Jews, Japanese Americans Meet to Promote Racial Tolerance : Culture: Two groups that faced wartime persecution and the struggles of assimilation gather at a seminar in Bel-Air. Speakers cite the need to unify against oppression.

Solly Ganor was dying.

Two-thirds of the 15,000 Jews who had suddenly been evacuated from Bavaria’s Dachau concentration camp seven days earlier on a “death march” retreat in May, 1945, had already died along the way. Anyone who had stumbled and fallen was shot; the German guards encouraged their dogs to tear them apart.

And now the 17-year-old Ganor had tripped and fallen. Suddenly, though, as he lay in snow from a freak storm, expecting to be shot, a hand wiped snow from his face, and he saw an unfamiliar face, an Asian face. Clarence Matsumura of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion had come upon the 5,000 dying Jews. The battalion, a segregated Japanese American unit, had overrun the Germans, who were marching the Jews into the Bavarian Alps.

“My parents are in an internment camp in America,” Matsumura later told Ganor after seeing dead Jews piled like cordwood at Dachau. Matsumura and many others in the battalion had volunteered for the military from the Heart Mountain, Wyo., internment camp. It was one of 10 outposts in the United States where 120,000 Japanese Americans--dubbed “dangerous enemy aliens” by the U.S. government--were held during World War II.

On Sunday, Ganor, who lives in La Jolla, and Matsumura’s widow, Joon, of Yorba Linda, joined about 250 other Jews and Japanese Americans at an all-day seminar at the Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel-Air to talk about the similarities these two groups share--particularly in promoting tolerance--in a city rife with racial strife. (The Los Angeles region has the highest combined number of people of Jewish and Japanese ancestries in the world.)

“It’s critical that we know about each other. . . . In law enforcement, we could have saved a lot of lawsuits if our officers had known more about cultural differences in the past,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky at the event, sponsored by the Holocaust Oral History Project in San Francisco. “This is as important for an LAPD officer as teaching them how to use a gun.”

Ticking off what binds the two groups together, Jewish historian Eric Saul cited, “Education. Honoring your parents. Staying out of trouble. Being an oppressed minority. Wanting to assimilate and yet be unique at the same time.”

And both groups went compliantly into camps in World War II, he added.

Ganor, now 66, came to learn more about a people who had saved his life. “They are a very silent people compared to the Jews,” he mused. “To them, bragging is a bad thing.”

Ganor had never set eyes on an Asian until 1939, when, at age 11, he raced to his aunt’s gourmet deli in Lithuania to collect his Hanukkah gift--some money. In the shop was “a man with a striped suit and slanted eyes,” Ganor remembered. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul to Lithuania, was later dubbed the “Japanese Schindler” for helping up to 6,000 Jews get transit visas to Japan, escaping the Nazi death camps.

But he could not help Ganor. As the war began, Ganor fled from town to town as thousands of Jews were corralled into synagogues and burned alive. At 13, he was captured, with his mother and sister, and sent to a Lithuanian ghetto, and ultimately, to Dachau’s outer camp, Landsberg. Working for nine months--12 hours a day on 400 calories--Ganor was put to work building massive underground factories. When friends fell into fresh concrete, work didn’t stop, and they were entombed alive.

In 1945, as American troops approached Dachau, Ganor and the 15,000 remaining Jews were forced on a death march toward the Bavarian mountains.

On the seventh day, the Germans suddenly ran off. “You are free now, don’t be afraid,” Matsumura told him. The soldiers spent three days carrying the half-dead Jews to an American camp. Matsumura, Ganor remembered, cried as he noted how the barracks at Dachau seemed so much like those he had left his parents in, at the American internment camp in Wyoming.

Over the next several days, Matsumura described to Ganor how, in the months after Pearl Harbor, his family had been forced to give up its Los Angeles grocery store and two cars; its bank accounts were frozen. The Matsumuras were given numbered tags--no names--and sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp, behind barbed wire and guard towers.

When the military came to the camp to recruit for the Japanese American unit, Matsumura volunteered. “They realized they were fighting a war against prejudice,” said historian Saul, who interviewed Matsumura before his death this year.

“I’m so moved,” said Joon Matsumura, watching the slide presentation of the Japanese Americans liberating the Jews.

Mayer Wolfe, 70, another Jew who was rescued by the Japanese Americans, said: “It would be nice if these groups could get together and know each other.”