Cagayan de Oro City Museum (The Old Water Tower)

The Cagayan de Oro City Museum is an odd-looking white cylindrical structure that is located along Fernandez Street in Barangay 1, which is just a few steps from Gaston Park and Saint Augustine Cathedral. This structure is an old water tower built during the American era in 1919 and completed in 1922. Its surface has three red stripes from the top to the base. The actual long unused water tank is on the highest level which is marked with thick red stripes on the top and a thin red stripe on the bottom. Right under that marker is a window. Further below are three enclosed levels which also serve as the support of the water tank. These levels have spaces that can be used as an office or a repository of things. On the side are vertical steps that go all the way to the tank.  On the base is a door and above it are Roman numerals A. D. MCMXXII which is A. D. 1922 in the Arabic numbers.                                                                                                         

When it was in operation the water tank used to provide water to an estimated 3,000 residents in the heart of Cagayan de Misamis. Its water was sourced with the use of steel pipes from Mahuganaw spring in Malasag, Baranggay Cugman. The Second World War caused massive damage to the infrastructures of Cagayan. Fortunately, the water tower survived the bombings and remained active until the early 70’s. Over the years, with the city’s growth in population and economy, the facility could no longer meet the water demand of the populace. Eventually, the water tank had to be closed, but the whole structure was not abandoned. The lower levels were still used for office work or other activities.

The old structure is not aesthetically pleasing. Its levels inside are not an ideal design for modern-day offices either because of their circular areas. However, the structure is the oldest in the city. Keeping it holds relevance to the city’s history. In 2008, Mayor Constantino Jaraula and the city council approved a resolution to convert it into a museum, and it became operational in 2010.

Inside the museum are mementoes, memorabilia and other objects that are relevant to the city’s history and culture. They include framed written accounts of the city’s history, pictures or portraits of past city mayors, weapons and uniforms, fragments of old China wares, fossils, gold nuggets, indigenous persons’ heritage items, and other things of historic values.

Today, the city museum is available for free to visitors from 9:30 am to 5 pm. It is open from Monday to Friday, and close on Saturday and Sunday including public holidays. Visitors can get inside by first registering at the museum admin office building which is just adjacent to the old water tower.

The Saint Augustine Metropolitan Cathedral of Cagayan de Oro

http://lapasan-myblognoel145.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-saint-augustine-metropolitan.html

Vicente de Lara Park

https://lapasan-myblognoel145.blogspot.com/2012/12/vicente-de-lara-park.html

Philippine Commonwealth Government of Manuel L. Quezon Helped 1,200 Jews Escape the Holocaust

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. 

Related posts:

The Philippine Commonwealth, a Transition Government Leading to Philippine Independence https://lapasan-myblognoel145.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-philippine-commonwealth-transition.html

The Philippine Government during the Colonial Period and the American Governors-General https://lapasan-myblognoel145.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-philippine-government-during.html

The Historic Philippine-United States Relationship and the Philippine Independence https://lapasan-myblognoel145.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-historic-philippine-united-states.html