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The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai Into Post-World War II San Francisco

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The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai Into Post-World War II San Francisco The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco Sara Halpern American Jewish History, Volume 104, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 87-114 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2020.0000 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/755246 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco1 Sara Halpern The transnational story of “Shanghai Jews” began in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) and the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), when German and Austrian Jews sought to escape the inferno. Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world that did not require an entry visa, offered one possible route out.2 In their quest to get there, more than 16,000 Jews rode on trains through the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border and embarked on ocean liners in Genoa. After that path closed in June 1940, they traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for Shanghai via Japan.3 Those trains and ships carried them to safety in Asia’s largest port, a city with over 5,000,000 Chinese and 50,000 foreigners. Over the next decade, as China experienced military and political turmoil, these German-speaking Jewish refugees formed a cohesive community of families and unaccompanied men, who were 1. The author expresses deep gratitude to present and past editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts. She also wishes to thank Deborah Dash Moore and Michael Gelb for their steadfast mentorship throughout the whole process, and to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michi- gan for providing research funds. 2. For more on entry visa policies in Shanghai, see Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the journey to Shanghai, see also Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 32; Ursula Bacon, Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China (Milwaukee: M Press, 2004), 21. 3. According to Yehuda Bauer, 18,124 people registered with the Nazis as leav- ing for Shanghai. By the end of 1939, some 15,000 Jewish refugees registered with the local relief agencies for support. Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), 253. In addition to German and Austrian Jews, around 500 yeshiva students and rabbis with transit visas fled to Japan, and the Japanese subsequently sent them to Shanghai between 1941 and 1942. See David Avraham Mandelbom and Malky Heimowitz, From Lublin to Shanghai: The Miraculous Exile of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin (Brooklyn: Me- sorah, 2012); Chaim U. Lipschitz, The Shanghai Connection, eds. Sonia Winter, Hallie Cantor and Judy Bendel (New York: Maznaim Publishing Corp, 1988); and Yecheskel Keitner, Operation Torah Rescue: The Escape of the Mirrer Yeshiva from War-Torn Poland to Shanghai, China (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1987). © by American Jewish Historical Society 2020 88 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY either unmarried or had left their non-Jewish wives behind. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and the refugees’ hope that Shanghai would serve only as a waystation led all but a few to emigrate from China after the collapse of the Axis powers in 1945. Approximately 7,000 refugees traveled to San Francisco. Unlike Canada and Australia, which ran selective labor schemes, the United States permitted corporate affidavits with no labor contracts.4 The US government also offered transit visas to those journeying onward to Canada, Europe, Palestine/State of Israel, or Latin America. The rest of the group traveled directly to Australia, Canada, and Europe.5 Little is known of Shanghai Jews’ post-World War II emigration and resettlement processes. After spending an anxious decade together, including twenty-eight months confined in a Japanese-sanctioned “desig- nated area,” which the refugees called the “ghetto,” it is striking that so many refugees’ memoirs, diaries, and testimonies were silent about their transition to freedom outside of China.6 Their stories instead frequently conformed to the Holocaust survivor narrative of experiences under Nazism, flight, survival, and grief. Those who spent their childhood in Shanghai frequently employed this literary strategy and supplemented their stories with what they learned from their parents. The absence of Shanghai Jews’ post-Holocaust stories in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies raises questions concerning their postwar transi- tion from Shanghai to their new homes in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. How did the refugees experience their first days of arrival? How did they interact with the local Jewish community and other Ho- locaust survivors? How did the former groups perceive Shanghai Jews while still reeling from the news in Europe? How did Shanghai Jews negotiate their refugee experiences as they attempted to find a place for themselves socially and economically in their new locales? In turn, how did the broader society treat these traumatized new migrants? These questions can be answered through the framework of diaspora: Shanghai Jews carved out their own space within the German-speaking 4. The Truman Directive of December 1945 permitted American Jewish organiza- tions to sponsor potential immigrants without family or friends in the United States. 5. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) reported that “nearly 6,000” Shanghai Jews resettled in the United States, 1,500 to Israel, 1,000 to Austra- lia, 700 to Latin America, 285 to Europe, and 140 to Canada. One thousand and 540 repatriated to Austria and Germany respectively. “Evacuation from Shanghai,” JDC Review, January-February 1949. 6. Sources include the oral history collection at the Holocaust Center of Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco (SFJFCS-HC), family papers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and published memoirs in English and German. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 89 Jewish diaspora of over 250,000 refugees from Nazism.7 They constructed a “microdiaspora,” grounded in their shared trauma of uprooting, and in experiences and memories of surviving in and emigrating from Shanghai during a catastrophic moment in Jewish history.8 While not a “home” in a literal sense, Shanghai served as a nexus for experiencing and remembering their Holocaust survival.9 As white Europeans, they grappled with cultural shocks; as impoverished and stateless residents, they struggled with hyperinflation, scarce goods, and uncertainty without consular protection; as Jews, they were confined in a “ghetto.” Amidst these difficulties, Shanghai’s transcolonial and cosmopolitan nature afforded new arrivals a chance to create economic, political, social, and cultural activities with German-Jewish flair. In “Little Vienna”—as English-language Shanghai newspapers described the German-Jewish community—they spoke German while learning English and “pidgin English,” a blend of Chinese and English.10 Compared to other tran- sient communities that had escaped Nazi persecution, Shanghai lasted the longest, from 1938 to 1950. This protracted wait for resettlement elsewhere contributed to formations of friendships and new families among Shanghai’s Jewish refugees.11 These charged moments laid the foundation for this “microdiaspora.” This article first explores these Shanghai years as formative, highlight- ing how the ghetto experience became the key to understanding how 7. On the concept of “victim diaspora,” see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (New York: Routledge Press, 2008). On the German-Jewish diaspora, as opposed to exile, resulting from Nazism, see Atina Grossmann, “German Jews as Provincial Cosmopolitans: Reflections from the Upper West Side,” Leo Baeck Yearbook (2009): 157–168. 8. On memory changes in relation to migration and settlement, see Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, eds., Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 8–10; Irial Glynn and J. Olaf Kleist, eds., History, Memory, and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 4–5. 9. For a study that highlights the value of re-scaling when examining migration pat- terns and connection to a particular locale rather than a nation-state, see Rebecca Ko- brin, Jewish Bialystok and its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 10. See James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: Free Press, 1994), 70. 11. As points of comparison, see studies of Jewish refugee communities in India and the Dominican Republic: H.G. Reissner, “Indian-Jewish Statistics (1837–1941),” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 4 (1950): 350; Anil Bhatti and Johannes H. Voigt, eds., Jewish Exile in India, 1933–1945 (New Delhi: Mandohar, Max Mueller Bhavan, 1999); Margit Franz, Gateway India: Deutschsprachiges Exil in Indien zwischen britischer Kolonialherrschaft, Maharadschas und Gandhi (Graz, Austria: CLIO, 2015); Marion A. Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945
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