SHE COULD have been my sister-in-law. Angelyn Aguirre, a 32-year-old native of Pangasinan, had spent the last six years working as a caregiver in Israel. This December, according to her family, she planned on returning to the Philippines permanently to raise a family with the man she married last year.
Instead, she flew home in a coffin after
being brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists. Her sin: refusing to leave the
side of her elderly employer, who the terrorists also killed. “Unimaginable
honor in the face of evil,” Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum said of
Aquirre’s last moments. “Despite having a chance to flee, Angelyn showed
unbelievable humanity and loyalty by remaining…”
She was one of three Filipinos killed in
last week’s horrific attacks by the psychotic Palestinian pirates. As the
subsequent clouds of war darkened Israeli skies, the Philippine government
prepared to evacuate some of the estimated 30,000 Filipinos in Israel,
especially those in the areas most likely to be affected. “The Philippines will
always stand with Israel,” President Marcos is said to have assured Israeli
Ambassador Ilan Fluss.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all. In my
five-plus years as a Jewish-American expat in the Philippines, I have often
felt the full force of Filipino love. It is warm. It is encompassing. And it
offers comfort as a soothing, solicitous, solace.
Filipinos actually have a longstanding
special relationship with Jews. During the Holocaust, which claimed the lives
of several of my ancestors, the Philippines was one of the world’s few
countries offering haven to otherwise untethered European Jewry. In fact, there
was—and remains some vestiges of—a fully functioning, vibrant, Jewish community
in Manila at least 1,200 strong.
“My father got a lot of positive
attention,” one refugee, who arrived at age eight, later wrote in a memoir
recalling the experience. “There was an element of something so redemptive.”
Lotte Hershfield, a German Jew whose
family emigrated to the Philippines in 1938, later described the experience as
life-altering. “We would not be alive today if not for the Philippines,” she
told CNN decades later. “We would’ve been destroyed in the crematorium.”
A monument erected in 2009 at Israel’s
Holocaust Memorial Park in the shape of three open doors, thanks the Filipino
people for saving Jewish lives. And to this day, Israel maintains special
bilateral trade agreements with the Philippines for goods and services worth
more than $530 million US dollars annually. It also encourages its companies to
invest in the country, provides disaster aid and military training, and allows
Filipinos to enter Israel visa free.
It “was like a rebirth,” documentary
filmmaker Noel Izon has said of the Jewish experience in the Philippines during
World War II. “They went from certain death to [the promise of] life.”
Which, metaphorically, kind of describes
what I’ve experienced in the Philippines as well. Though certainly never facing
death in America, being in the Philippines has indeed afforded me new life. It
is where I am raising my children. And it is where I feel most at home.
I have spoken often lately of a Jewish
religious obligation called “making Aliya,” an obligatory return to the land of
Israel before one dies. I have not yet done that. And yet, in some ways, I feel
like the Philippines is my Aliya. One day, after this war is over, my Filipino
wife and I will certainly visit Israel. For now, though, we are happy—as were
the Jews of a previous generation—to stay here in the promised land of these
welcoming Philippine shores. (David Haldane)
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