The Mysterious Dutch Visas That Allowed Some Lithuanian Jews to Escape Hitler

In 1940, Chiune Sugihara, then the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, issued thousands of visas allowing Jews to transit through Japan to destinations elsewhere; he would eventually also grant visas to Jews without any proof of intention to proceed onward. He began by issuing visas to Lithuanian Jews who were also Dutch citizens, claiming they were en route to the Netherlands’ American colonies. Alyza Lewin explains the role her grandmother—who was born in Amsterdam but in 1940 was in Lithuania along with her mother and brother—played in this story:

In Lithuania, my grandmother sought help from the Dutch diplomats because her mother and brother were Dutch citizens and because she had been a Dutch citizen prior to marrying my [Polish] grandfather. She initially asked Jan Zwartendijk, [the Dutch consul in] Kaunas, if he could issue her a visa to the Dutch East Indies. . . . He refused. So she wrote to the Dutch ambassador in Riga, L.P.J. de Decker. He also turned down her request, . . . [but later] replied that the Dutch West Indies, including Curaçao and Suriname, were available destinations where no visa was needed. The governor of Curaçao could authorize entry to anyone arriving there.

My grandmother again wrote to de Decker asking whether he could note the Curaçao or Suriname exception in her still-valid Polish passport. She asked the envoy to omit the additional note that permission of the governor of Curaçao was required. After all, she pointed out, she really did not plan to go to Curaçao or Suriname.

. . . That is how my grandparents and my father received the very first Curaçao visa. Relying on [the Dutch envoy’s word], Sugihara agreed to give my grandparents (and my grandmother’s mother and brother, who were still Dutch citizens) transit visas through Japan on their purported trip to Curaçao.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Chiune Sugihara, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Suriname

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society