Filipino love

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, whom 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 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. There were—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. 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 faced 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’s latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon and Lazada. A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he is an award-winning journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Surigao City.)