The Japanese Abraham | RealClearReligion
There’s a bestselling book by the psychologist Robert Cialdini titled Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In one point in this largely non-Jewish book, we are shown a photograph from 1941 of two rabbis from Eastern Europe who found themselves in front of the Japanese foreign ministry in Tokyo. They were two of the leaders from a group of thousands of yeshiva students who had been given transit visas by the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania. His name was Chiune Sugihara. The visas allowed the students to flee across Europe and Asia and land in Kobe, Japan. Two of them were my maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik. …
Kotsuji was truly an Asian Jew: From Tokyo to Jerusalem is not published under the name Setsuzo Kotsuji, but rather Abraham Kotsuji, the name he would ultimately adopt in converting to Judaism. This is apt, as one of the mesmerizing themes of the book is how his own life mirrors that of Abraham, and how his heroism allows for the Abrahamic journeys of so many others to come to fruition. Discovering Kotsuji’s story has given me a better understanding of my own Abrahamic familial identity.
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