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From Intercessors Network - On the Walls of Jerusalem - sent by Lars Widerberg in Linkoping of Sweden we got an Article about jews in Harbin of China written by Jonathan Goldstein. He is a professor of East Asian History at the University of West Georgia, is a summer resident of Glenburn. His books include “The Jews of China” (1999) and “China and Israel” (2000).

/DSr

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The Jews of Harbin, China
By Jonathan Goldstein
 
Israeli presidents and prime ministers have traditionally originated in Europe, America and the Middle East. The family of EHUD OHLMERT, who is about to be sworn in as the next Israeli prime minister, was originally from Russia but made a detour to Israel via the Far East.

Indeed, Ohlmert’s politics, and those of his father and grandfather, derive from the family’s residence in Harbin, China, a crucible for Jewish ideological development. What were the particular characteristics of Harbin that attracted the Ohlmert family there, exposed them to Zionism, and inspired Ohlmert’s father and many other Harbin Jews to immigrate to Israel? On the most fundamental level, the conditions of  Harbin underlie the Ohlmert family commitment to Zionism.
 
On one level the Harbin Jewish community underwent an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars and upheavals between 1898 and 1958. It lived through two world wars, two major local wars and two revolutions involving civil wars. On another level, despite these upheavals, the Jewish community of Harbin grew from zero individuals in 1898 to a high point of about 13,000 in 1931. It then began a precipitous decline. Most Jews left by 1950. In 1982, the community consisted of one elderly resident, Anna Agre, who kept many of the Jewish communal archives under her bed.
 
It is the community’s flourishing amidst adversity rather than its decline which merits attention. For much of its 60-year existence the Harbin Jewish community experienced a vibrant intellectual life which ranged from the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisroel to the secular faiths of Third International Communism and Maoism.
 
A distinct economic context underlay this intellectual flowering. The city was and is a railroad hub, constructed in 1898 by Czarist Russia on land leased from China. It was located at a point on the Sungari, or Songhua, River where the railroad intersected with extensive river traffic. Most significantly from the point of view of Jewish history, Harbin both was and was not part of Russia. It was a railway zone where Jews enjoyed residential permission plus an array of economic, political and cultural freedoms unavailable in Czarist Russia proper. Despite wars, revolutions and upheavals, many of these fundamental rights remained after the railroad zone was sold to Japan in 1936. 
 
Harbin’s Jews arrived at a particularly fortunate moment in time. They enjoyed the “boom town” experience that accompanied frontier expansion. Like other boom towns such as San Francisco, Harbin did not remain a cultural backwater. It quickly developed into a sophisticated city, nurtured by the wealth of its new entrepreneurs.
 
Several examples can be cited of Jewish participation in Harbin’s cultural life. In the early 20th century Moshe Levitin established a Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian publishing company. It brought out the Hebrew and Russian-language tracts of Harbin’s long-serving Rabbi Aharon Moshe Kisilev (1866-1949). Kisilev had embraced the pre-Herzlian religious Zionism of Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever while a student at the Volozhin Yeshiva. Kisilev was also a prolific author of Zionistic and secular tracts, notably “Natsionalizm I Evreistvo: Stat’I, Lektsii, I Doklady” (Russian: “Nationalism and the Jewish People: Articles, Lectures and Reports”).
 
Yet another exemplar of Jewish intellectual life in Harbin was its hospital director, Abram Yosifovich Kaufman, who lived from 1886 to 1971. He was effectively the secular counterpart to Rabbi Kisilev. Under Kisilev’s and Kaufman’s influence, which spanned the years 1913 to 1949, a majority of Harbin Jews became Zionistic. Twelve Russian-language Jewish periodicals were published in Harbin, including “Evreiskaia Zhizn” (Jewish life) and “Gadegel” (the Cyrillic rendition of the Hebrew “ha-degel,” literally meaning “the flag” and having specific reference to the blue-and-white Zionist flag). There was also a clandestine Communist Party in which many Jews were active, notably Israel Epstein, who later becomes a member of the People’s Republic of China’s National People’s Consultative Congress, a largely advisory and ceremonial body.
 
The Ohlmert family are products of this vibrant, highly politicized environment. Ehud’s grandfather arrived in the city from European Russia early in the 20th century. The grandfather died there and is buried in the city’s vast, 700-plus grave, Jewish cemetery. In the late 1920s, because of Harbin’s large Russian-speaking population, it became the East Asian entry point for Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky’s Zionist Revisionist movement. Most Revisionist literature at that time was in Russian. Ehud’s father Motya, also known as Mordechai or Motti, was among the first Harbin Jews to embrace Revisionism.
 
In the early 1930s he emigrated to Palestine “to till the land.” He and his sons became active in Israel’s Revisionist-oriented Herut Party, the ancestor of today’s Likud, which is in turn the progenitor of Ariel Sharon’s and Ehud Ohlmert’s mainstream “Kadima” party. Sharon and Ohlmert took some Likud stalwarts with them when they formed “Kadima.” Many hard-liners remain in Likud.
Throughout these transformations the family has retained its China ties. In 2004 Ehud returned to the People’s Republic accompanied by nearly 100 Israeli businessmen who hoped to capitalize on the then-Deputy Prime Minister’s China connections.
 
Both Ehud and his brother, an attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Beijing, were much-photographed reciting the Jewish prayer for the dead at their grandfather’s tomb, for which they had ordered a new gravestone. Shortly after the Ohlmerts’ return to Harbin approximately 100 other Israelis of Harbin origin came to the same cemetery, worshiped at Rabbi Kisilev’s grave, and participated in a gala reunion and historical seminar on the Jewish experience in their ancestral city.
 
The inauguration of Ohlmert, a son and intellectual prodige of Harbin, as Israel’s next prime minister, is yet another expression of the Jewish culture which once flourished in the city. In 2005 the son of Harbin Jewish Hospital director Abram Kaufman collaborated with Harbin Professor Qu Wei on a book which they entitled “The Homesick Feeling of the Harbin Jews.” That title encapsulates the sentiment of many Jews who lived in this city of refuge and culture for 60 years. The title says it all. 

* More about Jews of Harbin

* Chinese Jews - History of Jewish Community in China  

* The Virtual Jewish History Tour China