An interview with Dvir Bar-Gal on August, 21, 2024
Expert for the Jewish History of Shanghai
A Chance Find Leads To Two Decades Of Heritage Commitment
“I came to Shanghai from Sri Lanka, where I used to work for Israeli television during the 1990s first as a cameraman and then as the director of short features. I moved to Shanghai to cover September 11, 2001 at which time the Israeli media did not have many journalists in China. So I worked as a freelance journalist, studied Chinese, and during the course of my study, began to take an interest in the Jewish heritage tours run by an Israeli woman at the consulate there, Georgia Noy.
Soon after I met Georgia, she brought me a story she thought would be of interest to Israeli viewers about an antique shop in Shanghai selling Jewish gravestones. At the beginning, I did not think it would be interesting for me as a TV maker – I had previously shot a story in Sofia, Bulgaria, about Jewish cemeteries in bad condition and it didn’t make the headlines in Israel. But then Georgia explained to me that Shanghai used to have four Jewish cemeteries. And later I learned that there were about 3,700 Jewish graves! This was in the late 1940’s at the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and none of them exist in the city today. We’re talking about four cemeteries, with close to 4000 Jewish graves all disappearing from the ground!
After China reopened to the west, I would say from the late 1990s to 2000 people started to contact Georgia and they contacted the Chabad rabbi in Shanghai looking for the burial places of their ancestors, yet nobody could tell them what had happened to them, or even what to look for. Georgia and I went to the antique shop, and from there began to explore the story. Our research took us outside Shanghai to Qingpu District, which is today part of the city, but in 2001 was a village area on the outskirts.
There, we started to find and collect Jewish gravestones. People were using them as wash boards, stepping stones and as construction material. Although it was not my intention when I first came to Shanghai, for the last 23 years I have been trying to locate as many Jewish gravestones as I can find. Then with a few grants, I developed a project to collect as many I could collect with a goal of preserving them in a memorial site in the city. 23 years later, most of these gravestones are in a storage facility far from the city and the government still hasn’t given us permission to build a memorial site. So even today, this project is on the go in the hope that one day we will be able to do something more proper with the lost Jewish gravestones that I have found.
Through the process of doing journalistic research into the lost cemeteries, I learned much more about the Jewish history of Shanghai. And then about a year and a half after we met, when Georgia left to go back to Israel, she asked me if I would like to help run her tours. That kept me busy from 2002 to Covid in 2020. Thanks to Imperial Tours and others from around 400 visitors per year that Georgia had when she left, I grew this business almost 10 times the size.
One of the reasons I have come to find the whole story fascinating is because in Israel, the story of Shanghai is completely unknown.
The First Wave Of Baghdadi Jewish Opium Traders to Shanghai (1840’s – 1890’s)
On my tours, I give a lot more information about the Opium War, but in brief, there were three major Jewish immigrations to Shanghai, and the first one was right after the Opium War in the middle of the 19th century. The Brits won over China in 1842 and took small city ports for themselves. Shanghai was one of them. Following that, a Jewish community started to develop, mostly of originally Baghdadi Jews who came via India. They lived in India already, and expanded their business from there to Shanghai. Most of it was based on opium trading. We’re talking about a very small community centred around the Sassoon family, who used to have a huge conglomerate trading between the Far East and England with trading posts from Singapore to Manila to Rangoon in Burma, Kobe, Japan and so on. After the Sassoons opened their offices across the Far East, they started to bring other people they knew from Baghdad or Bombay to work for them, and with that, a Jewish community, mostly Baghdadi in origin, established itself in Shanghai. It stayed small, but very, very rich… very wealthy.
One cannot underestimate how much they contributed to the way that Shanghai developed to be what it is today. Many of today’s landmarks, like the Fairmont Peace Hotel, which used to be called the Cathay Hotel, built by Sir Viktor Sassoon… many of these impressive landmarks are still standing today, but not just these. Even the roads and districts, the main road in Shanghai, Nanjing Road… it’s really hard to underestimate what the Baghdadi Jewish community built. And they were never more than 1000 people.
They built two synagogues. One is Ohel Raquel and one is Beta Haron, of which Ohel Rahel is still standing today. The Sassoon family built it. Beta Haron, unfortunately, was destroyed in 1997. The major names of this community will be the Sassoon’s whom I mentioned before, the Kadoorie family, who still exist with big businesses in the Far East (including the Peninsula Hotels), maybe the only Baghdadi Jewish family from this wave that still impacts the Far East. There was also the Hardoon family, the Sofer, the Ezra, the Abraham family. We’re talking about the movers and the shakers of Shanghai in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Second Wave Of Jewish Immigration Was From Russia (1890’s to 1930’s)
In the early 20th century, there were so many good reasons for Ashkenazi Russian Jews to emigrate as soon as they could. An official program of antisemitism came from the Tsar himself. He forced many of the male Jews from the age of 14 to serve in his army. Many of them, if they did not shoot themselves in the leg to avoid conscription, tried to emigrate to other countries. Soon after came the pogroms in the Vale of Settlements and in all the shtetl and so there were a lot of good reasons for Jews to leave Russia. They went all over the world, to South Africa, to England, to America, but they also came to China.
When they went to China, they did not need to take any boat. They came over the trains on Siberian railways from the west to the east, and then either directly or via the city of Harbin in Manchuria, where there was also a large Jewish community for a time, they took trains down south to Shanghai, which soon developed to be a cosmopolitan city in the early 20th century. The Russian Jewish community grew between the 1890’s to the 1930’s to almost 6000 people. That was 6 times more than the Baghdadi community. And obviously, as soon as they grew in numbers, they opened their own establishments.
They opened their own synagogue, and as happened everywhere in the world, they lived apart from the Sephardi Jewish community. They had their own life and culture, etc. Many of them moved into apartment buildings in the French Concession. The wealthy Baghdadi Jews, if they lived in the French concession, lived in big mansions, but the Russians lived in nice apartment buildings. Although some had small shops, they were less into business and more into the professions, so many of them were doctors and lawyers and teachers and writers, musicians like the head of the Philharmonic of Shanghai.
I would say that if they can claim to have helped the development of Shanghai, that this would be in these types of occupations: in education, medicine, culture and so on. Shanghai is famous for both jazz and classical music, and many of the early 20th century Chinese musicians learned their skills first from the Russian Jews and then from the third community that we will come to discuss, the musicians from Austria running away from the Holocaust.
The Third Wave – Jews Fleeing The Holocaust (1938 – 1942)
The third Jewish community was in Shanghai the shortest time, eight years on average. That’s all, but they make the story of the usefulness of Shanghai more known today. We’re talking about a big group of refugees that arrived in Shanghai just before and during the Second World War. The third wave starts from the Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass – an overnight pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria) in November 1938 until ‘42 so arriving within three or four years and staying until after the war and the communist revolution.
This third community peaks at the height of the war in Europe after the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews, has already started. They come from Germany and Austria mostly, and later from Poland. There were also some Hungarian Jews and some Czechs, but it was mostly a German-Austrian immigration. The reason why they arrived from Europe was, obviously, that there was antisemitism there. And the second reason is that there were no other places in the world that would admit them in those days. Countries had their own waters and restrictions, and they didn’t want to accept Jewish immigration.
The Righteous Gentiles (Non-Jews Who Helped Jews Escape The Holocaust)
Chiune Sugihara
I don’t want to get into it in depth here. You have to join a tour for that, but there are some Righteous Gentiles in this history – mostly diplomats – who supported Jewish people leaving Europe, and their route brought them to Shanghai. One of them was a Japanese Consul, Sugihara, a Japanese person in Kovno, Lithuania, who issued more than 2,100 “laisser passer” – not visas – but transit papers. They permitted Polish Jews, who had run away from Poland to Lithuania, to go to Russia and take the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to the east, a week-long journey, and to cross from there to live in Kobe in Japan.
Before Pearl Harbour, the Japanese government was not in favor that these foreigners should come to them and they actually cabled Sugihara twice to stop, but he kept doing that. The Japanese did not want these foreigners and the people helped by Sugihara had to leave Japan, and most of them, not all, but most of them arrived in Shanghai. After Pearl Harbour, more or less the last group of Jewish people who came to Shanghai were the people who came with Sugihara papers, and we are talking about a few thousand of them.
Dr Feng Shan Ho
Another Righteous Gentile was Dr Ho, a Chinese consul in Vienna, Austria. He also issued a few thousand transit papers to allow mostly Viennese Jews to leave Austria. They did not take the train to Shanghai, but went down to Italy. The vast majority of these immigrants came in 1937-38, right after the Kristallnacht, and went by train to Genoa and Trieste in Italy, and from there they embarked on ships. They went on the Mediterranean Sea, passing the Suez Canal. The ship stopped in many ports in Asia, like Manila, Singapore and Hong Kong, but the Jews were not permitted to stay in those countries. So the ships docked in the one open port, Shanghai, where everyone could come in. If you had a ticket on a boat to Shanghai, you were free to walk in. When the people in Europe realized that, although Shanghai was not the dream of any Jewish person in Europe to emigrate to, when they realized this is one place they can go to and they had no other choice, many of them started to seek a way to Shanghai. The total immigration of this third wave is about 18,000 Jewish people.
Penniless Jews Arrive In Shanghai During The War
When many of these people left Europe they were permitted to take with them only 10 Reichsmarks. They had two suitcases in their hands and 10 Reichsmarks in their pockets, which was about three and a half dollars. That was the amount of money the Germans allowed them to leave Europe with. We’re talking about people from the middle class of Europe, doctors and lawyers and engineers – the type of occupations that Ashkenazi Jews occupied in Europe in those days. They all became extremely poor the moment they touched the ground of Shanghai looking for a place to stay.
The Jewish communities and organizations already in Shanghai tried to deal with this situation. They tried to find communal housing for them, to register them properly and to give them support until they could find work and rent somewhere or until they could move them to another shelter. They had a soup kitchen and other daily support to keep them alive.
You can only imagine the chaotic Shanghai they were moving into: Chinese poor mostly, and rain, and the heat of the summer, combined with invaders from Japan at that time, soldiers and others, and with many other foreigners, from the French in the French concession, Russian immigration, all the Portuguese, Spanish and the Italians that were in the city, and now you have these people with no money at all who needed to start their life from scratch in an exotic, wild city like Shanghai. You can imagine the culture shock and the economic gap.
Japanese Herd Some Jews Into a Kind of Ghetto
A few years later, under the influence of the Nazis, the Japanese, who occupied Shanghai, published a proclamation. It came in February ‘42. This proclamation stated that all the stateless people of Shanghai who arrived after 1937 must move to live in a certain area that they called by the name of the streets. It’s called the Hongkou district today, a poor neighbourhood by the river, a neighbourhood of immigrants and poor Chinese. The Jews who came after ‘37 had to live in this neighbourhood without the ability to be in other parts of the city.
Many people immediately think that this was a ghetto, and it was a ghetto but nothing like what we know from Europe. First of all, the Japanese proclamation referred to stateless people who came to Shanghai after 1937. All the Russian Jews, the Baghdadi Jews or any of the Ashkenazi Jews who came to Shanghai before 1937 were not forced by this proclamation to live in that neighbourhood. Also, it was not a ghetto because they never built a wall around it. If you were caught without proper papers in other parts of the city you would get in trouble. That was the essence of it. There were Japanese soldiers at checkpoints all over the city where you needed to show papers, for example to cross the garden bridge into Hongkou, and if you didn’t have the right papers you shouldn’t be there.
They had to stay in the neighbourhood but within it they could keep life going which meant that if you came early you might open a barbers’ or a tailor’s shop or a bakery. It was actually called “little Vienna” in Shanghai because there were so many Viennese-style coffee houses, opened by German Austrian immigrants to cater to everyone beside Chinese, because the Chinese did not sit to drink Viennese coffee and eat strudel. They hoped that other foreigners would come to enjoy their strudel. However, their own community could not afford to eat strudel. They were really poor to the end of the war.
At the height of this period, there were 25 – 30,000 Jews in Shanghai in Shanghai in those days.
Jews Leave After The War
The Americans dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and the Japanese surrendered. For a while, after the Americans came with their ships into Shanghai, they asked the Japanese forces to keep order so that there would not be chaos in the city, but that was only for about 10 days or two weeks. Right after the Americans took control of Shanghai, they started to give jobs to anyone who could speak English. Many of the more educated refugees who could speak English were able to earn ten times what they were making before.
Soon after, China fell into a civil war and people started to realise that Mao Ze Dong and his people were taking more parts of China and so the Jews started to leave. The first to leave were the refugees who came the last, because they had never really seen Shanghai as their home. They had run to Shanghai because they had no other options, and when other options started to open, mostly America and Australia, as soon as they could get visas they would leave. The Russian Jews who had small businesses didn’t want to start somewhere else but they knew Communism from Russia and they definitely didn’t want to stay under Communism and so at about the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution the majority of the Russian and the Baghdadi Jews had left.
I would say that by the time of the Communist Revolution in 1949 about 80% of the 25,000 Jews had already gone. Then, it all dissolved in 1952. Ohel Rachel, the synagogue that the Sassoons built was active until that time, and then the Communists put a picture of Mao Ze Dong over the Jewish ark and sealed the doors because they were against religion. After that, there was almost no Jewish Community.
To be exact, there were still some people living there in 1957. When they published a small community booklet at that time, there were about 70 people. So, within about 9 years, a community of 25,000 was reduced to 70 people. The Joint Distribution Committee contributed some money to who was left. These were mixed families of Chinese and Jewish people, but by the 1960’s there were only about 3 Jewish people still in Shanghai and the community had ceased to exist.
So the Jewish story in Shanghai is short, from the Opium war in 1842 to the Communist Revolution in the 1950’s, so 110 years – that’s a brief history of the Jews in Shanghai.”
Travelers interested in an extensive walking tour, covering this history, should contact Imperial Tours.
