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Unique Carnegie Hall concert to honor Japanese diplomat Sugihara, who saved 6,000 Jews
For most of his life, Chiune Sugihara received little recognition for the dramatic actions he undertook as Japanese vice-consul to Lithuania on the eve of World War II: the rescue of some 6,000 Jews from Poland and elsewhere from the Nazi death machine.
For decades, the Jewish world remained largely ignorant of his heroism. When, in 1985, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Israel, honored the unassuming retired diplomat as a Righteous Among the Nations, Sugihara was too old and sick to travel to Jerusalem to accept the award. He died shortly after.
But his renown has grown in the years since his death, and now Sugihara is being celebrated in a new way with an extraordinary piece of music composed to commemorate his heroic actions.
On April 19 at Carnegie Hall, Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper will perform this original piece of music — Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, “Vessels of Light” — accompanied by the New York City Opera Orchestra conducted by Constantine Orbelian.
The gala concert, organized by Yad Vashem and the American Society for Yad Vashem, which commissioned the piece, will pay tribute to Sugihara’s legacy.
Along with the honorary Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, Sugihara issued life-saving visas to the Jews trying to escape Europe through a complex, illegal scheme involving fake transit visas via Japan to the Dutch-speaking Caribbean island of Curaçao.
Not a single Jew actually traveled to that faraway island off the coast of Venezuela, home to the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas. But the operation — carried out under the noses of Lithuania’s Nazi occupiers — enabled thousands of Jews to resettle in Shanghai, leading to eventual freedom.
“Being half-Japanese myself, I understand the culture, and I know as a Japanese person that opposing authority goes against every fiber of our being,” Cooper, the cellist, said this month in an interview near her home in Tel Aviv. Born in New York to a mother of Japanese descent, Cooper later converted to Judaism and moved to Israel. She and her husband, Leonard Rosen, are
raising their three children as Orthodox Jews.
“Everybody’s heard of Schindler, who had a factory. But Sugihara had nothing to gain from this. In fact, he had everything to lose,” said Cooper, a visiting professor of music at Tel Aviv University. “He didn’t want recognition and never spoke to anybody about it. He didn’t even know that he had saved anybody until the very end of his life.”
Cooper, who studied at Julliard and comes from a long line of musicians — her father is a pianist and her mother a violinist and former concertmaster of the American Symphony — has a special personal connection to the Sugihara story.
Her husband’s father, Irving Rosen, was one of the Jews whose lives was saved by Sugihara’s actions. Armed with papers enabling Rosen’s family to leave Lithuania and emigrate to Curaçao via Japan, the entire family traveled via the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vilnius to Moscow to Vladivostok, then by sea to Japan — and eventually Shanghai.
“I became obsessed with this story and wanted people to know about it, especially given everything that’s going on in the world with the rise of authoritarian governments, mass dislocations, refugees, wars, rising antisemitism and anti-Asian hate,” Cooper said. “I’m not a writer, a filmmaker or an actress. I’m a musician. People had asked me, ‘Why not put together a nice concert in tribute to Sugihara?’ But I wanted to write something that could last forever.”
Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)
With the backing of Yad Vashem and the American Society for Yad Vashem, Cooper asked Auerbach to write the piece, a 40-minute composition for solo cello, choir and orchestra involving 130 performers, including Yiddish “whisperers,” allusions to Psalm 121 and an introductory piece by Japanese composer Karen Tanaka titled “Guardian Angel.”
At Carnegie Hall, Cooper, who plays on an Italian-made Guadagnini cello from 1743, will perform Auerbach’s moving, large-scale symphonic work as a soloist. She’ll also perform in Prague on March 27, Los Angeles on May 18, in California’s Napa Valley on July 18 and in Warsaw on October 8.
“Most people do not pay attention to history, because they’re so wedded to current events,” said the Carnegie Hall event’s co-chair, Peter Till, a board member of the American Society for Yad Vashem. “But this is even more relevant today because of the rise of extremist hate groups. They’ll forever deny that it exists, or ignore it, or say it couldn’t happen here, but hate continues
to repeat itself and people have to face up to it.”
The Sugihara story is especially compelling, Till said, because it’s the first event of its kind that links Holocaust survivors with Asia in general — and Japan in particular.
“This is as much about the music as it is an expression of humanity, of people from diverse cultural backgrounds coming together to save lives,” he said. “For Yad Vashem, this is a very important event because it shows the depth of understanding.”
Of the roughly 28,000 non-Jews who’ve been designated by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, only 40 were diplomats. Sugihara is the only Japanese citizen so honored.
“On the whole, the eligibility process for diplomats is slightly different than for ordinary rescuers, because they had immunity,” said Joel Zisenwein, director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Department. “In most cases, they were not at physical risk. But many of them had defied the guidelines and official policies of their foreign offices. Sugihara is even more interesting because he represented an ally of Nazi Germany.”
Zisenwein said Sugihara provided between 2,100 and 3,500 transit visas, though the exact number is not known.
“Literally, all rescuers from the Holocaust era have passed away, so people accepting the award are generally descendants or even grandchildren of the recipients,” Zisenwein said. “It’s interesting that Sugihara received his award for actions prior to the German invasion of Lithuania. Most of the Jews he rescued were Polish refugees who had fled there in 1939. Many countries claim to have their own ‘Schindlers.’ But here indeed was an individual who saved thousands of Jewish lives.”
Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper has a special personal connection to the Sugihara story. (Vardi Kahana)
The evening’s master of ceremonies will be Zalman Mlotek, who is also artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Tickets and sponsorships are still available for the event.
“It’s not just the people Sugihara saved. It’s the worlds of those thousands of people,” said Mlotek, whose father, Joseph Mlotek, was a 21-year-old Yiddish poet working at a newspaper in Warsaw when World War II broke out. After fleeing to Lithuania, the family heard about Sugihara and was able to obtain transit visas to Shanghai, where the elder Mlotek and his brother Abram spent the war years.
“My father became a Yiddish activist here in New York and set up a network of 200 Yiddish schools all over the country. He published books with my mother and did concert tours for Yiddish musicians,” said Mlotek, 71. “I look at myself today, as artistic director of the Yiddish theater for 20 years, carrying on this same legacy that would have been decimated had it not been for the heroism of Sugihara.”
Auerbach’s composition had its world premiere last November in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (known in Yiddish as Kovno), where Sugihara’s story took place. Additional performances are scheduled for cities around the world through 2024.
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Vanderbilt launches inquiry into instructor after math question about Israeli occupation draws criticism
(JTA) — Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.
Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.
“Assume Palestine as a state with a rectangular land shape. There is the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Jordan River on the east,” read the slide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine (…) was approximately 100 km. in 1946. The land decreases by 250 sq. km per year, due to the occupation by Israel. How fast is the width of the land decreasing now?”
Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”
In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.
“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”
In recent years, rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses has grown increasingly fraught, with professors’ commentary on the region sparking heavy scrutiny and, at times, disciplinary measures when their universities have determined that they exceeded the bounds of academic freedom. A recent report by Columbia University’s antisemitism task force found that students frequently experienced pro-Palestinian advocacy in classes entirely unrelated to the Middle East — such as dance or math classes.
The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.
In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”
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Hugh Laurie rejects ‘Zionist’ label after his tribute to Israeli ‘Tehran’ producer sparks social media firestorm
(JTA) — British actor Hugh Laurie pushed back against being labeled as a “Zionist” after facing a wave of online criticism for posting a tribute to the Israeli producer of the hit television show “Tehran.”
“Dana Eden, who co-created and produced ‘Tehran’, died on Sunday, seemingly by her own hand,” Laurie, who played a nuclear inspector in the show’s third season, tweeted last week. “It’s a terrible thing. She was brilliant, and funny, and an exceptional leader. Love and condolences to all who knew her.”
The seemingly innocuous post eulogizing Eden, 52, who was found dead while filming the latest season of the hit Apple TV+ series in Athens last week, quickly drew a volley of backlash on social media.
“She was part of the occupation force’s propaganda arm,” wrote one user in response to Laurie’s post. “What a shame, didn’t expect you to be a closet Zionist.” Another wrote that Eden “creates propaganda for Israel so that they can kill kids more effectively. People should have no sympathy for her.”
The award-winning series, which follows a young Israeli Mossad agent in Iran, was produced by the Israeli public broadcaster Kan and purchased by Apple TV+ in 2020 for roughly $20 million. Eden’s death, for which no cause has been announced, occurred during production of the show’s fourth season, which had already stalled following Oct. 7.
Laurie is not the first actor to spurn the “Zionist” label, as entertainers in recent years have increasingly faced pressure to declare their views on Israel. In December, Jewish actress Odessa A’zion pushed back on claims she was a Zionist after an image of her wearing an IDF shirt as a teenager circulated online.
On Friday, Laurie, who previously starred in the Emmy Award-winning medical drama “House,” shot back at the criticism.
“Nothing I have ever said or done could lead a sane person to believe that I am a Zionist,” wrote Laurie in a post on X. “However. If someone exults in the death of a friend of mine, yes I will block them. If you wouldn’t do the same in my position, you can f—ck off too.”
Laurie’s subsequent post also drew outcry, but this time from pro-Israel influencers who lamented the actor’s disavowal of the Zionist label, calling him “weak” and a “pathetic weasel” in the replies.
Freelance journalist Angela Epstein replied to Laurie’s post, writing, “Not Hugh Laurie as well. I thought he was one of the decent ones….”
“God almighty, why does no one understand English any more?” wrote Laurie in response to Epstein’s critique. “I have not spoken or written a word that would indicate pro or anti Zionism. That’s what those words mean. Blimey.”
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German anti-Zionist group’s plan to protest at Buchenwald memorial over kaffiyeh ban sparks outrage
(JTA) — An anti-Zionist group in Germany has drawn condemnation after it announced plans for a protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in response to a ban on pro-Palestinian symbols at the site.
The group Kufiyas in Buchenwald claims that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.” It announced a demonstration for April 11, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.
“Instead of honoring the persecuted and resolutely opposing every genocide, the memorial spreads Israeli propaganda and provides the ideological ammunition for the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” the group says on its website.
Buchenwald, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis and one of the largest in the country, was the site of the murder of roughly 56,000 male prisoners, including 11,000 Jews, from 1937 to 1945.
Last year, a German court ruled that the concentration camp had a right to refuse entry to visitors who wear a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who attempted to wear the scarf to an event commemorating the concentration camp’s liberation.
The woman, who was only identified by her first name, Anna, posted a testimony about her actions on the Kufiyas in Buchenwald Instagram page in which she said she was inspired by the resistance of Buchenwald prisoners.
“Our fundamental principle is this: criticism of the Israeli government’s policies, settlement policy, or actions in the Gaza Strip is legitimate,” said the Buchenwald Foundation’s director Jens-Christian Wagner in a statement outlining the memorial’s protocols. “However, it becomes antisemitic when used to relativize the Holocaust and discredit its victims as perpetrators. We will not tolerate this at the Buchenwald Memorial.”
The campaign against the memorial has been signed onto by a host of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which has defended the protest on X as evidence of what “commemorating past German crimes has to do with rejecting current ones.”
In a post on Instagram announcing the protest earlier this month, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald group wrote that it would hold a “public protest” in Weimar, the German city located nearby the concentration camp. The group also said it planned to host lectures and a “tour that vividly illustrates the events in the former concentration camp.”
It was unclear whether the protest is intended to take place outside the memorial itself. Kufiyas in Buchenwald did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the location of the protest.
The protest quickly drew condemnation from German leaders, including the country’s antisemitism czar Felix Klein, who told the Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the protest marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Michael Panse, the commissioner for combatting antisemitism for the German state Thuringia, where Weimar is located, told the outlet that the protest was “tasteless and historically ignorant.”
The protests also drew condemnation from the European Jewish Congress, which wrote in a post on X that the demonstration represents a “deeply troubling instrumentalization of Holocaust remembrance.”
“Holocaust memorial sites are places of solemn reflection and respect for the victims of National Socialism,” the post continued. “They must never be exploited to promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy or glorify those who perpetrate violence against Jews.”
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