The Japanese Scholar Who Saved a Generation of Jews

In his bestselling book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, a very non-Jewish volume, which has been translated into 40 languages, psychologist Robert Cialdini presents a photograph from 1941 of two rabbis from Eastern Europe who found themselves in front of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. They were two of the leaders from a group of thousands of yeshiva students, who had been given a transit visa by the Japanese consul in Kovno (Kaunas), Chiune Sugihara, allowing them to flee across Europe and Asia and arrive in Kobe, Japan. Two of those Jews were my maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik.

Nazi Germany, which was allied with Japan, had sent the “Butcher of Warsaw,” Gestapo colonel Josef Meisinger, to Tokyo to press for “a policy of brutality toward the Jews under Japan’s rule—a policy he stated he would gladly help design and enact.” As Cialdini writes, “Uncertain at first of how to respond … high-ranking members of Japan’s military government called upon the Jewish refugee community to send two leaders to a meeting that would influence their future significantly.”

Thus, two rabbis came down from Kobe to Tokyo and, in what must have seemed a surreal moment, met with the Japanese generals. The rabbis received an utterly unanswerable question: Tell us, why do the Nazis hate you so much? One of the rabbis was frozen, terrified, but the second, Rabbi Shimon Kalisch, known as the Amshinover Rebbe, delivered a response to the Japanese generals: “Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, like you.”