Jewish Life Digital Edition November 2014 | Page 70

Holiday time

of China
THE THIRD MIGRATION OF JEWS TO CHINA WAS
the arrival of the Ashkenazi Jews from
the 1880s onwards. The Ashkenazi Jews
began arriving in Shanghai in the 1880s,
from Russia and Eastern Europe, as a result of rising anti-Semitism. The Russian
Revolutions in 1905 and 1917 propelled
more immigration of Russian Jews into
China. They initially settled in Shanghai,
where they were assisted by the existing
Sephardi community, and later settled in
Tiangin and Qingdao. Initially, many of
the Ashkenazi Jews lived in poverty, but
soon rose to the middle class through
their industriousness. They eventually
outnumbered the Sephardi community
and also contributed to the economic and
cultural development of China. They too
left China with the taking of office of Mao
Zedong in 1949.
In late 1940s, the Japanese Consul in
Kaunas (Kovna), Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, together with his wife, with great heroism and self-sacrifice, and contrary to their
government’s instructions to the contrary,
provided transit visas to approximately
6 000 Jewish refugees, which included the
entire Mir Yeshiva, the only Yeshiva in Eastern Europe to survive World War II intact.

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The refugees travelled via Siberia and Vladivostok to Kobe in Japan, where they stayed
for about six months, until they relocated to
Shanghai. The learning in the Yeshiva flourished in Shanghai under the leadership of
the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz, and Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, the
mashgiach. They spent the War years until
1947 in Shanghai. Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, a
Lubavitcher Chassid who served as the spiritual leader of the Jewish refugees, arranged
for the Yeshiva to occupy the Beit Aharon
Synagogue, which was built in 1927 by a
prominent Jewish Shanghai businessman,
Silas Aaron Hardoon, an Iraqi Jew. Remarkably, the synagogue, which was built in honour of Hardoon’s father, was able to accommodate the students of the Mir Yeshiva as if
it were built especially for them!
The Yeshiva left Shanghai in 1947, part
immigrating to New York, and the rest to
Jerusalem, where the Yeshiva continues
to this day.
Another Japanese hero, Setzuso Kotsuji, whose father was a prominent Shinto
priest, who founded the Hebrew Department at Tokyo University and later converted to Judaism, acted as mediator and
translator for a delegation of Jewish

I BY HUGH RAICHLIN

refugees in 1941, headed by the Amshinover Rebbe, Rabbi Shimon Kalisch, and
Rabbi Moshe Shatzkes, when they met
with Japanese government representatives in Tokyo. As a direct result of this
meeting, the Japanese attitude toward
the Jewish refugees improved, with the
result that the Japanese government
withstood Germany’s pressure to expel
the Jews, which