Jewish refugees in Manila
and who wrote a history of the rescue, "Escape to Manila: From Nazi
Tyranny to Japanese Terror" (University of Illinois Press, 2003), said
that in 1937 Philip Frieder saw European Jews arriving in Manila's ****t
from Shanghai while it was under siege by the Japanese. Shanghai
remained an open ****t and eventually harbored 17,000 German Jews.
The Frieder brothers were reluctant to burden the Philippines with poor
refugees, so they focused on im****ting people in occupations the
country needed, like doctors. Mr. McNutt, the high commissioner, was
able to finesse State Department bureaucrats to turn a blind eye to
quotas and admit 1,000 Jews a year.
Mr. Quezon's approval was also needed. Dr. Racelle Weiman, the
Holocaust center's director, said there was a letter written by Alex
Frieder to Morris Frieder that said skeptics in Mr. Quezon's
administration spoke of Jews as "Communists and schemers" bent on
"controlling the world."
"He assured us that big or little, he raised hell with every one of
those persons," Alex Frieder wrote of Mr. Quezon in August 1939. "He
made them ashamed of themselves for being a victim of propaganda
intended to further victimize an already persecuted people."
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A Filipino-American Effort to Harbor Jews Is Honored
Published: February 14, 2005
(Page 2 of 2)
Mr. Frieder combed lists of imperiled Jews for needed skills and
advertised in German newspapers. The brothers and the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee arranged visas, jobs and housing and
raised thousands of dollars for sustenance.
Ralph J. Preiss, 74, of Manhattan, was 8 when he left Germany and
recalled his family studying Spanish on the ****p because they had read
an outdated encyclopedia describing their intended haven as a colony of
Spain. "We didn't know what the Philippines was or where it was," Mr.
Preiss said.
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Eva S=FCsskind Ashner, 71, of the St. Louis area, was 5 when she took a
train from Breslau in what was then Germany to Genoa, Italy, and from
there sailed through the Suez Canal to Manila and its swampy heat.
"The first thing I remember is that we stayed in a boarding house and
it was the first time I had to sleep with a mosquito net," Mrs. Ashner
said. "It made a big impression on me."
Like most refugee children, she attended catechism in Roman Catholic
schools. She even remembered crossing herself when saying her nighttime
Hebrew prayer, "Shema Yisroel" (Hear, O Israel).
"My father put a stop to that in a hurry," she said.
Most refugees hoped the Philippines would be a way station to America,
yet were delighted at the kindly reception from Filipinos. Doctors'
organizations blocked refugees like Mr. Preiss's father from practicing
on their own but tolerated Filipino supervision, and generally refugees
carried on with old routines. Mrs. Ashner's mother made gefilte fish
out of the local catch. Still, Lotte Cassel Hershfield of West
Hartford, Conn., said some people, like her father, never adjusted.
The Japanese invaded after Pearl Harbor, ending the rescue. They
treated refugees first as Germans, then as stateless, but did not
intern them. "They had a dim view of German racial doctrines - they
weren't Aryans," Mr. Ephraim said.
But their commandeering of food supplies forced refugees and Filipinos
to survive on cracked wheat and coconut milk, Mrs. Hershfield said.
With pain in her voice, Mrs. Ashner remembered how after the Americans
recaptured the Philippines in 1945, the retreating Japanese torched
much of Manila. Her father, Bernhard S=FCsskind, returned to the burning
city to rescue a nurse and was shot to death. Sixty-seven refugees were
among the 100,000 people killed.
"To me, when you have an experience like this it doesn't leave you,"
she said, explaining why she came to the reunion. "It's always with
you, and the people you went through it with are dear friends of
yours."
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