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| President Manuel L. Quezon |
The number of Jews living in the Philippines is
significantly small however their presence in the country is surprisingly long.
Jewish presence in the Philippines dates back to the Spanish Colonial era.
There was the story of Jorge and Domingo Rodriguez, the Spanish-Jewish brothers
who escaped the Spanish Inquisition and settled in the Philippines in the
1590’s. Both men were charged and convicted of practicing their Jewish faith
while outwardly professing that they were Roman Catholics.
After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain ceded the
Philippines to the United States. During the American colonial period there
were American Jews who served in the US armed forces. After their separation
from the military service some of them joined Jewish civilians who opted to
settle in the Philippines which was then an unincorporated US territory in the
Far East. Notable personalities included the Frieder Brothers who established businesses
and helped organize the Jewish community in Manila.
The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in
Germany in the 1930’s was a serious threat to the Jewish people all over
Europe. The party headed by Adolf Hitler devised a scheme to systematically
exterminate the Jews. Fearing for their lives, the Jews from Germany, Austria and
other fascist countries flocked to friendly embassies to seek refuge to countries
that would let them in.
The Commonwealth of the Philippines was one of the few
countries of the world which heeded the call of the Jewish people for help. President
Manuel L. Quezon, Paul V. McNutt, the US High Commissioner to the Philippines
and the leaders of the Jewish community worked together to come up with a rescue
effort. In relation to it, Quezon granted 10,000 working visas for Jews who
would come to the country. In addition resettlement areas in Mindanao were
prepared for them.
At first there was only a trickle of Jews who came to the
Philippines. Most of those who did were Jews from Shanghai, China who escaped
from the Chinese-Japanese armed conflict. But after Nazi Germany invaded Poland
in 1939 the persecution of the Jews increased, and as a result more and more
Jews wanted to get out of the fascist regimes of Europe. As the war escalated in
Europe, Hitler became more obsessed than ever to conquer Europe and implement
the “final solution” to deal with the Jews. In the Philippines the number of
Jews that seek refuge from Europe from 1937 to 1941 reached 1,200. The flow of refugees
stopped when the Japanese invaded and occupied the country at the outbreak of
the Second World War.
In the Philippines, during the war, some of the Filipino and
American officials whom the Japanese perceived as uncooperative were
incarcerated, and so were some foreign nationals especially Americans who were considered
by the Japanese as “enemy aliens”. Some of the Americans were American-Jews. The
Germans though were fortunate of being considered by the Japanese as ally in
the war. Since the Japanese was hard put in distinguishing between an ethnic
German and a German-Jew, the Jews in the Philippines were not subjected to
the same level of anti-Semitism that their brothers in Europe suffered in the hands
of Nazi Germans. However, like most Filipinos and Americans, the Jews also
suffered the brutalities and the horrors caused by the war.
Quezon died while in exile in the US on August 1, 1944, and
the Second World War ended in August 1945 with the defeat of the Japanese. On
July 4, 1946, the Philippines gained its independence from the United States.
The two events saw the Jews resettling either to the United States or Israel so
that the number of them in the Philippines greatly diminished. Just after the
war the Jewish population in Manila was just only about 600.
Philippine empathy on the plight of the Jewish people was further
shown during the implementation of the United Nation Partition Plan of
Palestine when the Philippines became the only Asian Country that voted in
favor of it on November 9, 1947. The majority of affirmative votes for the plan paved the way for the creation of
the state of Israel.
The world has only little knowledge of the deed of President
Manuel L. Quezon and the Philippine Commonwealth to save the lives of 1,200
souls from the horrors of the Holocaust of which over 6,000,000 innocent Jews
were victimized by state-sponsored murder and terrorism of the Nazi regime of
Adolf Hitler. Slowly but surely, however, the Israelis, the Filipinos and the
people of the world take cognizant of that exemplary deed by honoring President
Quezon and his commonwealth government with the construction and unveiling of
the “Open Doors” Monument on June 21, 2009 at the Holocaust Memorial Park in
Rishon Lezion, a city south of Tel Aviv in Israel.
