Annex - Open Doors:
A monument to the Filipino heart
Dr Abe V Rotor
- Help the environment (Tulong
sa Kalikasan)
- Provide health aid (Tulong
sa kalusugan)
- Share a lunch and gifts
(Tulong sa Kabataan)
Shalom Club Philippines, Inc or SCP is a non-government organization of Filipinos who were recipients of Israel MASHAV (Center for International Cooperation) scholarship Programs and other Filipinos who had been to the Holy Land on pilgrimage, study, educational and observation tours. The voluntary services of the members are their social responsibility to the Filipino people.
Seated, Ms Cecilia R Rotor. Ms Cora Antonio (Past
President), Miss Zeny Ubaldo, (founder and former chairman BT) Dr Sonia
Sarcia; standing, Dr Abercio V Rotor (trustee), Dr Juanito Batalon (trustee),
Dr Jose Arceo Bautista (trustee). Other others are Mr Jovito Saguinsin,
Mr Jose Umbal, Ms Corazon Matriz and Ms Leila Peralta.
Shalom officers (2016) - President - Dr Proceso
Domingo; Vice President - Ms Leonisa A Artes; Secretary - Mr.
Jonathan Galindez; Treasurer Ms Constancia C Dacumos; Auditor - Ms
Jacqueline DL Magpayo; PRO - Marilyn B Balleza
Vision: SCP
envisions to promote peace thru volunteerism and provides effective voluntary
services in sectors where basic services and sustainable human and community
development may be realized.
Mission: The SCP and its members stand committed to provide direct, personal and voluntary services for communities covered by its 27 chapters and 720 members (as of June 30, 2013) in the areas of agriculture, education, environment, health and social services.
Ambassadors of Peace Program - SCP's Centerpiece
1. Tulong sa Kalikasan - Help the Environment
This annual project on environment is implemented simultaneously by the participating chapters in their respective cities and provinces on the celebration of United Nations World Environment Day every 5th of June.
2. Tulong sa Kabataan - Ngayong Pasko Salo Tayo (Share a Lunch/Gift this Christmas)
This annual project on giving and sharing of lunch/food wirh the indigent children, elderly and families is implemented simultaneously by the participating chapters on Saturday before December 25.
3. Tulong sa Kalusugan (Health Aid)
This Health Aid project promotes health and social services through advocacy, information on the rights and privileges of children, women and the elderly and conduct of medical services and mission.
Sharing
a lunch with children in a marginal community, a joint undertaking - Kuya
Center, Shalom Club Phils, and the Embassy of Israel in the Philippines. 2014
Every
year SCP conducts activities in line with its three projects: kalikasan (tree
planting), share a lunch, and kalusugan (share a lunch, blood
donation, childcare, among others.
Activities of the Club
The Shalom Club of the
Philippines is a community group composed of former MASHAV scholars, seeking to
enhance their community through volunteerism, towards the goal human and
sustainable development.
The Shalom Club partners with the Embassy in endeavors that seeks to enhance
the bilateral relations between the two countries and peoples. Led by Ms. Zeny Ubaldo, President of the Shalom Club, the Club also engages in donation
missions and feeding programs, around Metro Manila and outer-lying provinces.
- The Shalom Club
Philippines, established by graduates of MASHAV's training courses in
cooperation with the Embassy of Israel in the Philippines, held its Annual
Tree Planting Event in the ‘Shalom Coffee Trail’ in Mount 387 Batong Amat
in Carranglan-Nueva Ecija. The activity is part of the Shalom Club’s
ongoing environmental and volunteering projects!
MASHAV maintains contact with many of its over 200,000 former course participants through its network of over 70 Shalom Clubs worldwide. These clubs serve as a forum for MASHAV alumni to participate in professional and social activities. Members are invited to attend local lectures by skilled experts, to exchange ideas and to organize technical cooperation and humanitarian assistance as well as holding cultural functions.
Among the many activities that have been organized by Shalom Clubs in their home countries have been workshops on professional topics ranging from AIDS education to business management, organization of events to raise funds for local charities, mobilization of club members to donate their professional services for community development and humanitarian activities. Members of the Shalom Clubs play an integral role in determining the focus and scope of programming of their clubs.
The Shalom Club of the Philippines - the friendship club of Filipinos who studied in Israel - hosted Ambassador Effie Ben Matityau by honoring former President Manuel Quezon with a wreath-laying ceremony. Shalom Club's board of trustees and members led by its chairperson Ms. Zeny Ubaldo also initiated a tour of the Quezon Memorial Shrine Museum. Photos courtesy of Ms. Zeny Ubaldo
Israel in the Philippines
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Holocaust Refugees in the Philippines
https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/why-president-manuel-quezon-sheltered-jewish...
After the War, most of the
Holocaust survivors who came to the Philippines moved to Israel, where they
permanently settled. Today, there are more than 8,000 people who are
descendants of the 1,200 refugee Jews who escaped to the Philippines. In honor
of the Philippines’ heroic act, Israel erected a monument in 2009 titled “Open
Doors”.
Lifestyle Philstar.com
Open Doors:
A monument to the Filipino heart
CRAZY
QUILT - Tanya T. Lara
June 28, 2009 | 12:00am
It
took Max Weissler over a month to get to Manila from Germany in 1941. He was 11
years old, fleeing Nazi oppression in Europe, and with his mother Henrietta, he
boarded what he later found out was the last ship that carried displaced Jews
to Manila.
They had nothing except for two small suitcases.
The ship passed through Siberia, Manchuria, Japan, Shanghai….and, finally, the
17 Jews escaping probable death in Nazi Germany arrived in Manila on Feb. 14,
1941. In those endless days at sea, Max doesn’t remember now if they ever
changed clothes, or how they lived out those weeks in Europe trying to find a
country that would take them in — but he does remember the relief of being
reunited with his father, Martin Weissler, who was already in Manila after having
secured ahead a safe passage to the Philippines from the American Consulate in
Copenhagen, Denmark.
Two years earlier, then eight-year-old Ralph Preiss had made the same journey
with his parents. The family had been living in Rosenberg, and were told in
July 1938 that they would be granted asylum, but the American Consulate in
Breslau, Germany, didn’t release their visas until January 1939.
Max and Ralph are two of the thousands of Jews granted asylum with their
families in the Philippines. Theirs was a passage of which very little was
known until Frank Ephraim, a fellow “Manilaner” or a Jew who fled to the
Philippines from the Nazis, wrote his book Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny
to Japanese Terror. Ephraim, who died in August 2006, got in touch with 36
fellow refugees, searched through historical and newspaper records, and
government documents to piece together the Manilaners’ shared history.
How did the Jews come to find asylum in the Philippines when most of the
western world — and all of Asia — refused them entry to their borders?
President Manuel L. Quezon knew about the Jewish plight in Europe and, as a
matter of policy, the Philippine Commonwealth government opened its doors and
welcomed the refugees in 1939, earmarking 10,000 travel visas to the
Philippines. President Quezon also built a housing community for the refugees
in Marikina and allotted vast tracts of farmlands in Mindanao that could
accommodate as many as 35,000 settlers. After World War II broke out, the
Jewish exodus to Manila came to a stop.
Quezon and his government saved some 1,200 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
On June 21 — a week ago today and 70 years after President Quezon’s open-door
policy — the Philippines and Quezon were honored with the unveiling of the
monument “Open Doors” at the Holocaust Park in Rishon Lezion, a city located 40
minutes from Jerusalem.
Representing the Philippine government were Ambassador to Israel Petronila
Garcia, and Tourism Secretary Ace Durano who flew to Israel with DOT
Undersecretary Edu Jarque and DOT consultant Ram Antonio.
“It is a good day to be a Filipino,” Durano says with pride to the audience
composed of Filipinos working in Israel, Israelis, and Holocaust survivors who
lived in Manila and are now based in Israel and the United States.
Durano adds the Jews were welcomed to the Philippines even before Quezon’s
policy. “It is more than hospitality. It is the compassionate spirit of the
Filipino. It is this compassionate spirit that allows us to be open to others,
to understand others, and accept others. This compassionate spirit
distinguished and gave distinction to the Filipinos in 1939. It is the same
compassionate spirit that distinguishes and gives distinction to the Filipinos
today…who are nurturing millions all over the world. And to my mind, it is a
great and noble calling for a nation to care for the world and be a blessing to
the world. This monument celebrates the Filipino heart. A heart that touches
others through compassion, a heart that makes one a blessing to others and to
the world.”
70-Year Journey
The Holocaust Park is a quiet, 60-acre space of rolling, green terrain
surrounded by mid-rise residential buildings in the western part of Rishon
Lezion (“the first to Zion” in Hebrew), the fourth largest city in Israel and
located south of Tel Aviv. At the park is the Boulevard of the Righteous
Gentiles, dedicated to non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save
Jews. Parents walk their kids here and teenagers bike around under the blue
skies — as they did on the afternoon of June 21.
At one corner of the park stands the imposing Open Doors monument, the first
Philippine monument in Israel, designed by Jun Yee who won the top prize from
eight entries by sculptors and architects in a design competition conducted by
the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in 2007.
Yee’s geometric sculpture of open doors represents the “feeling, sentiment and
emotion as the Filipinos showed the courage to welcome into the country and
provide humanitarian assistance for the Jews.” It is made up of three open
doors in metal sheets of varying heights standing on a base of Romblon marble.
The triangular patterns represent the triangles of the Philippine flag and the
Star of David to mark the friendly relations between the two countries. The Philippines,
after all, was the only Asian country to vote for the United Nations Partition
Plan creating the State of Israel on Nov. 29, 1947.
The sculpture also features three sets of footprints: George Loewenstein’s are
carved on the first door (he sent his cast from Florida where he lives); Max
Weissler, who learned his Filipino from the streets of Manila in the 1940s,
lives in Israel and went to the Philippine Embassy in Tel Aviv to have his
footprints cast; and Dorylyz Goffer, a 10-year-old Filipino-Israeli born in the
Philippines and a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
This recognition of the Philippines has taken an unnecessarily long journey as
very few Filipinos, Israelis, and Jews around the world know about the Jews
that emigrated to Manila. It seems almost unbelievable now that such a
significant story of that war went largely untold.
Frank Ephraim’s book started the journey for this recognition — and to think it
might not even been published. His widow Ruth Ephraim tells us that several
publishers turned it down — but Frank persevered and his book found a home in
the University of Illinois Press.
Escape to Manila inspired then Ambassador to Israel Antonio Modena to launch in
2005 a campaign for the remembrance of the Philippines’ humanitarian support
for the Jews. Modena met with Avner Shalev, chairman of the directorate of the
Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, and the mayors of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Rishon Lezion to discuss his plans. Mayor Meir Nitzan of Rishon Lezion
responded that the Municipal Council approved the construction of a Philippine
monument at the Holocaust Memorial Park.
Ambassador Modena passed away in February 2007; the work was continued by the
committee he had organized, by Chargé d’Affaires Gilberto G.B. Asuque, and
current Ambassador Petronila P. Garcia.
Two Wars
On Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, Kristallnacht (Crystal Night or Night of the Broken
Glass) took place — a coordinated attack on the Jewish people where 91 Jews
were murdered, 30,000 were deported to concentration camps, 200 synagogues were
destroyed, and Jewish-owned businesses were ransacked. This was the beginning
of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews during World War II.
What the Jewish refugees in Manila underwent was life under two wars — their escape
from the Nazis in Europe and the War in the Pacific with the Japanese
occupation of the Philippines.
Ten months after Max Weissler arrived on the last boat from Germany, the
Japanese invaded the Philippines. At Ambassador Garcia’s residence in Tel Aviv,
Max, who admits his Filipino is “kanto boy” because he learned it from the
street kids in Tondo, recalls the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army, and
the Filipino and Jewish kids’ attempts at sabotage.
“I saw the Bataan Death March with my own eyes on Dewey Blvd. (now Roxas Blvd.)
I saw people being bayoneted at the back and thrown into Manila Bay,” he says.
“They were very brutal.”
At the corner of Padre Faura and Guerrero St. stood the Japanese Embassy, which
had small windows facing Guerrero. “As children we wanted to burn down that
place,” he says. One night they took a match, lit maybe a paper or a piece of
cloth — and threw it through the window but nothing happened. “The next day, my
friend went again with the kids to burn it down, and they were caught by the
Japanese soldiers who were using the compound for their horses. My friend
didn’t come home that night. His mother went looking for him. The next day I
went to the breakwater on Dewey Blvd. next to the embassy and I saw four bodies
floating with their hands tied to their back and stabbed in the back. According
to his clothing, I knew it was him. I told his mother where I had found him.”
His name was Peter Mintz
“You see, we were all Filipino kids.” But 11-year-old Max was, of course, different.
He was a white kid who spoke neither English nor Spanish. His friends called
him “mestizong bangus, madaling maubos.” His mother baked cakes and pies to
make money; she called them apple and apricot pies, but they were really
stuffed with papaya and added with a squeeze of calamansi.
“Mahirap ang buhay diyan eh,” says Max with the perfect kanto accent. “Kumakain
kami ng kamote.”
Unfortunately, Max’s stories are not included in Ephraim’s book as the two had
lost touch with each other.
Max stayed in Manila for seven years, then went to Okinawa, Japan, where he put
to good use his skill in the dockyards. He began corresponding with a fellow
Jew from Israel named Esther. Sight unseen, Esther traveled to Japan to marry
him. Later, he joined the Korean War as a soldier for the US Army and was sent
to Pusan alongside Filipino and Korean soldiers, and then he went to the US to
study.
Max’s mother died in 1950 and was buried in the Jewish section of the North
Cemetery in Manila. Her remains are there to this day. Max came back three
years ago with Esther to visit his mother’s grave and the streets he grew up
in.
“I was in the Philippines less than 10 percent of my life. But I am still
there,” he says.
‘And here we are’
For Ralph Preiss, life in the Philippines under the Japanese occupation was
lived both in Manila and San Pablo City. His family arrived in Manila on March
23, 1939.
“We were helped all along by the Jewish community and the Filipinos,” he says.
“During the war we had soup kitchens on Taft Avenue. I had lunch every day
there as my main hot meal.”
His father, Harry Preiss, was a doctor but couldn’t practice medicine in Manila
because the medical association said he had to speak the language and had to be
a citizen to practice.
In 1940, the family moved to Laguna. “We were in Liliw when the Japanese came,”
he says. “The bridges were blown up, so we moved to San Pablo City.”
His wife Marcia, whom he met at the University of Connecticut years later, says
that Ralph and his parents also had to stay in the mountains for three months
with guerrillas. “After they bombed Manila, the Japanese went to the
countryside to get the Americans. They were told the night before in San Pablo
that the Japanese were going to kill all the white people and the Chinese in
town, so they left. They lived in the jungles for three months — 70 people. The
Filipino guerrillas were the ones that saved them again because they had guns.”
Ralph was eight when he arrived; 19 when he left. In between those years was a
life that they tried hard to live as normally as possible — even during the
war. He studied high school in San Pablo; he made friends with the local kids;
he lived with Rabbi Schwartz in Manila while he was studying for his bar
mitzvah; he studied engineering at the University of the Philippines in 1948,
and a year later he was accepted at MIT in the US.
“I was there when they moved the UP Oblation monument from Manila to Diliman,”
says Ralph with laugh. “We also had a hurricane that blew away the engineering
building.”
Even after he had left the Philippines and settled in the US, his parents
stayed as Dr. Preiss had founded a pharmaceutical company called Striaco. They
lived in the Philippines from 1939 to 1969, and retired in the US.
For Ralph and Marcia’s wedding in Connecticut, Ralph’s mother, Margot Preiss,
sent Marcia yards and yards of piña fabric for her wedding dress. Thirty-four
years later, in 1988, Marcia unrolled the wedding dress from her suitcase
because her daughter Lisa wanted to wear it at her own wedding to Eitan Fried
in Jerusalem. Jacqueline, another daughter (Ralph and Marcia have four girls),
also wore the piña wedding dress to her nuptials.
“My own daughter Yarden, who is 17, has asked my mother if she, too, can wear
the wedding dress someday,” says Lisa Preiss-Fried. “We know that the material
will look beautiful then, since it held up so well after all these years.”
Lisa grew up in New York calling her two sets of grandparents two different
names: It was “lolo” and “lola” for Ralph’s parents, and “grandpa” and
“grandma” for Marcia’s parents. Lisa felt unique growing up, having these
“exotic” grandparents who lived on the other side of the globe and would visit
them only every three years in New York.
In 1965, Ralph took his family to the Philippines for a visit. Lisa was but a
little girl then, but she remembers the jungle and the volcano in Tagaytay, and
going down the river in a hollowed-out tree trunk for a boat.
One of the stories Ralph told his daughters was about his bar mitzvah and the
fountain pen he was given as a gift. He left the pen in his school but the
building was bombed by the Japanese. “He lost the fountain pen because of the
Japanese invasion,” says Lisa. “That was something I remember very well because
as a kid growing up in the US you don’t think about these things. Another story
that he told us only recently was that when he and his parents went back to
Manila after they hid in the mountains, the city had been razed by the
Japanese. He said it was the most horrible thing he had ever seen.” Then she
adds, “But his dogs survived; my father’s dogs survived the war!”
Lisa says her father’s life in the Philippines was “always very much a part of
my family’s history. We knew about it. He was always very grateful that he had
survived.”
“And now here we are,” she says, standing by the Open Doors monument.
One life saved and there are 20 of them today — four daughters, sons-in-law,
and 10 grandchildren.
After the unveiling of Open Doors, Ralph Preiss shows people a class picture
taken in 1945 at the Laguna Academy in San Pablo City, where he graduated from
high school in 1948. He is standing at the back, the tallest among the children
— and they all are really children that have just survived the war.
At the Holocaust Park, Ralph walks around with his wife Marcia, daughter Lisa,
son-in-law Eitan, and grandson Yonatan.
Now, finally, 70 years after the first boat arrived in Manila from Europe,
Ralph Preiss, Max Weissler and all those who found refuge in the Philippines
have a monument to tell the whole world of how they escaped, survived, and
lived.
------------------
Kibbutz and Moshav
A moshav is a type of Israeli village/town or Jewish settlement, in particular a type of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms pioneered by the Labour Zionists between 1904 and 1914, during what is known as the second wave of aliyah. A resident or a member of a moshav can be called a "moshavnik". There is an umbrella organization, the Moshavim Movement.
* Israel's newly-appointed Ambassador to the
Philippines Ilan Fluss
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