Going Places, Near & Far…Jewish Heritage Travel Explores 3000 Years of Jewish India, Fleeting Time Transiting Japan Fleeing Nazis

Karen Rubin

Coming upon a pastel pink synagogue with hot pink trim is only one of the surprises travelers will uncover on Burkat Global’s 3,000 Years of Jewish India tour.  In Southern India you’ll walk in the footsteps of the Jews who arrived as spice traders 3,000 years ago and those who settled there.2,000 years ago after the destruction of the second temple.

The journey begins in Mumbai (aka Bombay), India’s  most sophisticated city, where you’ll shop in ancient bazaars and visit colonial relics.  You’ll also tour breathtaking synagogues and historic sites,  take a private boat across Mumbai harbor  to visit age-old synagogues and oil pressers on the Konkan Coast, and take another private boat to Elephanta Island to explore  early Hindu caves.  

A short flight takes the group to Cochin (aka Kochi) and the backwaters of Kerala, “the Venice of the East,”  for Ayurveda massage, yoga, or just relaxing. You’ll enjoy a Kathakali performance and traditional Kerala home-style meals.   There’s also a lazy afternoon on board a luxury houseboat, dining and taking pictures of villagers fishing, palm-fringed paddy fields and brightly-painted houses and churches.                                                 

In the city of Cochin you’ll have a cooking lesson and visit  a “secret” synagogue;  tour ancient Jew Town’s spice markets, antiques shops, Jewish cemetery and India’s oldest synagogue; view contemporary art on a special tour of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and see the Dutch Palace, Vasco da Gama’s church and more. In Muziris, where Jewish traders settled even before Cochin, you can work with archaeologists digging up the past, and swim in the Arabian Sea.  You’ll see recently-restored synagogues and an ancient Jewish cemetery in a town where Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Christians  have lived peacefully  for millennia.

There are about 5,000 Jews left in India, Howard Burkat tells me. “Because no one really knows the exact number, sometimes the number is thought to be as many as 7,500. There were substantially fewer than 100,000 before Israel became a state. Again, an exact and reliable number is very hard to come by. The vast majority of Indian Jews left the country to settle in Israel  in the years immediately after that country’s gaining independence in 1948. 

The synagogues that remain are in many cases still used as places of worship. They were built in the 17th-19th centuries and most have been used by the community ever since. However, some are in excellent condition. Some need sprucing up. And some are in terrible shape waiting to be restored. 

Recently the government of the southern state of Kerala, where the synagogues around Cochin are located, has  restored a number of synagogues beautifully, he says. “In fact Doctor Shalva Weil of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is the scholar in residence on our tour and travels with us, was heavily involved in a number of these restorations.”

In Mumbai on the holidays a few hundred people might attend services; out on the Konkan coast in the country outside Mumbai, fewer than a dozen people might worship. In still other synagogues, no one attends – they are museums maintained by government entities.

There is an old, beautiful synagogue, nearly 300 years old, hidden deep in the marketplace in Cochin. It is not visible from the street. You must be led to it through a large pet store and garden center whose Jewish owner will take you through his stores and into the synagogue to tell you its history. 

“There are no regular services now, the last rabbi returned to Israel more than two years ago,  but on our tour, Sabbath worship will be arranged,” Burkat says., “Travelers sit under chandeliers ordered from Europe in the 1700s, and walk on tile floors from China, each one different from the next, that have been in place for hundreds of years.” 

Dr. Shalva Weil of The Hebrew University, considered the world’s leading expert on Jewish India, will be the scholar in residence, traveling with and teaching the group.  

Along the way there are delicious meals of Indian food—not hot unless you like it hot—and special Jewish Indian Shabbat dinners.  (Note that tour meals are not kosher, but are  vegetarian and fish.)   Hotels, all green award winners, include the legendary 5-star Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, Kerala’s lakeside Coconut Lagoon Resort, which Condé Nast Traveler has called one of the world’s best getaways, and the Brunton Boatyard, which combines 19th-century atmosphere with 21st-century luxury on an historic stretch of Cochin’s celebrated harbor.

There are also opportunities to meet local people. “In Mumbai and Cochin we arrange dinners with local Jewish community leaders. Our ground operator and guides are members of the Bene Israel community in Mumbai – they are leading our group into their own community.” 

“3000 Years of Jewish India” makes three stops. In Mumbai and Cochin the group travels to numerous Jewish and non-Jewish sites. “Doctor Shalva Weil explains and lectures on the Jewish sites each day when we are visiting them. We also spend four days at the Coconut Lagoon resort, one of the most luxurious in India. This is a wonderful indulgence stop. There is a chance to learn about the literary heritage of Kerala and also see its famous Kathakali dances. There may be a lecture by Dr, Weill, but there is not Jewish heritage component here as there is in Cochin and Mumbai.

The tour is geared organized by the Burkat family and designed for families.

The small-group, land-only tour costs $7,995 per person, double occupancy, and includes almost everything: accommodation in luxury hotels, all intra-India transportation and transfers, daily breakfast, 21 lunches and dinners, bottled water,  sightseeing with entrance fees, the services of expert Indian Jewish guides, taxes and gratuities.  There is one departure: January 26, 2015; the tour is limited to 20 people.  International air fare is not included.   

For more information about the 3,000 Years of Jewish India tour, visit www.burkatglobal.com.  For reservations, call Iris Burkat at 1-914-231-9023.   

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Documentary of ‘Sugihara Visa’ Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe Sparks Heritage Tour in Japan  

A portrait of an unknown Jewish woman featured in a short documentary film of the history of Japan tourism has been identified by her own children.  The film was originally to trace the modern history of Japan tourism, but one big discovery about the oldest Japanese travel agency leads to little known footsteps of Jewish refugees escaping from Europe to the United States.

As Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) was researching the past 100 years of Japan tourism, there was an unexpected finding from World War II that showed Japanese involvement in helping Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Europe.

The finding led to a documentary, as well as a Jewish Heritage tour of Japan. And the documentary led to the identification of a Jewish woman by her children.

The documentary “Transit to Freedom” was a collaboration of the New York Film Academy   and JNTO, and was premiered at Japan Week, the tourism promotional event at Grand Central Terminal in New York City in March 2014. The screening as well as the coverage in the New York Times, ignited public attention to the documentary, and the documentary was made available online to reach a wider audience.

The film was based on a true story in a book by Akira Kitade, a former executive at JNTO, that his former boss went through during the wartime.  

Kitade’s former boss was assigned to escort European Jews when Japan Tourist Bureau (the predecessor of the Japanese travel agency, JTB Corp.) was contracted to transport them through the rough water of Sea of Japan between Vladivostok of the Soviet Union and a Japanese port city of Tsuruga.   

The Jews on this ship were on so-called Sugihara visa, which was the transit visa signed by a Japanese Vice-Consul Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania, known as Japan’s Oskar Schindler, who issued the transit visas for around 6,000 European Jews, even if it was against the order from the Japanese government under the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy.  

I became familiar with Chiune Sugihara, during an exhibit, “Diplomats of Mercy,” organized by the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives at Queensborough Community College at the Village of Great Neck Plaza. “‘In a conspiracy of goodness,’ Sugihara persuaded Soviet officials to let Jews with Curacao visas pass through Japan. The Japanese government refused, but he did it anyway, signing 2,000 visas by hand before the consulate was closed by Soviets. After the war, he was dismissed from the foreign service as retribution.”

Sugihara and his wife Yukiko, are honored as “Righteous Gentiles” for their efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust (see www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sugihara.html).

JTB USA offers a tour for Sugihara-related destinations in Japan.  For further details, see here. https://online.jtbusa.com/SpecialInterest.aspx 

While escorting Jewish refugees across the Sea of Japan, the Japanese travel agent received seven portraits from the refugees as a token of gratitude.

Inspired by this first-hand story, Kitade submitted copies of these photos to the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  One of the portraits posted on the Yad Vashem’s website caught the attention of a Montreal resident Judith Lermer Crawley, a daughter of Sugihara Visa’s recipients.  She perceived an undeniable resemblance to her late aunt, Sonia Reed (maiden name Zosia Gertler) in the young girl, and was convinced when she read the New York Times article on Transit to Freedom in March. 

She contacted her three cousins who are Sonia’s surviving children in the United States and Aya Takahashi, a Vancouver-based journalist, who sent the web link of the documentary to them.

When they saw the 73-year old photo in the film, they immediately recognized the girl on the screen was their late mother.  “My first reaction was one of surprise and amazement, chills and goose bumps.  I know my sister and brother had the same reaction…  I was struck by how young, beautiful, sad and vulnerable she looks in the photo, and was greatly moved by it,” says Deborah Reed, one of Sonia’s daughters.  “I was greatly moved by what she wrote on the back (of the photo). [She wrote in Polish, “Remember me – to the nice Japanese person.”]  To me, this speaks to the kindness of the Japanese people who were helping her and to her own feelings of uncertainty about her fate.  It brings home both the tragic and difficult circumstances she found herself in, and her great good fortune in being helped, actually saved, by the Japanese people.”  After finding a safe haven in Japan, many refugees were able to travel on to the United States and Sonia was one of them.

Deborah knew that her mother had escaped from Poland through Russia and Siberia to Japan, but she knew few of the details as Sonia almost never spoke to her children about her experience before and during the war years, though she remembers her saying how kind the Japanese people were to her.  “The photo and the documentary gives me a window into her experience, makes it more “real” and profound to me than it had been.  My own reaction (to this film) was, and is, a richer understanding of my mother’s experience, and very deep gratitude to Mr. Sugihara and the many other Japanese people who helped my mother and other Jewish refugees escape from Europe, survive and go on to create meaningful lives for themselves and their families.”  

According to Sonia’s son David, his parents owned a small factory on Long Island, NY and they had a business trip to Japan in 1979.  “They were extremely enthusiastic about their visit.  They very much appreciated the Japanese culture.  They were impressed by the (Japanese) industriousness and serious dedication to customer satisfaction…While my father evaluated the equipment, my mother supported his decision to purchase from a Japanese company.  They were both very dedicated to America and frankly reluctant to purchase from a non-American source…It shows how appreciative she was of Japan that she endorsed this –for them a very major – transaction.” 

With little funding available, the New York Film Academy volunteered to produce the documentary.  

In addition to Kitade, Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, an expert on Jewish history in Asia and the author of “The Fugu Plan” (co-authored with Mary Swartz) as well as Dr. Sylvia Smoller who experienced the hardship firsthand and has written a book based on the lives of her parents,are interviewed.  

You can view the documentary film “Transit to Freedom: How Ordinary Japanese Citizens Helped Jewish Refugees in WWII” here.

“With this film, we hoped to help shine a light on a little known story of Japanese helping Jewish refugees during World War II,” said documentary director Michael Young.  We were captivated by compassion and bravery shown by Vice-Consul Chiune Sugihara and by the members of the Japan Tourist Bureau.  Despite their government’s close alliance with Hitler, individual Japanese opened their doors and their hearts to these homeless and persecuted Jews.”  The New York Film Academy wishes to celebrate this story, and welcomes Japanese students and students from all over the world to shine their lights on other stories and make films to share with the world.

JNTO hopes to identify the rest of the survivors in photos by encouraging people to view the film.  “We never had much opportunity to introduce our country to the Jewish community before, so we would be delighted if they feel intrigued by the film to know more about Japan,” says Yuki Tanaka, the executive director of JNTO New York Office.  “Not many people know this but if you look back at the history, Japan has a surprisingly long relationship with Jewish people, so please come visit my country to discover an amazing link between us.” 

Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) is a nonprofit tourism board committed to the promotion of inbound tourism to Japan.  For information on travel to Japan, visit www.japantravelinfo.com

To find information on JTB USA’s tour of Sugihara-related destinations in Japan, see here. https://online.jtbusa.com/SpecialInterest.aspx

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For more travel stories about Responsible, Sustainable, Experiential and Green Travel, visit our new blog, MORAL COMPASS  : Great Places to Go Where the Going Does Good, at moralcompasstravel.info.

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