“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” ~

When we speak of the heroes who were actively engaged in rescuing the Jewish people from persecution, and who were directly instrumental in helping to establish the modern State of Israel, it is easy to forget those who were the visionaries who prepared the way. Josiah Wedgwood IV was one of those visionaries.

Named after his grandfather, the founder of the world-renowned Wedgwood china business, it is also noteworthy that he was equally proud to bear the name of one of the most righteous kings of Israel.

Josiah Wedgwood was passionate about helping oppressed people everywhere, believing it was the God-ordained duty of every Englishman. He continually decried Great Britain’s turning a blind eye to the reality of Jewish persecution in Europe. Surprisingly, or not, his view was not necessarily shared by his peers in Parliament, especially when the oppressed were Jews. Joshua B. Stein wrote that, “It was his contention that wherever in the world Britain had a claim to influence events, it was her right and obligation to make sure that she did so.”

To that end, he campaigned tirelessly to change the status of the British Mandate of Palestine into a Crown Colony. But that was only the first part of his plan. His ultimate goal was to have Parliament create an independent Jewish dominion that would be a part of the British Empire. He published his proposal in 1928 in his book, The Seventh Dominion. In that book, he proposed that this course of action would result in the Jewish people bringing great prosperity to that long barren and forsaken region. In another of his books, Memoirs of a Fighting Life, he pleaded, “See to it that in Palestine you set up a land of idealism and altruism, a land of liberalism and freedom, not merely a land of the Jews.”

While promoting that, he also vigorously challenged restrictions limiting the immigration of Jews into Great Britain where, he hoped, that there, too, they would be free from persecution and be able to contribute to British society.

When he became frustrated with the resistance to his vision during World War I, he made a radio broadcast in which he implored the United States to take over the responsibility for the Mandate, because he believed that the British had lost the will and lacked the moral fortitude to administer it. Ultimately, the British withdrawal proved to the world that Wedgwood was right.

Wedgwood died in 1943 at the age of 70, so he never saw the realization of his vision.

Although most of what Wedgwood did to promote a Jewish state is lost in the pages of history, there are streets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as an Israeli Naval destroyer, that bear his name – an appropriate tribute to a Visionary of Zionism.

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British Visionary – Friend of Zion appeared first on Mike Evans Museum.

Another reason is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, was named after him. That is special.

The final reason is because we believe that his story should never be forgotten. That would be reprehensible.

Patterson was a staunch advocate of Zionism in a storied military career that included commanding the Zion Mule Corps, a contingent of 750 Jewish soldiers recruited from the Diaspora to fight in the Boer War and in World War I.

Two years after it was formed in 1915, the Mule Corps was expanded and, thereafter, was known as the Jewish Legion. Its five battalions consisted entirely of Jewish volunteers. The 38^th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers was comprised of Jews living in Great Britain and a number of Russian Jews who joined forces with the former Mule Corps members. The 39^th Battalion was made up of Jewish men from the U.S. and Canada. Palestinian Jews and former Jewish POWs held captive by the Ottomans became the 40^th Battalion. The 41^st and 42^nd Battalions completed the Legion, but were posted in England without seeing action.

The Jewish Legion fought in the Battle of Jerusalem in 1917 and the Battle of Megiddo in 1918. The Battle of Megiddo was the last, and decisive, Allied offensive thrust in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign under General Allenby. Patterson served as commander of the 38^th Battalion until his retirement in 1920. Perhaps his passion and vision for Zionism are best exemplified, not by what he said at the end of his career, but by what he said to his men on March 31, 1915 upon the formation of the Zion Mule Corps.

“‘Pray with me that I should not only, as Moses, behold Canaan from afar, but be divinely permitted to lead you into the Promised Land.”

His prayers were answered as he led his men in recapturing the Promised Land in a battle that was among those with the fewest Allied casualties in all of World War I.

Patterson served in the British military for 35 years until his retirement. There is no doubt that leading the Jewish Legion, the forerunner of the Israeli Defense Forces, was his greatest honor.

Following WWI, Patterson authored The Story of the Jewish Legion, somewhat of a companion piece for his previous books, With the Zionists at Gallipoli and With the Judeans in Palestine. Patterson successfully lobbied to raise funding for Zionist efforts after retiring to California.

He died in La Jolla on June 18, 1947, less than a year prior to the establishment of the nation of Israel, a day for which he had worked and prayed for an entire lifetime. According to his last wishes, Patterson’s ashes were brought to his beloved Zion and buried in an undisclosed location. This Museum is planted here for the very same reason that his ashes are. Because we love Israel.

In 2004, Patrick Streeter published Mad for Zion, A Biography of Colonel J.H. Patterson. His inspiring story is available at Amazon.com.

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It was only after his death in 1986 that his own country became aware of his heroic efforts; efforts that the government of Japan did not appreciate at the time they were taken.

Sugihara entered the service of the Japanese diplomatic corps in 1919. In 1939, just one year after being posted at Helsinki, Finland, he was reassigned to open a consulate in Lithuania. He was almost immediately confronted with a crisis. Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland displaced a massive wave of Jewish families seeking a safe haven in the only direction available to them – to the east. To the east meant travelling through Russia, but Russia would not allow the Jews to travel across the country without a valid transit visa.

In July 1940 Sugihara awoke one morning to the sounds of a crowd of several hundred Jews outside the consulate, pleading to secure Japanese transit visas.

Three times Sugihara appealed to the Japanese government to secure authorization to issue the necessary visas. His request was denied each time.

Realizing that the volume of visas required would be great and, most likely expecting to be denied permission to issue them, Sugihara began issuing them without authorization. He managed to hand write and stamp some 300 visas per day, a task that would not allow him to take breaks for meals and that left his hands painfully stiff at the end of the day. He continued this practice through the end of August, when he was ordered to leave his post.

Realizing the desperate need for the Jewish people to escape Hitler’s onslaught, he continued writing visas in the car on the way to the train station and on the platform while waiting for the train. Even after boarding the train, he wrote more visas, tossing them out of the window until the train began to depart. Then, as the train was leaving, he tossed the stamp that made the visas official into the crowd so the Jewish people could actually authenticate their own visas.

Following the war, Sugihara and his family were imprisoned by the Russians in an internment camp in Rumania. When released, he returned home to find that he had been dismissed by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. His ignominy forced him into a life of abject poverty, although he eventually worked his way out of it by taking a job in Moscow that allowed him to see his family in Japan only twice a year. Because he saw no reason to glory in what he had done, he became just another obscure person. Yet, the last words he heard from the Jews on the railway platform in Lithuania rang in his ears: “We will never forget you!”

They remained true to their word. He had not realized that he had helped 6,000 Jews to escape. Nor did he realize that those people never forgot him. After years of searching, Nishri was able to locate him, sharing with him the news of the numbers he had saved. Sugihara visited Israel in for the first time in 1969. He was greeted by the Israeli Minister of Religion, Zerach Warheftig, another of the Sugihara Survivors.

Sugihara was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, one year before his death. Even with this great honor, his story remained unknown in Japan – until his funeral was attended by an unusually large delegation of Jews from around the world. This simple, humble, honorable man would probably be embarrassed to know that today there are monuments erected in his honor in Kaunus, Lithuania, the location of his consulate, and in Yaotsu, Japan, the town where he was born.

He was just a man who wanted to do the right thing. His commitment to righteousness was ordinary to him, but heroic in the eyes of the Jewish people and the world.

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Born in Belgium in 1941, Josef Mendelvich was one of the millions of Jews who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Nazis were intent on implementing Hitler’s Final Solution. Yossi survived the war in the care of a Christian family. Following the war he made Aliyah to the new nation of Israel with his mother. His father had perished at Auschwitz. But, not only did he come to Israel, he became as much of Israel as anyone could hope to be, helping to share the country into what it is today.

Yossi spent 30 years in the IDF, including being a company commander in the Six-Day War, a battalion commander during the War of Attrition, a brigade commander in the Yom Kippur War and, later, a division commander in the Sinai. He rose to the position of Aluf – the second highest rank in the IDF, akin to Major General – of the Northern Command, a position subsequently held by current IDF chief, Benny Gantz.

While it is tempting to speak of life after retirement from the military, Yossi has never really retired. He has just continued to keep on working for the success of the nation of Israel and the Zionist cause. Following stints as CEO of Tadiran Telecom and the Second Israel Broadcasting Authority, Yossi decided to enter politics as a member of the Likud party, becoming Minister without Portfolio from 2009 through March 2013. Most recently, he has been Chairman of the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. He has spent much of his professional and personal time providing assistance to Holocaust survivors living in Israel.

Yossi Peled is a fine representative of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. We are proud to have him represent the Friends of Zion.

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On her 100th birthday she said, “I am one hundred years old now. That is an admirable age, and I have even reached it in fairly good health. So then, it’s fair to say ‘You’ve been fortunate,’ and being fortunate seems to be the red thread running through my life.”

At an earlier date she declared that she stood, “at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more – much more – during those dark and terrible times years ago. But, always, like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness, never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.”

Miep was Austrian by birth. At the age of eleven, Herminie Santrouschitz was taken-in temporarily by a family in the Netherlands as part of a program to help the Austrian people recover from the destruction of World War I. As it turned out, it was decided, the situation being what it was, that Herminie – or Miep, as she was called in Holland – should remain in the Dutch family’s care. That turned out to be both fortuitous and sufferable.

She was fortunate to meet her future husband, Jan Gies, at work before she was laid off and took another job at the Opetka Company in Amsterdam. She and Jan became good friends with the owner of the company and his family. Over a short period of time, things turned ugly again in Europe as the Nazi regime in Germany set out to conquer the world and annihilate the Jews. Miep was fortunate to be living in Amsterdam rather than in her homeland of Austria. It seemed like the Netherland’s neutrality would keep it safe from Hitler’s madness.

As it turned out, that was only an illusion. Germany stormed the Netherlands and began to implement Hitler’s Final Solution there, just as it had elsewhere. Some Jews fled the continent. Others, like Miep’s boss, hid. Miep and Jan brought food and other necessities to his family to provide for their sustenance whilst in hiding. She risked her life, using her lunch break to make her daily deliveries. She knew that, should they be found or she be caught, they would all be subject to the same fate. Unfortunately, the family was eventually found and sent to their miserable fate. Only the father was saved alive. As for Miep and Jan, no one was the wiser.

After the war, Miep said that, “I am not a hero. More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.” Any righteous person would do the same.

Her kindness extended beyond helping her boss’ family. After the family had been taken, she visited the place where they had been hiding to gather up their personal effects and deliver them to her boss, Otto Frank. Among those belongings were the diaries of Otto’s daughter, Anne, which would eventually tell a small part of the story of the persecution of the Jews during World War II. Little did Miep know, when she handed those diaries to her boss, how many lives would be changed by a simple act of kindness.

All Miep knew was that, “It was not enough.”

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Among the tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews that Wallenberg is credited with rescuing was a young boy named Tom Lantos, who eventually became a U.S. congressman. It was he who sponsored Wallenberg’s honorary U.S. citizenship. He wrote, “During the Nazi occupation, this heroic, young diplomat left behind the comfort and safety of Stockholm to rescue his fellow human beings in the hell that was wartime Budapest. He had little in common with them. He was a Lutheran; they were Jewish. He was a Swede; they were Hungarians. And yet, with inspired courage and creativity, he saved the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children by placing them under the protection of the Swedish crown.”

After having spent several years working in South Africa and in Haifa, he returned to Sweden where his business travels took him throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, including France, Germany and Hungary. During those trips, he became aware of the cruel treatment of the Jews under the Nazi regime. In June 1944 he was inserted into the growing crisis in Hungary, ostensibly as the leader of the Swedish legation there, but with a directive to help rescue Jews whose extermination was being planned by Adolph Eichmann. By the time he arrived, nearly half of the Hungarian Jewish population had already been transported to concentration camps.

Despite an original plan to extract as many as 700 Jews by use of diplomatic passes, and moving with a passion that far outweighed that of Eichmann, Wallenberg managed to rescue 120,000 Jews, more than half the remaining population, from Eichmann’s dastardly plans. Before he left Sweden, he had appealed to the highest levels of the Swedish parliament and to the monarchy to gain permission to have a free hand to take whatever actions he saw fit, without the encumbrance of bureaucratic interference. That permission was granted, and he took full advantage of it.

Raoul Wallenberg was far more than a paper-pusher. He personally intervened on behalf of the Jewish people and directly interfered with Eichmann’s plan. He hired hundreds of “employees” and hid hundreds more in “Swedish libraries.” He built houses, outside of which were hung Swedish flags, and which he declared to be Swedish territory in which hundreds more were hidden.

His heroism and his cause were publically evident when he would run atop already loaded railcars, stuffing diplomatic passes that exempted the bearers from being relocated. He would then demand that the soldiers open the doors and release into his custody any who had a pass in their possession. It is said that, when the German soldiers were ordered to shoot him as he ran across the cars, they deliberately aimed high in admiration for his courage.

In January 1945, Wallenberg was escorted by the Russian military to an unknown destination. Before he left, he told an associate that he was unsure whether he was going as a guest or as a prisoner. He was never heard from again.

We may never know the rest of the story, but we do know this, that “there is no greater love than a man who would lay down his life for his friends.” Be it known, by the compassion and actions of Raoul Wallenberg and thousands like him, then and today, that there are many righteous among the nations who are friends to the Jews.

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Understandably, his heart was broken by the atrocities that he had personally witnessed beginning to unfold perpetrated on the Jewish people in his Polish homeland. But this was not his greatest heartache nor the one that inflicted the greatest personal pain. It was the one that he called the Second Original Sin. He did not mean the Holocaust. He was referring to the, “self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy or heartless rationalization,” that caused his mission to fail.

Karski’s mission was not to save a Jew. It was not even to save some Jews. It was to save all of them. He said, “The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war, when – as it seemed to me – it might help. It did not.” Therein was his heartache. Having seen first-hand how the Jewish people were suffering under the Gestapo in Warsaw, he understood that nothing would stop Hitler from completing his Final Solution, unless it came from outside the countries over which he had control. He determined to expose the travesty to the entire world.

At great peril to himself and those who helped, he made his way across Europe in 1942 to Great Britain and, ultimately, to the United States intending to appeal to the highest levels of leadership for the help the Jews so desperately needed. Indeed, he was received by some of the most influential people in both countries, where he produced graphic and startling evidence “exceeding everything fantasy can picture.”

In Washington D.C., he met with President Roosevelt’s closest Jewish advisors. Those meetings were where his heart was crushed. Despite being politely received, he found that, almost without exception, his words had fallen upon deaf ears, even to the extent that Felix Frankfurter, himself a Jew and a Supreme Court Justice, told Karski, “I am unable to believe you.”

It is difficult to imagine the frustration of the messenger whose report would not be believed and whose hopes were miserably dashed. But, if there could be a horror more imaginable than the Holocaust itself, it might have been the one that Karski ultimately suffered when he read the news reports after the war that “the governments, the leaders, the scholars, did not know what had been happening to the Jews. They were taken by surprise. The murder of six million innocents was a secret.”

Karski, on a mission to warn the world and save the Jews from unspeakable abominations, came to understand how many of the Old Testament prophets agonized when no one would listen. The more he tried, the more he was rebuffed, but the more he also learned to love the Jewish people.

In his later years, Karski called himself a Christian Jew. His wife’s entire Jewish family died in the concentration camps. Karski’s love for the Jewish people endured as long as he lived.

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