Feature by Helen Lippman

Discovering/ Rediscovering Jewish An Insider’s Tour of Shanghai Today

Ellis in Shanghai

hortly after arriving in Shanghai recognized him from the picture on the the opportunity for commerce Shanghai for his high school reunion, back cover. offered after the British won the Opium my husband, Ellis Jacob— Wars and opened it to international trade. San Iraqi Jew and native The next morning—my first day in Shanghailander—was walking along the Shanghai—Ellis and I took Bar-Gal’s tour. With the still-bustling as Bund when a stranger grabbed his arm. In our group were an Australian couple a backdrop, evidence of the Baghdadi “Ellis, come talk to my people,” implored who’d arrived in the city ahead of their —and the wealth they amassed— Dvir Bar-Gal, an Israeli photojournalist scheduled trip to be sure they didn’t miss is all around. The still stately, if slightly who conducts tours tracing the history it, several New Zealanders and Americans, shabby, Astor House Hotel, on a corner of Jews in Shanghai. His “people” were and a young Chinese woman whose where Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu the dozen or so men and women taking Jewish boyfriend had piqued her interest. River converge, was the headquarters his tour. for Ellis’s reunion. Owned by Kadoorie As we gathered around Bar-Gal to hear until the Communists took the city, The story Bar-Gal tells began with about Shanghai’s first Jewish settlers, I the hotel’s lobby is filled with pictures like Ellis’s forebears, had a powerful sense of déjà vu. Although of famous guests, from US President the first of whom settled in Shanghai I’d never before been in , I was Ulysses S. Grant to Charlie Chaplin, the in the mid-1800s. In a book titled, The familiar with the names of Shanghai’s Duke of Edinburgh and Albert Einstein. Shanghai I Knew, Ellis details his family’s most prominent Sephardic families: the migration from (and Basra on Abrahams, Hardoons, Kadoories, and the A block away is the former Broadway his mother’s side) to Shanghai by way of Sassoons. All these families are not just Mansions, an upscale residential Bombay and Calcutta, and his early life names to us; they make an appearance building in the 1930s and ‘40s, now a as “a foreign native in prerevolutionary not only in Ellis’s book, but frequently in his 5-star hotel. In the opposite direction China.” Bar-Gal has Ellis’s book and had conversation as well. All were attracted by is , much of it developed

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The former Hongkou Ghetto today

by Silas Hardoon. Hardoon rose from Back down Nanjing Road along the While the Iraqi Jews were amassing poverty, working in a mailroom, as Bund is the legendary — their fortunes, a second wave of Jews a doorman, and as a rent collector, built in the late 1920s by . began arriving, fleeing from pogroms according to Bar-Gal, before becoming Sir Victor, a British baron as well as in Russia. The Russian Jews traveled the richest man in the . an Iraqi Jew, lived in a wood-paneled by train across Siberia to China. Many penthouse apartment atop the green- disembarked and settled in Harbin, Later that day, Ellis and I walked a domed art deco building. but a small enclave continued on mile or so up Nanjing Road—through to Shanghai. As Bar-Gal spoke of a crowded, noisy shopping area where The splendor can still be seen. The Shanghai’s Russian Jewish community, neon lights, flashing signs and stores night before, shortly after I arrived, jet- I couldn’t help thinking of my own selling the latest electronic devices lagged from a 14-hour flight, Ellis and I heritage. My grandparents, too, were assault your senses. Nanjing Road in sat, with some of his former classmates, driven out of Russia by the pogroms. Hardoon’s day was equally crowded, inside Sassoon’s old apartment. We By fate or fortune, they boarded a ship Ellis recalls. There were big department listened to a presentation about today’s bound for the United States rather than stores then, as now, and lots of little Shanghai American School, a modern a train to China. eateries, take-out stalls and small iteration of the high school from which markets—but without the buzz and he graduated. After the talk we had Refugees fleeing the Nazis comprised bright lights. cocktails on the roof—with a spectacular the third and final wave of Jews to arrive view of the older, elegant buildings in Shanghai, starting in the late 1930s. When Ellis lived here in the 1930s and along and the newer, sleeker Eventually expanding to about 20,000, ‘40s, Nanjing Road became Bubbling architecture across the river in . refugees from Germany, Austria, and Well Road as you headed west, and Poland were settled with the help of his home—on the second floor of an Victor was the grandson of David both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi apartment building—was on Seymour Sassoon, who hired Ellis’s grandfather, communities. Soon, bakeries, cafes, Road, just off Bubbling Well Road. Jacob Shalom Jacob, in the 1880s, and music venues began to appear in The building looks different now; a thereby making it possible for the Jacob what became known as Little Vienna. verandah that was accessible from the clan to escape from an Iraq that was Jacobs’ second-floor apartment has increasingly intolerant of Jews. The elder The next group to take Shanghai by been closed off. Its history lives on Jacob’s first job was in Bombay. Around storm wasn’t Jewish, but Japanese. nonetheless, with a plaque on an outer the turn of the century, as Sassoon’s They swarmed the city in 1941, the wall identifying the complex as the real estate holdings expanded, he was day of Pearl Harbor. Ellis remembers “former Cosmopolitan Apartments.” sent to Shanghai to help manage them. awakening the next morning to find

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armed soldiers on every major street simple paragraph, written in English, In villages outside the city, headstones corner. But despite their presence, the Chinese and Hebrew, tells of how they were tossed into the river. Bar-Gal has Japanese left the established Jewish escaped Nazi persecution and came to used bulldozers to pull them out, seen communities alone. Ellis celebrated his Shanghai, then suffered at the hands of villagers using headstones as scrub Bar Mitzvah in 1944 at the Orthodox the Japanese. Disease was rampant in boards and moved the ones he has Ohel Rachel while the city the ghetto and, Bar-Gal told us, about reclaimed from one site to another. The was under Japanese occupation. (He one in 10 refugees died. 100-plus headstones Bar-Gal has found graduated from high school in 1949, just thus far are catalogued (and searchable) days after the Communists took the city.) If Bar-Gal has his way, another Jewish online at shanghaijewishmemorial.com. memorial will be erected in Shanghai— This wasn’t the case for the refugees this one in memory of every Jew who This piece of Shanghai Jewish history, who had fled the Holocaust for this died and was buried here. There were too, has special meaning for Ellis. Four safe haven. Their experience in four Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai. All of his relatives were buried in the city: Shanghai was dramatically different. In were demolished during the Cultural a maternal grandfather whose name he 1943, under pressure from the Nazis, Revolution. Soon after he arrived in 2001, doesn’t know; his paternal grandfather, the Japanese ordered all “stateless Bar-Gal heard about two headstones Jacob Shalom Isaiah Jacob; and two refugees” (defined as those who arrived with Hebrew writing sitting in an antique uncles, Ezekiel Jacob and Saleh Jacob. after 1937) into a ghetto in Hongkou— store. His interest was piqued. Gradually, Perhaps, through Bar-Gal’s efforts, their the next stop on Bar-Gal’s tour he said, “what started as a journalistic headstones may be found and their story became a mission.” lives—and deaths—memorialized. I ‘d known about the ghetto for years and seen the documentary, “.” Now, Bar-Gal led us down a dark and dreary lane and into a tiny dilapidated apartment occupied by Jewish families some 70 years ago. The refugees, restricted to an area of roughly one square mile, lived in squalor, crowded in among some of Shanghai’s poorest Chinese.

A short distance from the ghetto is the old Ohel Moshe Synagogue, a former spiritual home to the refugees that now commemorates them. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum includes a restoration of the old synagogue, a bookshop, and dozens of photos, art works, newspaper clippings and a short film about life in the ghetto, as well as some rotating exhibits. The museum also houses a plaque honoring Ho Feng Shan. Ho, a little-known Chinese View from Huoshan Park diplomat serving in Vienna, personally saved thousands of Jews from the Helen Lippman is the managing editor Holocaust by issuing documents they Please watch for our review of Ellis of The Journal of Family Practice needed to leave the country. Jacob’s memoir, The Shanghai I in Parsippany, NJ. She has written Knew: A Foreign Native in Pre- about outdoor activities, science and Revolutionary China, in an upcoming In nearby Huoshan Park, through a technology, and employee benefits, issue of Asian Jewish Life. gate in a quiet, peaceful setting, stands as well as travel and US health care. a stone memorial to the refugees. A

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