A story in the Aug. 25 Tribune appropriately recognizes the courageous act in 1940 of Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara (“Japan’s Schindler”) in Kovno, Lithuania, who issued 3,400 (not 1,944 as reported) transit visas to Japan, thereby enabling desperate Jewish men, women and children to escape the Holocaust.
As Prof. Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew University describes in his book “American Jewry and the Holocaust,” Sugihara’s action was especially courageous because he was disobeying instructions of the Japanese Foreign Office.
The story omitted one important issue: Who covered the enormous transportation expense from Lithuania to Japan for these mostly penniless refugees? Moses Beckelman, the American representative to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Kovno, took on this complicated and costly responsibility, thereby completing these singular acts of compassion.
In 1991, the 50th anniversary of the rescue, the Mirrer Yeshiva in New York, whose 2,000 members were among those saved, paid tribute to Sugihara and Japan-which nevertheless honored the visas and gave temporary shelter to these refugees during the Holocaust years.
