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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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The post Unique Carnegie Hall concert to honor Japanese diplomat Sugihara, who saved 6,000 Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank
(JTA) — Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist known as one of the paper’s most consistent defenders of Israel, used his Tuesday column to take direct aim at the country’s handling of settler violence in the West Bank — warning that unchecked attacks now pose a threat to Israel’s security and to Zionism itself.
Stephens, who has spent years pushing back on what he sees as double standards applied to Israel, wrote that he decided to speak out against what he called “Jewish terrorists” despite his reluctance to feed the volume of global condemnation facing Israel.
“That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things,” he wrote. “It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
Stephens’s column drew heavily on a public letter sent Sunday to President Trump by Matan Vilnai, a retired IDF deputy chief of staff, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers. The letter cautioned that Israeli security services have been effective against Palestinian terror groups but hamstrung when it comes to curbing Jewish extremists. The letter warned about the consequences of Israeli inaction in curbing attacks on Palestinians.
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests,” wrote Vilnai.
Stephens pointed to last week’s rampage by extremist settlers through several Palestinian villages — attacks that reportedly included arson at a home and two mosques and an assault on a stonecutting factory — as evidence the problem has become routine rather than exceptional. He cited Israeli military figures showing nationalistic and settler-related crimes climbed to 867 incidents in 2025, up from 682 the year before.
Stephens also cited Eran Shamir-Borer of the Israel Democracy Institute, a former IDF legal official, who told him the government has specifically declined to place suspected Jewish settlers under administrative detention. The practice, imprisoning individuals without formal charges, is regularly deployed against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
The columnist dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public framing of the violence as the work of roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents,” as he did in an interview with NBC earlier this month. Stephens argued that a government capable of eliminating a Hamas commander deep inside Iran cannot plausibly claim it’s unable to rein in a few hundred vigilantes.
Stephens is known, and widely admired within the pro-Israel community, for his robust defense of Israel, from refuting the charge of “genocide” directed at Israel to condemning what he has called the “hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country.” Editor of the conservative Jewish thought journal Sapir, Stephens was also chosen to give the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y earlier this year.
“I think it is really important that people like Bret Stephens are speaking up about settler violence, and I think that it also shows how terrible that it’s become,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in an interview with JTA. “Even people who are pretty, let’s say, hesitant or who almost never criticize Israeli policy are speaking up.”
But she also suggested that the issue goes beyond a failure to enforce the law or hold settlers accountable, and instead reflects the priorities of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
“This is actually government policy because this is violence that is designed to take more and more of the West Bank,” said Jacobs. “There’s already been not just violence, but expulsions, shoving Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas and, ultimately, annexing the West Bank or at least as much of it as possible.”
Liberal Jewish groups like T’ruah, including Torat Zedek and Bnei Avraham in Israel and the U.S-based groups Smol Emuni, J Street and New Israel Fund, regularly condemn the settler violence and call on Israeli security forces to hold the perpetrators accountable. They also take part in “protective presence” visits to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians threatened by Jewish settlers.
The largest Jewish organizations have been less vocal on the topic, although the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism have issued statements condemning settler violence.
Right-leaning groups have either downplayed the extent of the violence or say Jews living in the West Bank have been provoked by neighboring Palestinians. On the same day that Stephens’s column appeared, the media watchdog group HonestReporting ran an article saying that the major news outlets disproportionately focus on settler violence, and run many fewer articles about Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians. It also cited official Israeli data suggesting that violence by Jewish civilians in the West Bank had declined significantly since March.
Nevertheless, Stephens appeared to be echoing a growing sentiment even on the right that the settler violence is both wrong and a black eye for Israel at a time when its reputation is suffering around the world.
“I don’t think there are many supporters of Israel in the U.S. who are happy with how Israel has handled, or really mishandled, settler violence,” said David E. Bernstein, a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and a frequent commentator on Jewish affairs, in an email exchange with JTA. “To me, it’s anti-Zionist to allow settlers to flout the law and public policy, whether by violence or by setting up illegal outposts, because Zionism means accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and radical settlers who don’t are no different than extremist Haredim [Orthodox] in not doing so.”
Last week, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that the government had approved a plan in March to tackle violence by extremist settlers but kept the plan secret due “to political considerations.” The report didn’t say whether the plan has been implemented.
The post Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism
For nearly two years, Zohran Mamdani has made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a central political target. Now Netanyahu is making Mamdani part of his own reelection campaign.
The 50-second video released Wednesday on Netanyahu’s political social media channels builds on comments the Israeli leader made on Fox News this week, portraying Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. It intersperses footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitic incidents with recent clips of Mamdani condemning Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war after the mayor backed off a vow to have the Israeli prime minister arrested during an upcoming visit to New York. It also features Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, who liked social media posts that supported Palestinians immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. (Mamdani said his wife is a private citizen and does not work in his administration.)
The clip ends: “No one will stop me from fighting for the truth of Israel.”
The video comes as Netanyahu faces one of the toughest reelection campaigns of his political career, trailing his rivals ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, which could determine not only his political future, but also his legacy and potentially his freedom as he faces a corruption trial.
The fight with Mamdani has become politically useful for Netanyahu. His main rivals — former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — are seen as more moderate leaders who could rebuild strained ties with Democrats and win back support for Israel among Americans.
Joel Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said in an interview that turning Mamdani into a symbol of today’s Democratic Party gives Netanyahu a way to challenge one of his rivals’ central arguments that they are better positioned to course-correct the U.S. political shift against Israel. “For Netanyahu, it’s very important to try to portray the Democrats as Mamdani and make the argument that only he can stand up to that,” Rubin said.
Mamdani has positioned himself as a prominent progressive critic of Israel amid the war in Gaza, a position that helped propel his rise and which has become increasingly part of national Democratic Party politics.
Mamdani’s high-profile confrontation with Netanyahu escalated when he announced a review of whether he had the legal power to arrest the Israeli prime minister when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Experts on Israeli politics warned of an unintended consequence: would allowing Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro wrote on X on Saturday. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Some political strategists argue that Mamdani and his allies have little reason to mind if Netanyahu remains in power. “I bet they’re rooting for Bibi, in a perverse way,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, in an interview with the Forward discussing how Israel is reshaping Democratic politics.
While still serving as a New York state Assembly member, Mamdani zeroed in on the Israeli prime minister as an enemy, leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023.
Throughout his mayoral campaign last year, Mamdani repeatedly injected Netanyahu into New York politics., Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he launched his campaign. According to a report, members of Mamdani’s inner circle were pushing for him to make this arrest declaration. After his election, already knowing the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani proceeded with the review. When it concluded he did not have the power to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani used a mayoral address to declare him a war criminal and then encouraged New Yorkers to protest him on his UN visit. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him.
“There is a core principle amongst the left in American politics that having someone to organize against is crucial to growing numbers and persuasion, and for Mamdani, having the foil of Netanyahu is an incredibly valuable tool for motivating support,” said Rubin, who led Jewish outreach for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Whether that principle translates into votes for Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel’s Oct. 27 election remains to be seen. At the moment, Mamdani and Netanyahu have become unlikely political assets for each other, each giving the other a powerful opponent to campaign against.
The post Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families
(JTA) — As Conservative/Masorti rabbis, we see firsthand the joy of couples building a life together in the Jewish community, and the pain of those who feel shut out because one of them is not Jewish.
We think of the community member, though not Jewish, who developed a profound love for davening (prayer) and Torah study, and has supported his children’s and grandchildren’s Jewish education and observance of mitzvot. We think of another community member who faithfully drove her four children to Hebrew school for years and, after her youngest child’s bat mitzvah, chose to convert to Judaism herself.
It is time for our halacha, or Jewish law, to address issues facing intermarried couples and families robustly.
The two of us had the honor of joining colleagues in co-authoring a teshuvah — a rabbinic response to questions of Jewish law — that does just that. The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has approved a teshuvah that seeks to honor these couples and families and their commitment to Jewish life in our congregations and communities.
Since we are part of a movement that balances a commitment to halacha with the realities of modern life, our work is grounded in traditional Jewish texts, laws and principles while also reflecting the core belief that welcoming others and extending hospitality are essential Jewish values.
Based on halacha and Jewish tradition, the teshuvah affirms the longstanding standard of Conservative/Masorti rabbis that clergy may officiate only at weddings where both partners are Jewish. It emphasizes that while a wedding is a significant moment that often singularly drives these conversations, there are many other important life-cycle moments that rabbis can offer as occasions for Jewish celebration and reaffirmations of commitment to mitzvot.
Through this teshuvah, we formalize a public mishebeirakh (blessing) before or after the wedding day for a couple committed to building an exclusively Jewish home, as well as a hanukkat habayit ceremony to dedicate their home.
We welcome non-Jewish parents on the bimah during their children’s b’nei mitzvah and offer “mazal tov” and other basic gestures of inclusion to intermarried couples, both of which were once considered unacceptable. Our goal in doing so is to inspire the couple and family to grow in Jewish living.
We affirm that synagogues may not hire intermarried individuals as clergy but may hire intermarried individuals for other roles, and that rabbis may officiate at funerals for non-Jewish family members and support a Jewish mourning process when a non-Jewish loved one dies.
It’s been about 40 years since the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which sets halachic policy for our movement internationally, broadly addressed questions around intermarried couples and families. We have learned over time that those intermarried couples who choose to embrace Jewish life are integral to the fabric of Conservative/Masorti communities.
We invite these couples to engage meaningfully in Jewish practice at home and in community, and, if they are having children, to raise them as Jews. Sometimes they may even choose to convert to Judaism at some point.
We do so because, as rabbis, we enjoy the privilege of being invited into people’s lives, and our role is both pastoral and educational. As people figure out their own identities and relationships, our role is to help them integrate Jewish tradition. As couples turn toward each other and seek to integrate Judaism into their lives, we are here to help them chart a course and to bring Torah into the conversation and observance of mitzvot into their lives.
We aim to inspire the couple to grow in Jewish living, observing mitzvot, studying Torah and searching for God in daily life. To do so, we must create gateways so everyone can find a place to learn and find joy and inspiration in our traditions, within the boundaries of halachic standards and principles.
Many of the practices in the teshuvah are already in place in some communities. Some offer solutions that speak most directly to realities in North America, and we call on local rabbis to interpret them in light of the circumstances in their local communities.
In the days of the Mishnah and the Talmud, when faced with new and challenging circumstances, our rabbis found creative and often beautiful solutions to embody the Torah as they understood it. As we follow in their footsteps, we use the wisdom we have inherited to both uphold and transform those values and honor the halachic principles that are central to our rabbinates and communities.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families appeared first on The Forward.
