After watching Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ powerful new video on Jewish identity titled “Why I am a Jew,” I am reminded of a time when I wasn’t alive in a place I’ve never been to. Echoes of the past sound softly in my ears, words that I have heard told over so many times that it is as if I heard these words at their first utterance. They are the words of my grandfather, vouching to save the lives of Jews he has yet to meet.
My grandparents, Nissim and Esther Tawil, were living in the port town of Kobe, Japan for their business. Nissim, who was born in Jerusalem, married Esther Tawil from Syria in 1937 and moved to Kobe after the wedding. There were about thirty Jewish families living there at the time, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, all there for business. My grandfather was able to help set up a shul to help organize the small Jewish community and maintain their observance in such a remote place. My grandparents recalled having a good life in Japan. This was before the war.
Throughout World War II, the Japanese government was living in a state of constant paranoia. Although the Jews, including my grandfather, were mostly businesspeople, they were constantly accused of spying for the U.S. and England. In my grandfather’s words, “we suffered during the war.” But they soon realized that they were well off compared to Jews living in European countries. Not long after my grandparents arrived, the remote town of Kobe became a safe-haven for hundreds of Jewish refugees, all of whom fled the Nazis and the terror of the Holocaust.
One day, my grandfather received a summons for a meeting in a government office. Naturally, he was nervous – he had heard the stories of people who were summoned to a meeting like this and never returned. After all, this was a wartime. Nevertheless, my grandfather met with the officials who explained to him the following: A group of Jews were gathered in the Russian city of Vladivostok, which is on the border of Japan. These Jews had some sort of visa, but the Japanese consulate needed someone to agree to sign their papers and guarantee them, allowing them access to Japan. If not, they would be sent back to Germany or Poland.
My grandfather, who was known by the government as being one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Japan, was asked if he would sign for these Jews. True to the words of Rabbi Sacks, “our nation, though at times it suffered the deepest poverty, never gave up on its commitment to helping the poor, or rescuing Jews from other lands, or fighting for justice for the oppressed, and did so without self-congratulation, because it was a mitzvah, because a Jew could do no less.” My grandfather agreed to the task.
This response made the government officials angry, as they began to shout at him. “Now we know that you are very unreliable, Mr. Tawil. You’re willing to sign these papers without knowing who and what these people are? How can you take such a responsibility upon yourself?” My grandfather explained to them that he was doing just what they would do. “Suppose the people by the border were Japanese. Would you send them back to Germany or Poland to be killed, or would you sign for them? This is the reason that I want to sign.”
Apparently they didn’t understand this analogy. I’m not sure if they would have done the same based on what they replied. “We don’t have all the information for these Jews, we do not know all of their names, so we need to send them back. However, there is another group coming from Siberia, so you can sign for that group.” Understandably, my grandfather was distraught by this suggestion.
As Rabbi Sacks noted, “The Judaic tradition shaped the moral civilization of the West, teaching for the first time that human life is sacred…” This is certainly what my grandfather displayed in this situation. He told them he must have them in Japan, so he would sign the papers without their names, and when they came in, they would fill in their names.
This triggered shouting again. “How can you sign a paper without knowing what kind of people they are? These people are spies! They don’t look like the Ashkenazim and Sephardim who live here – they have beards and peiot. We suspect they’re not Jews.”
Due to the fears that these refugees were spies, my grandfather made a deal with the Japanese that people from the community would go to interview the refugees on their boat to see if they were Jews or spies.
And in the end, they weren’t spies. Far from it.
These Jews were all rabbis and students from Mirrer Yeshiva, and among them was Rav Aharon Kotler, the founder of Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey. My grandfather had the privilege of learning with these men twice a week in his home. There were six or seven groups of refugees who made their way to Kobe within six months.
We were always proud of my Grandpa Tawil’s Japan story. But it wasn’t until I was older that I realized the story’s deeper message. My grandfather risked losing the trust of the Japanese during a time that his relationship with the government was his only lifeline in order to save people that he had never even met. The Japanese could not even comprehend this mentality.
While at times I may feel like I do not have a connection to most Jews, or when there are those rare Jews that I wished I was not connected to, I then remember that these are Jews that my grandfather would have saved, and these thoughts are eliminated. It is with this mindset that I am able to fulfil what is said in “Why I am a Jew”:
“The dreams and hopes of my ancestors live on in me, and I am the guardian of their trust, now and for the future.” This dream of ahdut, a feeling of unity among Jews, surely was one of my grandfather’s, as demonstrated by his actions.
I imagine my grandfather ending off his story with similar words to those that Rabbi Sacks used: “This, then, is our story, our gift to the next generation… Take it, cherish it, learn to understand and to love it. Carry it, and it will carry you.”