LEE SAUNDERS: Fourteen times bigger than Israel and with a population of over 110 million, the Philippines has always punched its weight as a hospitable nation for the Jewish community going back to the time of the Spanish Inquisition. In the 1940s, as Nazi atrocities grew in Europe and at the request of Manila's Jewish community, the Philippine government issued visas. While many countries were turning away Jewish refugees, this small tropical island nation not yet even yet fully independent from the US was willing to absorb them.
בְנֵי־לֹ֣וט
Bnei Lot are of an ancient origin. In the migratory tradition of Ruth begun more than two millennia ago, a remnant of David and Solomon migrated into Maritime Southeast Asia which comprises what is now Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, The Philippines, and Singapore, as well as Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, with a sizeable minority of Malays migrating back to their tribal allotments in Sephardic Judah, besides Terrestrial and Figurative Jordan.