Recounting El Salvador's Holocaust rescue

It was an unlikely friendship between a Jewish businessman from Romania and a Salvadoran diplomat that paved the way for a little-known rescue mission to save an estimated 30,000 Jews from the Holocaust.

The story of that lifesaving bond, forged in the years leading up to World War II, was honored Sunday at a Great Neck synagogue.

Col. Jose Arturo Castellanos, El Salvador's consul general in Geneva in the 1930s, at the urging of his friend George Mandel-Mantello, issued Salvadoran citizenship certificates to the European Jewish families. The move allowed the families to assume Salvadoran citizenship and escape the fate of 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

Mandel himself was saved by a diplomatic passport issued to him after Castellanos appointed him first secretary of the consulate. He then added the Salvadoran-sounding surname of Mantello.

"It's an important part of human history that relates our communities," Salvadoran vice consul Miguel Alas Sevillano said Sunday at Temple Israel of Great Neck, where an audience of about 300 gathered to learn about the rescue mission.

Ina Soep Polak, 89, of Eastchester, a Dutch Holocaust survivor whose family received one of the Salvadoran documents, said she had no idea that paperwork had saved her family until she unearthed the certificate in her father's belongings in 1980.

Polak said she hoped her story would influence younger generations. "We want to better our young people. Old people know all about the Holocaust," she said. "It's the young people who should be aware."

Beth Lilach, of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, said, "This certificate truly stood for life for her as it did for so many other European Jews. Without a certificate, she would have ended up like the others in Bergen-Belsen," the Nazi concentration camp in Germany.

The rescue effort is the focus of the 2006 documentary "Glass House," a portion of which was shown Sunday.

"It's a very little country," Leo Herrera, 50, a West Babylon resident who is Salvadoran with Jewish roots, said of El Salvador. "We're not a powerful country. We're not a nuclear country. But we have guts."

Not enough people know of the historical ties between the Salvadoran and Jewish communities, speakers said.

Omar Henriquez, 55, a Long Beach resident who is Salvadoran, said, "I hope this starts a conversation so we can live together." Henriquez pointed out that Jews have, in turn, given to the Salvadoran community, citing one Jewish philanthropist who donated $9 million to build a hospital in El Salvador.

Loud applause erupted after David Newman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Long Island, turned to Sevillano and said, "On behalf of the Jewish community, thank you for the leadership of your predecessors."