SA Rabbi thanks Sugihara heir for rescuing his father

TALI FEINBERG

The Japanese man and Jewish rabbi met to celebrate the actions of the late Chiune Sugihara, who defied his government and wrote thousands of visas for Jews to escape Lithuania during the Holocaust. The late Rabbi Shimon (Simon) Goldman was one of those lucky men.

Now, 75 years later, the younger Goldman was able to thank the younger Sugihara for his father’s heroic actions. “It was the rescuer meeting the rescued,” said an emotional Rabbi Goldman on the phone from Philadelphia, where the meeting took place.

“My father was the sole survivor of his family. He ran away from home at the age of 14, and joined the Chabad yeshiva in Vilnius. This was one of the places where Sugihara distributed his visas. But every other member of my father’s family perished in Majdanek or Treblinka.”

The long-awaited interaction between the sons of the fathers was made possible because of Goldman’s own son, Rabbi Yochanan Goldman of Bnai Avraham Chabad in Philadelphia, who invited both men as part of an annual tribute event.

Nobuki lives in Antwerp, but he travelled to the United States especially to meet the son of a man his father once rescued.

“I was very emotional, embraced him, and thanked him. I’ve been waiting for decades to say thank you. It was very moving,” says Goldman of the moment they met. The two also enjoyed a tea ceremony at a Japanese centre, where they sat on the floor sharing bowls of green tea and dates (all kosher for the rabbi), and anecdotes of their fathers. The unusual sight of a rabbi taking part in a Japanese ceremony was a powerful image of how anyone can reach across cultural divides for the greater good.

“We spoke about the commonalities between Jewish and Japanese cultures, such as respect, morality, and honesty. The story of our fathers shows ‘the power of one’ – how a single individual can act with courage and integrity to save lives. My whole family would not be here if it were not for the courage and nobility of his father defying his government’s instructions,” says Goldman.

“The Talmud says that to save one soul is to save an entire world. To some, it may just be a nice turn of phrase, but here we can see how it unfolded literally. One man’s actions saved generations and generations” he says.

Goldman explains that the visas handed out by the elder Sugihara were only transit visas, meaning that Jews still had to cross Communist Russia to make their way to Japan. The journey was dangerous, so the diplomat had low expectations that anyone he helped would actually make it out of the war alive.

“But most of the 6 000 people he saved did survive, and some estimate that between 40 000 to 60 000 descendants are alive today because of his actions,” says Goldman. “When my father passed away at the age of 91, he had more than a hundred blood descendants. Every time he held a new grandchild, it was a sign of his victory over Hitler.”

Many of Goldman’s family members joined him in Philadelphia for the event, as did other Sugihara survivors. “A member of the audience had been a little girl in Lithuania when Chiune wrote a visa for her, her sister, and her mother. She brought the treasured visa to the event to show the younger Sugihara, who was extremely moved.”

Goldman says that most Jews who got visas settled in Kobe, Japan. But when Japan joined the war a year later, they had to leave, and most made their way to Shanghai, China. There was a thriving Jewish community of refugees there, with at least four or five yeshivot! After the war, the yeshivot’s American counterparts organised visas for these Jews to settle there, which is how Goldman’s father landed up in the US.

Incredibly, Goldman’s daughter Zeesy Deren married Rabbi Asher Deren, whose father, Rabbi Chatzkel (Haskiel) Deren, was also saved by Sugihara. The couple therefore both have grandfathers rescued by the same man, and the two men are even pictured standing next to each other in a photo of Jews in Kobe, Japan.

“The first time I saw the list of names that he had saved taken from his records, I got a chill. First, my grandfather was on the second to last page of the thousands of names, meaning that his was one of the last visas issued. But more significantly, one of the names before his was Simon Goldman,” Zeesy’s beloved grandfather,” wrote Rabbi Deren on Facebook.

“I knew the historical connection, but seeing it in black and white and in such proximity, made me realise to what extent the divine providence of my destiny was intertwined with the selfless kindness of this righteous man.”

“My teacher, the Rebbe z”l, said that every Jew born today is a survivor because Hitler’s goal was that there would be no Jewish nation left,” says Rabbi Goldman. “We therefore have an obligation to survive as strong, proud Jews. I have invited Nobuki to come to South Africa, and I hope he will visit soon.”