On the tourist trail of China's Jews

The arrival of year 5774 was celebrated in Shanghai, as in Jewish communities all over the world, with the tones of a cantor reciting Rosh Hashana prayers in a synagogue filled with people honouring one of the world's oldest religions. Just like everywhere, except that the state owns the synagogue and the Communist party decides when Jews can worship there, ie not often.

Outside the main gate of the leafy compound in which the Ohel Rachel synagogue is located, a sign says "Shanghai Afforestation Commission" - although, thankfully, there is no indication that the building is used to store agricultural equipment between Jewish high holidays. But the Shanghai Education Administration, which actually owns the building, limits the days on which it does open for worship to a handful. The rest of the time, the city's best preserved symbol of Judaism is closed both to the public and to the observant.

But don't worry, it's not really personal: China is far less anti-Semitic than just plain anti-religious. Chinese Christians have it far worse.

In fact, the story of Jews in China has remarkably little anti-Semitism in it, says Israeli Dvir Bar-Gal, whose vocation is researching and publicising Jewish life in Shanghai - including searching for thousands of desecrated Jewish gravestones that peasants have used as threshold stones, or to beat laundry against, since the cultural revolution.

"There is no anti-Semitism here - here everything is about business," he says, as he guides us through the streets of Jewish Shanghai on one of his daily tours, which take in some of the most famous buildings on the Shanghai Bund (built by Baghdadi Jews early in the last century) but also the Jewish ghetto.

"No other city saved so many Jews," says Mr Bar-Gal, as he tells the story of Shanghai, port of last resort during the Holocaust. When other nations closed their doors, only Shanghai (then controlled by Japan) did not require visas for entry and imposed no quotas on incoming Jews, more than 20,000 of whom fled there to escape Nazi Europe.

Shanghai was no promised land, even so. At the urging of the Gestapo, Japanese forces confined stateless Jews into Shanghai's own version of a ghetto, in the Hongkou district, where they already had 100,000 Chinese neighbours. One in 10 did not survive the war, but this was through no fault of their hosts: they died of diseases they shared with their cheek-by-jowl local neighbours, or at their own hands when they could bear no more poverty and hunger. But there were no concentration camps and no organised extermination of Jews in Shanghai - a rare human rights story where China ends up on the right side of history.

Mr Bar-Gal takes us to one of the alleyways of that ghetto, where two men can scarcely walk abreast, where multiple families still crowd into dark, dank, tenement-style houses that can have changed little since the remaining Jews moved out of them after the Communist party won power in 1949.

Today, perhaps 5,000-6,000 Jews make their home in the city, says Mr Bar-Gal. So when the Jewish high holy days rolled round this month, a couple of hundred of them chose to celebrate at Ohel Rachel, built in 1920 by Baghdadi tycoon Jacob Sassoon, and named after his wife.

Rhonda Levin was there, on the eve of the new Jewish year 5774, sitting in the section reserved for women in the cavernous house of worship, where a row of artificial elephant ear plants runs straight down the centre to keep the men away from their womenfolk. And at the dinner afterwards, over apples dipped in honey and other traditional foods, she explained her theory of the relationship between Jews and Chinese - a theory I heard repeatedly that night.

"To me the Chinese are just like the Jews," said Ms Levin, who said she was "in town on a trade fair". "Hardworking, good at business, focused on family," she said, while another tablemate opined that, per head, Chinese and Jews have more Nobel Prizes than the average guy, too. Those are the same stereotypes some people hold against Jews - but here they are seen as a good thing.

At the end of the day, and for whatever reason, China has a lot of time for Jews and Jews have a lot of time for China. And now that China has figured out that there are plenty of tourist renminbi to be made from the story of the Jews of Shanghai - and the Chinese who saved them - there seems a good chance that the mutual admiration society will endure even into 5775, and beyond.

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