Behind the Headlines Jewish Landmarks in China Gone but Scholarship, Music Flourish

In 1946, the year after the end of World War II. perhaps as many as 40,000 Jews lived in China. Mainly engaged in commerce and industry and a considerable number in cultural pursuits, particularly music more than half were in Shanghai and the remainder mostly in Tsientsin and Harbin, the latter a major point of entry for Jews who fled from Hitlerism via the trans-Siberian railway into China.

Today, Jewish landmarks are almost completely non-existent. Among the estimated 900 million Chinese, perhaps a dozen identifiable Jews remain. Of these, the American Joint Distribution Committee assists five elderly Jews in Shanghai and a woman in Canton. Other Jews include several in the Chinese government service in Peking and some with Chinese spouses who reportedly are not recognized as Jews.

In the Chinese government is Israel “Eppi” Epstein, a native of China who emigrated to Canada and returned to China. He is in the Foreign Language Press in Peking, as is Sidney Shapiro. Others are Solomon Adler, who was a U.S. Treasury representative in Chungking during World War II. and David Knik a teacher in the Foreign Language Institute.

Present in China are young American Jews such as Tom Gold, of Cincinnati, Ohio, a Harvard exchange scholar in Shanghai; and Margo Landman, of New York, who teaches English at the university near the industrial city of Tsientsin. Violinist Isaac Stern gave concerts in Chinese cities last summer. The historian Barbara Tuchman became a leading authority on Sino-American relations during World War.

Numerous Jews visit the People’s Republic of China as tourists and as specialists in their fields, such as social work and medicine. Of some statistical interest is that this past summer the first tour organized by a Washington travel company founded and directed by a Chinese, consisted of a group of 20 Americans in which there were II Jews, including this correspondent. A gastronomical element is that two of them stuck grimly to vegetables in a determined effort to be as kosher as possible. Three others avoided park which was a staple of every meal in some form.

JEWS IN CHINA 1000 YEARS AGO

Jews are known to have lived in China more than 1000 years ago. Yale Oriental Professor Kenneth Scott Latourette in his book, “The Chinese – Their. History and Culture” published in 1943, mentions Jews three times. “In the ninth century,” wrote Latourette, “we hear of Nestorian Christians, Jews, Moslems and Persians in Canton.” Reporting foreign influence of that period, Latourette noted that “Jews there were in China of the Tang?(dynasty) but probably few in number and all merchants. The Jewish community in Honan which disappeared only in our own day was of much later origin.”

Foreign merchants, Latourette wrote, were encouraged to come to China. They seem mostly to have been Moslem Arabs. Many of them married Chinese women. A colony of Jews which has been finally absorbed into the surrounding population only in our own day built a synagogue at K’aifeng. “Honan province is roughly half-way between Peking and Shanghai.

WAVES OF IMMIGRATION, EMIGRATION

After the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, some Russian Jews emigrated to China but the largest migration of Jews come with the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany. By 1939, almost half of Shanghai’s Western population of about 60,000 was Jewish. Among them was the former Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal, whose parents brought him as a youngster from Berlin to escape the Nazis.

By 1949, nearly all the Jews had departed, many leaving behind businesses and industries with legal claims that are not yet settled. China had become embroiled in a bitter civil struggle and those of Western influence or origin were in jeopardy. But anti-Semitism as such apparently never existed in China and the casual tourist today detects none.

R. D. Abraham, Chief Rabbi of China was quoted by the Jewish Student Press Service last May as saying in 1956 that “the government and people of China have for centuries been sympathetic and tolerant towards our people. Never has there been anti-Jewish sentiment in China.”

VIRTUALLY NO TRACE OF JEWISH EXISTENCE

Today, the visitor to China finds virtually no trace of Jewish existence. In Shanghai, Arthur Rosen, a retired Foreign Service Officer who is now president of the National Committee on U.S. -China Relations with offices in New York, has reported that there were three main synagogues — two Sephardic and one Ashkenazic with Russian congregants. In addition, a small Polish Jewish synagogue stood in the ghetto near Soochow Creek. Some halls, this correspondent was told on his visit, also were used for services on High Holidays and a Jewish school functioned in Seymour Road north of Nanjing (Nanking) Road, a principal artery. The Jewish Club, in the western section of Shanghai, is now a conservatory, it was said.

All that remains of these structures are traces of a Sephardic synagogue said to have been a magnificent three-story structure. It is now used for commercial storage. It is just off the Bund skirting the Huangpoo River between the “Peace” Hotel and the Friendship Store in the heart of Shanghai. These traces consist of three seven-light candelabra on one pillar and a fourth on another beneath a round roof typical of Sephardic synagogal architecture. Gold, who accompanied some visitors to this site, said he heard there are remains of the synagogue in Shanghai’s Huqui Road but he has not seen them.

China’s cultural revolution that came in the wake of the civil war destroyed architectural manifestations of virtually all religious shrines. Among the few that escaped is the triple-towered French Catholic cathedral, locked and unused, that looms conspicuously in the Tsientsin landscape.

TWO JEWISH CEMETERIES GONE

Shanghai had two Jewish cemeteries, but neither now exists. Miss Talitha Gerlach, a spirited octogenarian originally from Pittsburgh who has lived and worked in China since 1926, described to this reporter what happened to them. One is now the small triangular People’s Park in Nanjing Road. This cemetery had existed since about 1849 near the north border of the British international settlement. “Bodies were buried three deep there, ” Miss Gerlach said, “because it was a small plot and the

The larger cemetery, established after the large Jewish in flux of the Hitler period, was “a little north” of the Blumenthal home whose address she gave instantly from memory as 59 Chusen Rood in the area north and east of Soochow Creek, This ground no longer is used as a cemetery. Many of its gravestones, she said, have been moved to “another place.” The Shanghai city government, she said, has the names that were on the stones.

“After liberation, “Miss Cerlach recalled in speaking of the events after the present government took power, “the government cleared the cemeteries. Relatives with whom it was able to communicate were notified to instruct the committee in charge what to do with the bodies. An international cemetery was set up outside the city The Y. M. C. A. had such a plot. If a family wants a body, it will be shipped anywhere.”

Miss Gerlach said she is personally trying to trace the remains of a woman, Feige Freud, at the request of relatives. She died in July 1945. Her name was engraved on her tombstone in German and Hebrew along with the date of death.

Miss Gerlach, who has lived in Shanghai since 1930 when she came there to serve the Chinese Y. M. C. A., never left except for the period of the Sino-Japanese War. She now works for the China Welfare Institute.

CONTRIBUTION BY RUSSIAN EMIGRANTS

Discussing the influence of Shanghai’s Western population, she emphasized the contribution to the cultural life of the city, especially in music, by the Russian emigrants. There were no Chinese musicians in the original Shanghai municipal orchestra. “The members were all foreigners, she recalled.

Now, Chinese authorities proudly show off their music classes to tourists. Chinese youths play Western-type instruments and do exceptionally well with the violin and, as tourists quickly learn, they delight in offering American and European melodies. It is of special interest that the leading dance orchestra of the pre-war period for many years was led by violinist Henry Nathan (Nathanowitz) who came from Scranton, pa.

Perhaps the most splendid of the many striking structures along Shanghai’s Bund is the landmark Heping (Peace) Hotel that was the acme of hotel architecture when it was completed in 1927 as the “Palace Hotel” by the famous British Jewish Sassoon family. The family’s Shanghai mansion is now the King-Kong Hotel. The Palace Hotel, with its pointed green roof of bronze, continues to be a showplace in Shanghai.

From its dining hall windows one looks out on the hundreds of cargo ships lining the Huangpu River. Once the most palatial hotel in the East, it has a dignity resembling those in Paris, London, Vienna and a few other European capitals. It was in the “Palace,” one understands, that the Nathan Orchestra performed and Chinese guests savored the smooth musical flow of the period that Chinese youngsters now perform so well.