Jakob Rosenfeld went from Vienna to Shanghai in 1939 as a Jewish refugee, and after seeing the Chinese persecuted by the Japanese army of occupation, the Austrian Jew decided to join Mao's New Fourth Army in 1941. He served in the Chinese Army ten years, attaining the rank of a general - or General Luo as he was known in China.

He became a legend as the young doctor on the frontlines, operating tirelessly on war wounded with only the light from a flashlight. He also waged his own war to improve hygiene and trained dozens of Chinese doctors in the methods of modern medicine.

"He was a great hero and a humanist, admired by the army and the population, who saved thousands of lives," China's ambassador to Austria, Lu Yonghua, told AFP in 2006.

Ho Feng-Shan was a Chinese diplomat in Vienna who risked his own life and career during World War II to save thousands of Jews. He served as the Chinese Consul General in Vienna from 1938 – 1940. Despite being ordered to desist by his supervisors, he remained steadfast in his principles and continued his extraordinary humanitarian efforts by facilitating the safe departure of thousands of Jews by issuing visas to the Chinese port city of Shanghai.

Zeev Jabotinsky, "An Open Letter to M. M. Vinaver", published in the St. Petersburg daily Ryetch, 1907:

“I never hid my banner and I will never try to hide it; I am a Zionist and I do not conceive of Jewish welfare outside of Zionism.

But I don't consider Jews in Russia as strangers or foreigners; our forefathers had been living in many regions of Russia hundreds of years before their present masters arrived there; we have contributed to Russia's economic development, we have created her flourishing commerce in the south-west, we have enlivened and enriched her border towns; our nation has sacrificed many maybe too many lives of our youth for her liberation.

George Washington is remembered in Jewish history for the letter he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island in August 1790. The letter is addressed to "the children of the stock of Abraham" and poetically quoted the Old Testament, vowing that the new government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."