A Belated Hanukah Update

From Shanghai to the UK

JDC’s first official event in Shanghai, Ohel Rachel Ceremony and Limmud

For me, Hanukah began on December 4^th, at the Community Hanukah fair. It was put together by Chabad in the Portman Hotel plaza, a big indoor hall, on a Sunday afternoon. I arrived on time to help set up for the Kids Kraft table, and ended up running the window-decorating booth. Aside from a wide-variety of crafts, there was a children’s winter coat sale, booth of community businesses selling their products and services, and of course, plenty of incredibly food.

I had a great time running my booth, as it’s been a while since I’ve hung out with kids. It also allowed me to marvel at the diversity of the community in Shanghai, and how nice it is that families have a place here to come celebrate a Jewish holiday. I ended up making a hanukia out of some weird colorful plasticky-playdough material, and it was awesome.

Around that same time, I was deciding what (if anything at all) I should do for Hanuka. In my activities with and for the community, I am constantly trying to strike a balance between what the community needs and what I am actually able to execute by myself. For example, obviously there is no need for a family event, and in any case, something like that is virtually impossible to plan and carry out alone.  So I decided that, in the spirit of Shanghai expat culture, I would find a Happy Hour rate (Shanghai is all about Happy Hours, Ladies’ Nights, promotions, discounts, and ways to go out to nice places for less or even nothing at all) at a nice, appealing club, and invite everyone I know. Everything was thought out – the date (as late as possible but before people leave on vacation, and without conflicting with other community events), the food (sufganiot and levivot from Chabad, both Kosher and festive), and the party favors (chocolate coins and dreidels). The club was a bit tricky to work with, though in the end I managed to get the Happy Hour rate and permission to bring the food in.

The Israeli Consulate and it’s wonderful employees helped me advertise the event (the picture in the flier below is from when I celebrated Hanukah in India with a group of friends), and through that and my own invitees, word got around through all the circles – Americans, French, Europeans, and of course, Israelis. People told me that they received the email from different friends, and that there was talk about it in Chabad on Friday. Other people told me, during the event, that there where people there who had not come for a Jewish event in years.

About 80 people came before 10 pm. I calculated a total of 150 people throughout the whole night. I couldn’t believe it. I realized that the time is right to bring the Jews of Shanghai together. If there is a place and a reason (religious or otherwise), they will come. It was so simple; a good party with other Jews, and many people told me they wish this happened more often.  What surprised me was that there were people from all ages and backgrounds. Certainly plenty of young, single professionals, but also lots older couples. It was great. And it didn’t step on anyone’s toes, which only added to its success.

On the first night of Hanukah, the community was allowed to use the old synagogue downtown , Ohel Rachel. It was such a beautiful event. I am realizing now that all the Hanukah activities so far have all been so different yet all so fitting the holiday, and it has been so enjoyable. This event was for the entire family, and indeed, there were many children, but also plenty of younger peope. The one age group that continues to be conspicuous in its absence here is the teenagers. There are many, many under-5 year-olds, but no over-10 year-olds. There was a small candle-lighting ceremony, some song-singing, and a lot of incredible food. It was just a nice Jewish mingling event, but the context of the synagogue made it really special. It’s such an incredible building that I think reflects what the Jews of Shanghai must have been like in the early part of the 20^th century, at their strongest.

Then, on the second night, the Liberal group threw a Hanukah thing at Haya’s, the Israeli restaurant downtown. It was a family-style sort of dinner, which many young people attended. It was a different group – plenty of mixed couples, but also people who want a different scene from the Jewish centers around the city.

The next day, I flew to the UK to attend Limmud, which this year fell on the remaining five nights of Hanukah. Limmud was an amazing, intellectually diverse experience, made only more interesting by the fact that, aside from both of my JDC bosses, I had never really been exposed to British Jewry (or really, British culture beyond the really famous stuff), and it was very enriching to be in that environment.

For an entire week, I attended sessions by incredible speakers, all having something to do with a crucial part of my identity – Judaism, Israel, or the diversity of the Jewish world. There was text study (which I actually really love. Nothing like a page of the Talmud to keep you intellectually humble), panels on journalism and politics, on Jewish identity and religiosity, theater and music workshops and performances, amazing lectures on topics in Judaism – sexuality, Hannah Arendt, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, and so much more.

Limmud is run by volunteers, and every presenter is also a participant. Some of the presenters are really high-level experts in their field, yet there is a sense of equality and openness about the whole experience.  Every evening concluded with the lighting of the candles – everyone together out in the courtyard, usually with musical accompaniment. It was a very intense, but also so fulfilling.

I also attended a lot of Limmud International sessions, with the hope of getting an idea of how other people around the world have made Limmud happen in their communities. I am very excited about helping make Limmud in China a very proximate reality. It will be so incredibly nourishing for both the communities and the individuals here. This is a great framework for people to give something to the whole, from which they can also take back a lot as individuals. And it’s something that is simple, uncomplicated, fully accepting, and intrinsically Jewish, because its fundamental cornerstone is something all Jews indisputably have in common – learning, in all its manifestations. 

The Global Day of Jewish Learning in Shanghai

An insight into the Shanghai Jewish Community

The Jews in Shanghai are redefining the meaning of community. This city, like many other Asian cities with a substantial expat population, attracts a wide range of ages, nationalities, occupations, and personalities. Most people are here on a long-term temporary basis, but everyone seeks to make this place home. People are committed to socializing and building healthy support systems. Even though community-building has happened in a rather top-down fashion so far (there are four rabbis for about 2000 people), Jews are taking their individual responsibility to contribute to their community quite seriously. The question is, what will this community look like?

Through planning, and executing the first-ever Global Day of Jewish Learning in Shanghai, I learned a lot about what “the community” – used here as the population of people s who self-identify as Jewish  - wants and needs.  It started out as a small thing, in my mind. I have been here for less than two months, networking solidly within the expat world and building a relationship with the all-Chinese staff at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. As the first JDC person in the region in a very long time, and the first long-term foreign volunteer the Museum has ever had, the time was still unripe for me to swoop down on the Museum with an event that centers around discussing Jewish prayer (another layer of complication is the fact that Judaism is not recognized as a religion in China).

Or so I thought. I had called and texted about fifteen people whom I thought would be interested in the event. Word got around, and on Sunday morning, my Chinese colleague (who very kindly ignored all the less-precise details about what was happening) and I watched as 25 people poured into what used to be the Women’s Gallery of the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, in the Hongkou District of Shanghai.

Brunch was a great success, a mixture between a family-style breakfast and a buffet. As we started the session and I read the Shema prayer out loud, a chill went through me. I had been so busy with the preparations for the event, with worrying who would come and how it would go, that I had barely stopped to think about what it was that I was organizing. I had planned the session and had read the texts and the facilitator’s guide, but it was only in that moment when I said the prayer that I realized  how many people in the last century, under a wide-variety of conditions, had said that prayer in that same building.

The interconnected nature of the Jewish world is truly remarkable. Here I was, sitting in an old synagogue that once was the heart of a ghetto of Holocaust refugees, in China, reading Rashi and Maimonides, with 25 other Jews, ages 20 to 75, from Australia, Israel, France, the US, Mexico, Brazil, the UK, Turkey, Canada, and South Africa. We had some Chinese guests who participated in the session and kept us entirely aware of where we were.

It was such an unexpected success that I had to wonder: all other things aside, what is the Global Day offering that people are craving so much? Expat communities tend to focus on the basics. Holidays, Shabbats and births are the predominant things that unite people here. The community is based on religious aspects of Judaism. But Shanghai Jews want to interact on a much more social level. This is what is missing in the community, an outlet for cultural Judaism, an exploration and questioning of Judaism with other Jews. And that is exactly what the Global Day of Jewish Learning helped to provide.

After the session, my colleague gave the group a tour of the Museum. Many of the participants had never been to it before. It was wonderful to learn the history of the place where we had the session, and it gave the event additional depth.

On my part, I learned a lot: about the community, about my strengths and weaknesses as a community organizer, about what is difficult and what is easy in the situation I am in. Above all, I realized that I am in a position to collide worlds. Yesterday I felt the potential of that, the magnitude of being in such a position.

There are things to be done. 

Jews in Asia – a What-if?

I wonder sometimes what Asians would feel towards Jews if Jews had lived in these countries in significant numbers and for significant periods of time. We say that China is one of the only countries in which anti-Semitism doesn’t exist, but that’s not strictly fair or true. China didn’t have the opportunity to develop anti-Semitism, because there were simply never enough strict Jews here.

 India, however, is a good example of a country with long-time Jews and no anti-Semitism (the recent attacks are neither India-based nor aimed against Indian Jews). What would it be like in China? Would Jews – as a consequence of being a minority – be scapegoated, hated, ostracized in the same way? Or would it be as it is in India – different, because of an altogether different combination of factors that led to altogether different results? As opposed to Western or Middle Eastern countries where Jews lived, flourished and were persecuted, in India there is no single predominant religion. Hinduism (simplified) is best defined as a collection of similar-but-different beliefs, traditions, languages and culture. Each mix is unique, but the spiritual-traditional aspect is central to Indian identity. Everyone believes in something or other, and that something is always a little bit different from everyone else’s. So no one cared or noticed if one group of people was praying to an unseen god, or not working on the seventh day of the week, or had strange dietary habits. Every group had its own quirks.

So I wonder if in the East Asian countries it would have been the same (same), but different. What would Judaism have looked like here in big numbers? The picture is not the same as in the West, but it’s also not like in India.

Perhaps people are right when they say that Chinese and Jewish cultures are similar. I think they refer to the work ethic, the importance of family, and the value placed on learning. To me it seems that although it’s true that these are common traits, the cultural consequences of them are so different that it outweighs the fact that the original values are the same. The “way of being” is too different. This might be in part because of the other, multi-facetted influences Judaism has had, as well as the development of Chinese history and the effects it has had on culture and people (most recently communism, which Chinese people do not fail to notice was originally conceived by a Jew…too ironic to my point? I wonder).

Perhaps if the two cultures had mixed – truly mixed, in that way that only history can achieve – they would have benefitted from and nourished each other. It certainly seems like that’s what happened during the time when the Jewish refugees were here and coexisted with Chinese people.

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There is now so much renewed interest for the continued collaboration between the two cultures, with all its complexities and challenges. I’m realizing now, as I finish this post, how utterly privileged I am to be thrown right into the heart of it all.  I AM this experiment, right alongside my Chinese co-workers. It’s kind of fun. 

Some historical roots of “an interconnected world”

I was staring up at the synagogue today, this hundred-year old building in the middle of Shanghai, and it suddenly hit me how small, transient and wide-spread the Jewish experience has been, and for so long. I tend to think of the time before commercial airplanes as slow, and somewhat lazy or relaxed, when it took forever for anything to get very far, especially information and people. Things like the morse code or telegrams had to exist because otherwise nothing would get done. And travelling from Europe to the edge of the Pacific, on either side, seems to have been a trip too long to bother with. Which is probably why only soldiers and rich people did it.

Within this frame I suddenly thought of what it must have been like to be a Jewish refugee here in Shanghai during World War II. Because those are the only other people who would make that trip – people with no other choice.

Let’s picture it. You’re in your teens, arriving with your parents, or maybe in your twenties, arriving by yourself. You have to go through Japan, via Panama, or via the trans-Siberian railroad. Imagine the weeks (the months!) on trains or boats or both! Imagine the discomfort, the motion-sickness, the hard beds. Kids playing games to pass the time. Reading and re-reading the few available books, maybe sharing them with each other. Knowing with certainty that undertaking such a trip – with all its difficulties – is better than the horrors you left behind. Maybe that’s what kept people sane.  

In Japan you stay for a few days, a week, with another thousand refugees, because it’s just one more country that can’t – wont’ – take you in. It’s just part of the trip out of death-ridden Europe. Salvation, of course, but too temporary to be a sustainable solution. Maybe there’s a camp there. Bunk-beds, open showers, too little food and too many people, dirt, lice.

Then, finally, Shanghai. The only city in the world where you don’t need a visa, where you are welcome. Another crowded boat, children and parents on the deck, and you standing there alone with your meager belongings wrapped up in a bundle, lying at your feet. You gaze out and see the spectacular outline of this strange city, this city that you hope will be a free and safe, if temporary, home. High European buildings line the riverfront, hiding the truly local Chinese lifestyle that sprawls behind.

You disembark, cross a bridge over a big creek, and arrive at your new neighborhood.

The people are nice there, warm, friendly. They help with the children, with the food. They are your neighbors. Not refugees, but owning perhaps exactly the same amount of stuff. You learn to communicate with each other. You learn from them. Maybe even make friends. When else in history – how else – would once-affluent European Jews get to share their daily lives with lower-class Chinese? Even today, with all the traveling and mixing, this is a hard thing to achieve.

Then one day, the neighborhood closes in on itself, enveloping everyone in it. The Japanese, to appease the Gestapo, create the first and only Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The uniqueness of this ghetto is evident. Jews and Chinese coexisted as semi-prisoners, both suffering under the hardness of the Japanese rule.

Life becomes less comfortable. Working is hard, as is going to school, because you need special permit to leave the ghetto. Nonetheless, Jewish books, magazines and newspapers are published. People celebrate the holidays. Shops, bakeries, pharmacies, cafes open and flourish. Children are born. People get married. Maybe you are one of them.

And then, just like that, a decade passes. Suddenly it’s 1950, and almost no one is left. The Japanese are gone. Communism is coming, and business becomes impossible. People found their surviving family members, moved to America, Australia, Israel.  So you pack you bags, now perhaps significantly bigger, get on a boat, and go to reunite with the few distant cousins left to you.  

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Subsequently, the refugees thought very fondly of their time in Shanghai. It seems that the significance of it lies not merely on the fact that they were saved from a horrendous death, but also in that they were truly welcomed by the local population, and were allowed to flourish. Even the Japanese had nothing against the Jews, and were much more severe on their Chinese neighbors.

 A beam of light in an otherwise horrendous decade. 

The Museum (September 27, 2011, part 2)

As I walked into the dark-red brick compound, S pointed to the security guards – older Chinese men in light-blue uniforms. She introduced me and I asked her to tell them that even though I don’t speak Chinese now, I am going to learn and work hard so I can talk to them. One of them, the head guard who’d been there for a long time, greeted me in Hebrew. “Naim meod lehacir otakh”, he said, in the strongest shanghainese accent you can imagine. It took me a second to realize it was Hebrew, but then I laughed and answered, “naim meod”. He then wished me a shana tova (because it’s Rosh Hashana, he clarified). I appreciate moments like that. It reminds me that I’m not jaded enough to stop enjoying how inter-connected the world is. And it’s one of those strange connections that seem to skip a few beats. This man doesn’t speak English, but is comfortable sustaining a basic conversation in Hebrew.

The synagogue were the Museum is housed is modest and beautiful. My first, personal reaction was that here is a little tiny part of the huge puzzle that was the Holocaust that I knew nothing about. It adds a deeper layer to the phrase “world war”. There’s always something new to learn, and it’s always great when the new thing is as life-changing as this detail in history was. About thirty-thousand people were saved because Shanghai opened its doors to them. And here I am, coming back to this city to represent an organization that was here 70 years ago, helping the refugees. It’s like holding a little piece of history in my hand. It’s an honor of the sort that until now I have not been privy to. I'm beginning to understand that a big part of my experience in Shanghai will have something to do with this connection that both JDC and the Jewish people in general have with this amazing city. 

The building was taken over by trader Jews in 1927, when they began using it as a synagogue. I wonder what brought them here to this neighborhood. Even now, after much of Shanghai has modernized, it remains stuck in its former humble glory. The lane houses are old and packed, street vendors line the corners, and the side streets are full of little fabric and household items shops, repairmen, laundry services and babies. It’s wonderful.

Behind the synagogue is a beautiful courtyard, surrounded by these little lane houses. Two small buildings erected in the courtyard portray the history of the Jewish refugees through pictures and videos. The synagogue has four floors: the first, main synagogue floor, the second balcony floor (where the women used to pray), which now has a conference table and computers for research, the third floor which is now an art gallery, and a little tiny attic, where the office is. I love it up there. We have a good view of the street from the balcony, the ceiling is low, and everything is wood and cozy. It’s a nice place to come to.

(I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the lack of order in the posts; I really wanted to share these three posts that I wrote almost two months ago when I arrived in Shanghai. From now on they will correspond to the dates!              - 10/11/2011)