A group of 306 Jewish refugees trapped in Shanghai during the Chinese civil war were permitted this week-end to leave for the United States and Canada and sailed aboard the S.S. General Gordon, it was announced today by the Joint Distribution Committee, whose director in Shanghai arranged for the repatriation of the DP’s.
Of the contingent, 125 refugees will come to the United States where they will be met upon their landing at San Francisco by representatives of the United Service for New Americans. The remaining evacuees will go to Canada where they will be housed and cared for by the Canadian Jewish Congress. The majority of this group will remain in Canada on a permanent basis. Others are bound for Israel or for future repatriation to their native lands, particularly Austria.
Dr. Simon Bergman, director of the Hospital of the Joint Distribution Committee in Shanghai, who arrived in this country recently after eight years in the Far East, reported today that “all Jewish communities in China are facing extinction.”
There are no more than 5,000 Jews left in China today of a total of 20,000 who resided there in 1945, he reported at a meeting of the executive of the World Confederation of General Zionists. The Jews, he said, are concentrated in Shanghai, Harbin, Dairon, Tientsin, and in several smaller cities.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
