Parasitical Zionist Jewry's Future "Host" -- via the Asia Society

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Parasitical Zionist Jewry's Future "Host" -- via the Asia Society

Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, the Asia Society is an international, nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening relationships and deepening understanding among the peoples of Asia and the United States.

Richard Holbrooke and David Chu

Honorees were David Chu, founder of Nautica and founder and CEO of DC Studio International; Chong-Moon Lee, founder of Diamond Multimedia Systems and founder, Chairman and CEO of AmBex Venture Group; Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, Charter Member of TiE and Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Lulu Wang, CEO of Tupelo Capital Management; and Jerry Yang, co-founder, Chief Yahoo & Director of Yahoo!
http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/party ... _08_05.php

Women's Campaign for Israel at Asia Society
Home > About JNF > JNF In Your Area > Greater New York Zone > Greater New York > news

The Women's Campaign for Israel held a festive luncheon at the Asia Society with psychologist, popular commentator in the media, author and renowned lecturer, Dr. Dale Atkins PhD. Dr. Atkins, who is known for her practical advice, keen intellect and warm personality, instantly connected with the sold-out room of 40 women, as she helped unravel life's challenges. WCI Committee Co-Chair Laureine Greenbaum gave a detailed and moving talk on her recent Water Mission to Israel. All proceeds from the luncheon will benefit JNF's water projects in Israel. The women were also offered a discount on all purchases in the Asia Society store in time for Chanukah shopping. It was a warm and inviting event which left the group with a deeper understanding about the work of JNF and a good feeling about our organization.

Additionally, WCI launched the new $1800 Sderot Tulip Level of giving for the Women's Campaign in New York. With each $1800 purchase of a Sderot Tulip women are entitled to one year membership in the Women's Alliance.

http://www.jnf.org/about-jnf/in-your-ar ... srael.html


-----------

Jael Silliman: Bringing India's Jews to Light

Email Print Share Share

Indian Jews singing hymns at the Judah Hyam Hall Synagogue in New Delhi on September 4, 2003. (Findlay Kember/AFP/Getty Images)
enlarge image

Indian Jews singing hymns at the Judah Hyam Hall Synagogue in New Delhi on September 4, 2003. (Findlay Kember/AFP/Getty Images)

Jael Silliman is an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of the new book Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Brandeis University Press, 2002). This immensely personal book chronicles Calcutta's little-known Jewish community through the lives of four generations of Jewish women in Silliman's family. It has been called "a fascinating account of the relationship between urban and national identities, the heterogeneity of the Jewish diaspora, cultural difference between colony and post-colony, and, above all, women's lives" by Gayatri Spivak. Asia Society spoke with Professor Silliman from her home in Iowa City.

 

As far as I understand, there are three distinct Jewish communities in India. Can you give a brief explanation of the history of each community? When did each community come to India and under what circumstances? How did the communities interact with each other in South Asia?

The Jews of Cochin are the oldest Jewish community in India. They are believed to have come as traders or as refugees from the siege of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago or more. They were a prosperous community of agriculturalists, soldiers and merchants and a few held high political office under the Hindu Maharaja. The second oldest Jewish community is the Bene Israel community, who supposedly were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast and settled in and around Mumbai way before the city existed. They assimilated into Hindu culture but maintained some Jewish observances that enabled them to be "discovered" much later and brought back into the Jewish mainstream.

I am from the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta. The Baghdadis came to India during the British Raj and settled in Bombay, Calcutta and other port cities in Asia. In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora stretched from Baghdad to Shanghai and westwards to London.

There was very little interaction among the three distinct Jewish communities in India; they spoke different languages, observed different traditions and were products of very different cultures. They also lived in three very different regions of India. While the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay lived in close proximity with the Bene Israel there was very little interaction between them.

How is the history of the Baghdadi Jewish community in India tied into colonial history?

The Baghdadi Jews who came to India as traders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were responding to the new economic opportunities generated by colonialism. The community flourished under colonial rule. When the first Baghdadi Jewish settler, Shalome Cohen, arrived in Calcutta in the late 18th century, the British had identified Calcutta as an important commercial center. Calcutta's appeal was enhanced by its connection to both river and ocean traffic. The British had established the key economic institutions for trade to flourish and Fort William afforded Calcutta's merchants political protection and security in their business enterprises. Jewish traders made large fortunes in the opium trade and when that trade declined they invested in cotton and jute products as export staples. They were also involved in the cultivation, shipping, and sale of indigo, among other items.

The Baghdadi Jews partnered both Indian and European commercial interests. Their relationship with India and with colonialism was complicated; they played an exploitative role as outsiders in the economic colonization of India, while facilitating the colonial project. They were loyal to the British and when the British left they were unsure of their future in India. This led to a Jewish exodus that was propelled by the Second World War, Indian independence, and the formation of Israel. Today there are barely 30 Jews left in Calcutta though three impressive and large synagogues, two prayer halls, two schools, and a cemetery remain, along with a few stately mansions and street names. For the most part the Jewish presence has been written over by contemporary India and is visible to only those in search of it.

You have written that once you came to the US you identified much more with South Asian culture than with Jewish culture and that "Calcutta's Jews had a kind of colonial politics that embarrassed" you. Can you explain this?

I grew up in an independent India. By the '60s and the '70s there were only a handful of Jews left in Calcutta. I strongly identified with India and did not have any Jewish friends. Most of the Jews who I knew were the older members of the community who had stayed behind in Calcutta. These older members of the community who had grown up in a colonial world still had very colonial mentalities. Most had colonial ideas about race and placed themselves in the upper echelons of the social pyramid that structured social life in the colonies They wore dresses, did not identify with an "Indian India" and still lived in predominantly Jewish worlds. They did not mix with others and seemed very narrow-minded, outdated, and anachronistic to me. It was certainly not a world I wanted to be part of; it was a backward-looking rather than a forward-looking community and had little to offer me as a young person. I wanted to be part of the Indian mainstream and was full of idealism about India's future. I winced when my grandmother would refer to my friends casually as "natives."

How does the Judaism you grew up with differ (both religiously and culturally) from mainstream American (Ashkenazi) Judaism? What are the similarities?

I did not grow up in a very religious world. Though my home was Jewish and I was proud to be Jewish, I did not grow up as part of a Jewish community. Thus I was not very familiar with my own Jewish traditions or heritage. For me Judaism was more a form of identity than anything else. It fixed my location in a very plural society. While Jewishness set me apart and made me different, it also made me like everybody I knew. They too, like me, identified with being Indian as well as with the community to which they belonged, be that Christian, Parsi, Bengali, Punjabi or Marwari. Thus I would say that by the time I grew up I was very much like assimilated Jews in America today. This was strikingly different from the generations who preceded me who lived almost exclusively in Jewish worlds and identified primarily with Jewishness.

In India those Jews who studied in the Jewish schools had primarily Jewish educations and were very familiar with Baghadi Jewish traditions. However we did not have Sunday schools or religious teachings outside the schools. Religious observances were limited to going to services on the high holidays, keeping Passover, having Shabat dinners every Friday, etc. Our melodies for prayers were completely different from Ashkenazi melodies, as was our food. Our food is primarily Middle Eastern with an Indian influence. There are a few Calcutta specialties like aloo-makallah, which is a deep fried crisp potato that we eat on Friday nights.

I have often heard Indians proudly say that India is the one country where Jews have never been persecuted. Do you think this is an accurate assessment?

Yes, that is very accurate. In fact I would say that Jews have been treated with great respect in India and never been excluded from social or political life. When they have chosen to identify with India and serve the country they have achieved high political office and their Jewishness has never been a political or social bar. Socially, Jews have been members of exclusive clubs and societies and have not been restricted in any social spaces. They have thrived in their economic endeavors and been writers, artists, political commentators, film stars, army generals and even governors of prominence.

You called Calcutta's Baghdadi Jewish community "a diaspora of hope." What makes this diaspora hopeful? Did Indian Jews successfully avoid the horrors of the Holocaust?

I called our community a diaspora of hope because as the community moved from Baghdad to India and the Far East in the 18th and 19th centuries, and reconstituted themselves in the Western world by settling in Australia, England, Israel, the US, and Canada in the latter half of the 20th century, they advanced their social and economic positions in each of these moves. This diaspora of mobility and gain shows that diasporic processes do not have to be framed in terms of overwhelming loss, exile, and displacement. As the Baghdadi Jewish experience indicates, Jewish diaspora experiences are very varied. The European Jewish diasporic experience cannot be generalized to other communities that thrived in diaspora. The Calcutta Jews did not experience anti-Semitism even as the Holocaust raged in Europe. In fact the Baghdadi Jews provided shelter to several European Jews who escaped the Holocaust and lived in India. Several of those European Jews stayed on in Calcutta after the war and did very well for themselves and their families.

The book focuses on women in your family. What are the advantages of learning history from personal narratives? Are there any pitfalls? How did you research the book? Was the bulk of it gleaned from family stories or did you have to do a lot of outside research?

Learning history from the personal narratives of women enables the lives and voices of women that have never been heard or critically understood to emerge. One of the challenges of conducting this form of research has to do with ethical issues: what you can and cannot say about people's lives. This is especially complex when you are telling the story of members of your family and your concerns regarding how they and other family members will read your account of their lives. I relied heavily on oral histories as there are almost no written documents about their lives. My mother knew all the women portrayed and was critical in this writing. The book blends together my consciousness with my mother's, making it sometimes hard to separate one from the other. I began each portrait by asking my mother to tell me what she thought was most significant about each character and the time in which they lived. She provided me with a series of dates and notes. Starting from her telling and cursory notes I probed and pushed myself and her, moving each account in very different directions. Knowing I could not produce an "objective" account of their lives, I let my mother and other informants speak for themselves as much as possible so that readers may draw their own conclusions.

I have visited, interviewed and spent time with members of the community who knew or were related to the women whose lives I portray. I have cross-referenced and substantiated the family narratives with historical material, oral interviews with others members of the community, inside and outside experts as well as my own perceptions and experience of growing up Jewish in Calcutta.

To what extent did Indian Jewish communities maintain their distinct identity and to what extent did they assimilate into mainstream Indian culture?

The Calcutta Jewish community till the mid-20th century strictly maintained their Jewish identity and drew impermeable borders between themselves and the other communities that engulfed them. They lived for the most part in close proximity to other Jewish families, went to Jewish schools, attended Jewish social functions and inter-marriage was taboo. This social segregation was commonplace in the Indian and colonial environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the compartmentalzation of difference was pervasive among all communities. As a religious community, the Baghdadi Jews were always worried about assimilation. They emphasized their foreign origin and their religion to distinguish themselves from the dominant Hindu and also the minority Muslim and Christian communities. They distanced themselves from India and Indian culture. However they were well integrated in the economic system and occupied that space between Brown and White in the colonial period. Neither British nor Indian, they clung tenaciously to their Jewish identity. However, they cultivated and enjoyed good social relationships with their Indian and British counterparts.

Can you unpack the term "Jewish Asia"? Where are there other Jewish communities in Asia and how were they connected culturally?

Throughout what I call "Jewish Asia" refers to this string of Baghdadi communities who carried out their business ventures and community life in key financial and port cities. The Jews within each of these communities were few in number and were sustained by the other Jews in Basra, Rangoon, Bombay, Karachi, Singapore, and Shanghai who provided each other religious, financial and social support. Thus this scattered and small, interdependent community of Baghdadi Jews provided one another with the business links as well as the cultural and religious resources they needed. Travelers and goods moved up and down this network. Women moved from one community to another in search of marriage partners and entire families moved up and down this vast geographic space to be part of family celebrations: weddings, brits [circumcision ceremonies]. and bar mitzvahs. Marriages, commercial news, and business ties welded the small communities into an important economic and cultural presence in the East.

In the US, Jewish studies has previously been dominated by Ashkenazim and by the experience of the Holocaust. Why is it important for other Jewish voices to be heard?

By constantly privileging the Ashkenazi Jewish experience, the histories of other Jewish communities are erased. The diversity of experience among Jews is obliterated and we are not able to imagine worlds where anti-Semitism does not exist. An understanding of Jewish life in Calcutta, where many diverse communities thrived, provides new insights into how multiculturalism operates. Multiculturalism was a way of life in Calcutta. It is important for this minority narrative to be heard in India today.

Why was now an important time to write this book? Does the imposing presence of the BJP and the rise of anti-minority sentiment in India underscore the importance of this book?

These minority narratives testify to India's plural past, in which many communities flourished. Telling these stories today is particularly relevant not only to understand India's past, but her future. Such accounts resist efforts to communalize India's past and present and stand in contrast to contemporary histories that are being rewritten to serve sectarian agendas. Though the Calcutta Jews were small in number, they played a significant role in shaping the cultural and economic contours of the city, as did Parsis, Armenians, Chinese, and other minority communities. Calcutta became a great city because its history was molded by many different communities and its interactions with the outside world. It is important to underline the role of minority communities in the development of India, especially today when anti-minority sentiment is on the rise and being used for political objectives.

What has happened to Calcutta's Jewish community today?

There are barely any Jews left in Calcutta today. I returned from Calcutta last week and heard that an older member of the community, a well-known restaurant owner, had passed away. There were not the ten men needed for the minyan [a Jewish prayer group requiring ten male Jews]. There are rumors in the city that the well-known Jewish confectioner Nahoums in the New Market will soon be selling out. The synagogues are immaculately maintained as they are run on Jewish Trust Funds. The Jewish Girls School in the heart of Calcutta has no Jewish girl attending it. As I said earlier as well, the Jewish presence has been written over by contemporary India and is now only visible to those in search of it.

For those who grew up in Calcutta when there was a thriving Jewish community, there is a nostalgia about the Jewish presence. People write to me after reading the book about Jewish friends they knew, businesses they patronized, and often ask me incredulously why the Jews left this city where they prospered and were always so welcome.

Interview conducted by Michelle Caswell of Asia Society.

http://www.asiasociety.org/countries-hi ... page=0%2C1

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Om-Shalomers Come of Age: Children of Jewish and Hindu Parents Are Emerging as a New Cultural Subset
By Jeremy Caplan

This article first appeared in the Forward and is reprinted with permission of the author. Visit http://www.forward.com.

Last month, Sara Mishra celebrated her Bat Mitzvah with a little laining and a little lamb. Mishra, 13, read from the Torah at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Reconstructionist synagogue on Manhattan's Upper West Side, before she and her family and friends piled onto school buses and drove to Utsav, an Indian restaurant in Midtown. The party started with some traditional klezmer tunes and Israeli folk dances, followed by an Indian feast, complete with Goan fish curry, lamb vindaloo and an array of spicy (nonkosher) Indian delicacies.

It may sound like the latest craze in exotic Bar and Bat Mitzvah catering, but in fact Mishra is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Hindu father, and her experience is reflective of a cultural heritage that she shares with many in her generation. Some call them "HinJews." Others say they're "Om-Shalomers." But whatever they're called, young Jews of Hindu and Jewish parentage are coming of age, marking the emergence of a new cultural subset in an increasingly diverse American Jewish population.

In the wake of the Hart-Cellar Act, which liberalized U.S. immigration policy in 1967, a wave of mostly male Indian graduate students moved to the United States to study engineering. Many of them married Jewish-American women. Of these couples, many have raised their kids as Jews while also introducing them to secular Indian cultural values. Like "JewBu kids"--born of Jews married to Buddhists--these children have grown up surrounded by a unique blend of values and traditions.

"Despite the obvious religious differences, there are clear parallels between Jewish and Hindu traditions," said Nathan Katz, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University and the editor of The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies. "They share an emphasis on home-centered religious practices, family values, dietary codes and other rather striking similarities."

Mishra's Bat Mitzvah invitation--which integrated the Star of David with a lotus and other traditional Indian symbols--was designed by Shelley Beckler, who, like Sara's mother, Deborah Bernick, is a Jewish woman married to a Hindu man. During the Bat Mitzvah reception at Utsav, some of the men wore yarmulkes (head coverings) while many of the women in attendance wore traditional Indian flower bracelets, and Mishra's family brought out a small statue of Ganesh to help illustrate a brief lecture about the Hindu elephant god. Baruni Samal, Sara's paternal aunt, offered Sara her blessing, explaining that Ganesh is traditionally invoked to help remove obstacles for a young person coming of age. Her maternal grandmother, Frances Malter, 87, expertly navigated the buffet; since her daughter married an Indian in 1981, Malter was armed with more than two decades of experience with Indian food.

Bernick traveled to India in 1973 to teach at an ORT vocational school for girls. She met Bijon Mishra in Bombay (now called Mumbai), and the two quickly became friends. A year later, Mishra came to the United States to study engineering on a Rotary Fellowship, during which he maintained his friendship with Bernick. It wasn't until 1978 that the two started dating, and they weren't married until three years after that.

"It was an 'Om-Shalom' wedding," Bernick said. "Bijon's sister sang a song in Oriya, an Indian language, and my friend sang songs in Hebrew." The couple also exchanged sweets during the ceremony, according to an Indian tradition, and then ended with the customary Jewish breaking of the glass. A justice of the peace conducted the wedding, because the rabbis Bernick contacted wouldn't officiate at an interfaith marriage.

Bernick said her parents accepted her choice of husband. "It didn't come as a great surprise, since we had been dating for several years," she said. "And they knew I had an interest in other cultures; they knew I had dated people in Iran and India. The most important thing to my parents was that his family had good values and Bijon was a mensch (good person)."

Bernick and Mishra named their first daughter Dina because it is both a biblical and an Indian name, and they named their second daughter Sara after Bernick's maternal grandmother and because it echoes a Sanskrit word for wisdom, Saraswat. The couple decorated the walls of their Manhattan home with Indian cloth paintings and an Indian ketubah (Jewish wedding contract) from the 1800s, while on their shelves Indian artifacts joined menorahs and Jewish handicrafts. And although the family blends cultures, Bernick said that religiously, the family is fully Jewish, not Hindu.

Dina, now 19 and a student at Harvard University, celebrated a similarly blended Bat Mitzvah six years ago. "There's a stigma against intermarriage in some segments of the Jewish community," she said, "but it's not a choice I made. It was my parents'. One girl at a Jewish camp I went to told me I was a sin and I wasn't supposed to happen. But I'm trying to find a way to blend aspects of both cultures. I'm a member of both Hillel and the South Asian Association at Harvard. And I light candles for Hanukkah and for Divali, a Hindu festival of lights."

Not all Jewish-Hindu matches go over well with parents. Judi Kilachand, who attended Sara's Bat Mitzvah, is a Jewish friend of Bernick's who also married a Hindu. Kilachand's parents were so disappointed by her marriage that it took six years before they accepted their son-in-law, Kartik. "Like all other Jewish parents, they wanted me to marry someone who was Jewish," said Kilachand. "But once they got to know Kartik, they really liked him and accepted him into the family."

Kilachand and her husband traveled to India for their wedding reception and, over the years, Kilachand has learned to cook Gujarati food and to speak some Hindi and Gujarati. She often wears salwar kameez, an Indian tunic and pants, but she and her husband sent their two sons to Hebrew school and both sons had Bar Mitzvahs.

"There's a natural affinity between Jews and Indians," said Kilachand, who works at the Asia Society. "They share a lot in common. You've never met a more Jewish mother than an Indian mother. All they want to do is feed you, mother you and take care of you."

In the majority of Jewish-Hindu marriages, the groom is the Hindu. But in some cases, it's the bride. A colleague of Kilachand at the Asia Society, Shyama Venkateswar, is a Hindu woman who married a Jewish-American man. Unlike Kilachand, she faced little familial resistance to her choice. "My parents were liberal and progressive, and the issue of my husband's race or religion was moot," said Venkateswar. "But it's still a relatively new phenomenon, and both the Indian and Jewish communities look askance at intercultural marriages." Venkateswar and her husband are raising their child as a Hindu, and she hopes he might someday learn to speak an Indian language.

Indeed, language is often an important marker for "blended couples." Bernick said that she even knows one family--the Schaechter-Viswanaths--whose children are being taught to speak both Tamil and Yiddish. Like so many mixed couples, they want to ensure the kids understand both their South Indian heritage and that of their Jewish ancestors.

Though Sara and Dina Mishra are a long way from marriage, Bernick admits that she hopes one day her daughters will pass on Jewish values to their own children. "I feel strongly about transmitting a strong Jewish heritage. We are a diminishing minority," she said. "But we've brought up our daughters as Jews. I don't see intermarriage as a pure negative, though I also wouldn't necessarily encourage it. I just hope my daughters each settle on a good person. All other things being equal, it would be nice if they found someone with a Jewish background with whom they can pass on our traditions."

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/relatio ... bset.shtml

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Why Japan Will Never Forget (the Holohoax and the Jewish Nuke scientists directing A-Bomb's over Nagasaki and Hiroshima???  :x  )
by Jayne Kim Schrantz



George Brady and Fumiko Ishioka

The story of Hana Brady's suitcase and its journey
from World War II Auschwitz to contemporary
Japan testifies to the profound depth
and tenacity of the human spirit. Fumiko Ishioka,
the woman responsible for bringing Hana's story to light,
recently visited Hong Kong for
the Asian premiere of Inside Hana's Suitcase
at the 2009 Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival.

The story of Hana Brady begins in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, but today it spans the globe, thanks to the determination of Fumiko Ishioka, the director of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center. In 2000 while working with Small Wings, a group of Japanese students studying the Holocaust, Fumiko visited Auschwitz and eventually convinced them to lend her some items from their museum to showcase in an exhibition she was planning, "The Holocaust Seen Through The Children's Eyes." Among the items she received, the battered suitcase marked in white paint with the name and birth date of a Holocaust orphan, Hana Brady, sparked the imagination of her students.

Over the next eight months, Fumiko doggedly retraced Hana's steps through WWII from a happy childhood in Czechoslovakia to the doors of Auschwitz's gas chambers, eventually tracking down Hana's elder brother, George. George had not only survived life in both Terezin, the Jewish Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, and Auschwitz, he had gone on to create a new, happy life and family for himself in Canada. Fumiko reached out to George and asked him to help her students understand the person that Hana Brady had been and to share her story with them. George relished the opportunity to share his memories of Hana, thus beginning an almost decade-long friendship between George and Fumiko. With George's assistance, Fumiko has developed a traveling exhibit and presentation on the Holocaust, centered around Hana's suitcase. that has been presented to over 500 schools throughout Japan.

It's important to understand that Fumiko's work is pioneering in Japan. History education itself is a contentious issue in contemporary Japan and has inspired a long, heated debate among scholars for six decades. The content of history textbooks is tightly controlled by the extremely powerful Ministry of Education. Japan's wartime activities, its complicity with Nazi Germany, and its active aggression throughout East Asia have been considered taboo subjects for school textbooks for years. For almost fifty years, a famous historian Ienaga Saburo raged a legal war against the Japanese government for violating his freedom of speech by censoring material on 20th century Japanese history in textbooks he had written. Fumiko's mentor, Makoto Otsuka, who she considers a true pioneer in Holocaust education, established the beginnings of Holocaust education in Japan through the Japanese Christian Friends of Israel's Holocaust Education Centre in Hiroshima. However, Fumiko has taken the process a step further. In the past decade through work such as Fumiko's at the Tokyo Holocaust Research Center, students throughout Japan beginning to learn about a vital part of world history.

In Fumiko's experience, an openness to learning modern Japanese history often depends upon the teachers. "It really varies but I would say that the Holocaust is a new subject for many of the children that I meet. Not only the Holocaust but also our country's atrocities have not been told properly. We always joke that they [textbooks] ran out of time by the time they got to the modern period and World War II since they started with the ancient period." In fact, while children are extremely keen to learn about World War II history and even Japan's complicity, Fumiko finds that it can be difficult to introduce the subject because history teachers themselves are as not interested in the subject. As a result, she has to approach the topic through other subjects, such as art, literature, or music.

As a small island nation, most Japanese children are not exposed to children of other cultures, races, or religions. While Japanese children are no strangers to prejudice or racial bias, particularly against other Asians such as Koreans, Chinese, or Filipinos, they are often surprising free of anti-semitism, perhaps a result of being woefully unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust or WWII in general. To that extent, Fumiko is working with an empty slate. "Some kids or teachers might have an image of Jewish people being rich, but for most students it's the first time they have really heard about Jewish people. I explain to them that it's not a race but a religion and try to explain to them the long history of Jewish people in Europe for 2000 years."

Fumiko deconstructs stereotypes of Jews that were perpetuated by the Nazis by showing students pictures of people from different sects, such as Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe or assimilated Reform communities in France. "We see the Holocaust as an event with a finite beginning and ending, but I try to explain to them how it developed from the early years into the eventual result." It is Fumiko's hope that teaching children how to deconstruct the underpinnings of prejudice and the rhetoric of hatred will empower them to apply the same lessons to their own lives and communities.

The founders of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center were originally inspired in their work by a desire to promote tolerance and understanding to Japanese children and perhaps mitigate the serious social problem of bullying in Japanese schools. Fumiko explains that, "Our intention was not to give them the chance to learn how terrible it [the Holocaust] was, but rather to look at how it happened and how we could possibly have such hatred towards a certain group of people. We want to encourage them, faced with such intolerance and prejudice in their own community, to open up their eyes and minds. We want them to widen their world through learning about the Holocaust."

Like Anne Frank, the story of Hana Brady resonates with children on many levels. Hana's happy early childhood, her dreams of becoming a teacher, the loss of first her parents and later her beloved elder brother, and her confinement in the Jewish Ghetto that only ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz all generate an empathetic response in children because they can imagine themselves in the same position of confusion, powerlessness, and suffering. Fumiko admits that, "Of course, the children are shocked by the depravity of what occurred, by the sheer vast numbers of people that were killed, and they are especially shocked by the fact that young children, often of their same age, were killed." She is careful, however, to try not to scare them with the subject matter, so young children are never shown photos of the gas chambers or of dead bodies. What she tries to generate is empathy for those that suffered under the Holocaust.

Understandably, Fumiko's discovery of Hana Brady's suitcase and her incredible story has been a transformative experience. For Fumiko, George Brady is a personal hero in the truest sense. "I cannot describe how grateful I am that he decided to share his most difficult memories with us. What inspired me is how a person like George survived and has never given up and has created such a beautiful family, his positive outlook on life. The Holocaust is more than just a historical event for me. It's become a chance to explore human nature. I really want to keep sharing this lesson with many more students. It's really my life's work."

More information on the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center can be found at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/holocaust/tokyo/topenglish.htm. The Center no longer runs a permanent exhibition on the suitcase and instead maintains a traveling exhibition through its outreach program to schools.


< Table of Contents - Winter 2009-10

http://www.asianjewishlife.org/pages/ar ... Japan.html