Lost Shanghai Jewish Graves

History

Shanghai, China - Israeli photojournalist Dvir Bar-Gal discovered Shanghai’s graveyard secret: hundreds, maybe thousands of Jewish tombstones are scattered around Shanghai’s outlying villages, used as everything from building beams to washboards.

As the old, dilapidated villages around Shanghai are being redeveloped into upscale neighborhoods, Israeli photojournalist Dvir Bar-Gal is racing the clock, scouring swamps, construction sites, riverbeds and cabbage fields for the slabs of stone that mark the city’s Jewish past. What turned into his mission of the decade began by accident, when he discovered a Hebrew tombstone in a Shanghai antique shop in 2001. Since then, he’s become Shanghai’s “gravestone sleuth,” unearthing burial markers in the most obscure places around the bustling Chinese metropolis.

Bar-Gal, a photojournalist from Tel Aviv, was in Shanghai to learn more about the city that served as a refuge for Jews for a century, when he hooked up with a tour led by fellow Israeli expatriate and Shanghai resident Georgia Noy. When the tour ended, Noy sent the journalist what she thought might be a story lead for him: a photograph of two Jewish gravestones, adding that she had found the stones in an antique shop in the city, where they were up for sale.

The name Yachne bas Reb Shmuel Poliak was engraved on one stone; the other stone bore the name Raizel bas Reb Moshe Abramowitz, written in both Hebrew and Russian.

Jews were looking for their ancestors’ burial places, and although Shanghai had a large Jewish community, there was a big mystery. There was not a grave to be found. Bar-Gal approached Mr. Shu, the store owner, but one of the stones had already been sold, although the dealer didn’t realize the significance of the large marble stones he was selling. When he learned that they were gravestones, his face clouded; the Chinese believe that gravestones bring bad luck.

In the middle of a cabbage field

Stones in the Mud

Some of the older locals remembered that the stones had been brought from a Muslim cemetery several kilometers to the east, closer to the city.
The guards at the cemetery’s gate were not surprised by the visitors. They related that Jewish tourists had once come frequently to the cemetery and inquired about Jewish graves in the vicinity, but they had had no information to give them. They did tell the group, however, that the land had once been an international cemetery and had contained many Jewish graves.

Jewish gravestone behind one of the local houses, embedded in a block of cement that was used as a support wall.

The Pearl of the East

Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Shanghai had been known as the “Pearl of the East;” from its origins as a tiny fishing town, it turned into China’s largest city and a bustling international port metropolis. At its peak, the Jewish community in the city numbered no fewer than 30,000 Jews.

The first Jews to settle in Shanghai arrived in 1845, when David Sassoon, an Iraqi Jew living in India, moved his family business to this city, China’s first city to open to the West. He was soon joined by the Kadoorie and Hardoon families, Baghdad merchants who eventually built their fortunes in Shanghai, where they occupied key positions in the city and made significant social and economic contributions to its development.

The next wave of immigrants to Shanghai included Russian Jews escaping the pogroms of the early 1900s. The Russian immigrants included a significant number of academics — doctors, musicians, and teachers. By the early 1940s, there were numerous Jewish institutions and services in Shanghai.

The last major group of Jewish immigrants to Shanghai is probably the most well-known of the three: European refugees who escaped the Nazi advance during WWII. At that time, China was the only country in the world where immigrants and refugees did not require entry visas, and many Jews used this to their advantage as they fled from the Nazi terror.

• The thousands of refugees who streamed to the city were mostly penniless, and they desperately needed the assistance that was extended to them by the established, wealthy Sephardic community.
• Japan occupied Shanghai during the war, but refused Nazi orders to deport or murder the city’s Jews. The additional 20,000 stateless Jewish refugees were confined to what became known as the Hongkou ghetto, and although disease and poverty were rampant, the Jews were spared the horrors of the Holocaust.
• There had been four Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai until the 1950s, containing a total of about 3,700 graves. The first, known as the Israeli Cemetery, had already been founded in 1862.

In 1958, all four cemeteries were supposed to be transferred in an organized fashion to the west of the city, where an immense international cemetery had been constructed, including a Jewish section.

The few Jews who remained in the city after the Communists came to power assisted in transferring the graves. During the 1960s Mao Zedong launched his “Cultural Revolution,” and the cemetery was completely destroyed in this ideological deluge, along with China’s rich cultural heritage.

The revolution turned the gravestones into meaningless slabs of rock, and they were uprooted and designated for various uses, such as used as washboards by the villagers.

Grave Obesssion

As soon as Dvir Bar-Gal realized the extent of the story, it went from being a newspaper scoop to a mission. In the last few years, Bar-Gal himself has become a tour guide, taking Jewish tourists to explore Shanghai’s Jewish past, but always with an eye on his first project. He has spent the past ten years traveling through the villages around Shanghai, where the locals already recognize the “foreigner” who comes in search of tombstones.

The villagers turn the stones upside down for cultural reasons. They believe that tombstones bring bad luck, and therefore place them with the inscriptions on the underside, believing that they will no longer be considered tombstones once the inscriptions are no longer visible.

This local custom has greatly magnified the difficulty of the search, since every time a suspected gravestone is discovered, immense efforts must be invested to flip it in order to determine whether it is a Jewish gravestone.

Information Center

Bar-Gal has established an information center where the names found on the various tombstones are listed, along with pictures of each tombstone and details of the location where it was found.

Without the ability to locate the graves themselves, the stones have remained the last testimony to the existence of the many deceased. “When I began my project, I consulted Rabbi Sholom Greenberg, the rav of Shanghai and a Chabad shaliach, and he told me that the grave stones do not possess any kedushah. The kedushah is in the body of the deceased, and as long as the stone exists only for the purpose of perpetuating his or her memory, there is no problem with moving it.” Bar-Gal thus decided to gather the tombstones to a central location, where they will be preserved in memory of the deceased.

Bar-Gal once found a tombstone at the bottom of a river, which proved a link to a family in New York. A local villager admitted to Bar-Gal that he had thrown it in the river, and was even able to identify its location. Bar-Gal brought in a bulldozer to fish the stone out of the water.

Chinese Auction

Today, Bar-Gal has unearthed 105 tombstones and located about thirty of the families of the deceased.

The thousands of dollars Bar-Gal has spent recovering the gravestones has been covered in part by a grant from Stanford University’s Sino-Judaic Institute, the Israel Consulate, some private Israeli companies, and donations from visitors who take his guided tours of the old Jewish Hongkou district. But China doesn’t officially recognize Judaism as a religion, and historical preservation is a low priority in a country that destroyed much of its own history and culture.

Bar-Gal wants to open a memorial center for the tombstones that are now being held in a storage facility, and has spent the last decade trying to interest the Chinese authorities in the idea, but they have pushed him off repeatedly, preferring to ignore the past.

He still hopes to receive government permission to build a Jewish memorial in a small park in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto. Meanwhile, his story is still waiting for a good ending.

About the Project

The project to unearth, restore, document and create a befitting memorial for those Jewish people that lived and died in Shanghai is the work of a small and dedicated team (see below). This research is ongoing from its inception in November 2001. The project’s evolution is documented from the initial discovery of the first Jewish tombstone in a Shanghai antique store, through to the unearthing of over dozens more and with the hope of creating a befitting memorial to this unique piece of Shanghai and Jewish history.

Names of the tombstones that have been found in Shanghai to date are listed below. Please note that some of the names have been translated from Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew and German and as a result some inaccuracies may exist. It is hoped to add more names as recovery efforts continue.

Additional information relating to the following list and/or of other Jews who lived and died in Shanghai is welcomed. Please click on Feedback and Support.

• Shanghai Jewish Memorial

Research

Dvir Bar-Gal wrote the above document in March 2002. For further reading click on the links to other Publications on the project. Asian Wall Street Journal, James T. Areddy 23 May, 2003.

• Shanghai Graves
• Culture
• China
• Dangoor

The list of names contain links to information obtained from The Lost Shanghai Jewish Graves many of which may need to be added to Geni. Your assistance with this project would be much appreciated. Any queries contact Pam Karp.

1. ABRAMOWITZ MLIKA
2. ABRAMOWITZ REIZEL
3. ARONHEIM ADELE'
4. ARZICH ISRAEL
5. BERBHAN LEA ?
6. BLOCH BENNO
7. BOGOMOLSKY FREIDLE
8. BOROCHOV SOLOMON
9. BRAUNTHAL LOTTE
10. CORBOLEFSKY SOPHIA
11. DELBOURNO SARAH
12. DUCHOWASKAIA ? LEA
13. EIFLAND JACOB
14. FELDMAN HAYA
15. FELDMAN SARAH
16. FINELAND LEIB
17. GODSCHMIDT ANITA
18. GOLDMAN HAIM
19. GRONOWSKI WILHELM
20. HALEVI?
21. HARPUDER HANS
22. HESS OTTO
23. JOSEPH BENJAMIN
24. KADOORIE ELLY - Geni record at Sir Elly Kadoorie
25. KADOORIE LAURA - Geni Record at Laura Kadoorie
26. KAPEL SOLOMON / SHLOMO ?
27. KATZ RIVKA / REBECCA
28. KATZ / ? UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
29. KIRGNER LEO J.
30. KLEBANOFF TSIPA ARONOVNA
31. KOHN HERMINE
32. KRELL NATHAN / NACHMAN
33. KUPFERBERG ABRAHAM
34. LACHMANOITZ ? PAUL / PINCHAS
35. LAZARUS EMANUEL
36. LEAH SARAH
37. MAND…? ALBERT EDVARD
38. MARCUS SAMUEL, SEMMY
39. MI…? ESTER
40. MINNY SOLOMON REUBEN - Geni record at Solomon Reuben Minny
41. MOSES RIMA
42. MOSES SOL
43. NATOWIC GISELA
44. NEIFELD ISACK
45. PELIACK YACHNE
46. PISAREVSKY GREGORY / ZVI-HIRSH
47. POWIZER ROBERT
48. PRASTERMAN SHMUP
49. PUCHES ROSA
50. RABINOWITZ ISAAC
51. RAKUSEN CHARLES
52. RANDBY RACHEL / LEA
53. ROBINS ESTHER
54. ROSEMSTEIN HAIM
55. ROSENFELD ALBERT BERNARD
56. ROSENFELD FANNY
57. SAMETZ ELIZABETH
58. SAMUELS ZITTA
59. SAPHNAT ? SARAH
60. SASSOON AARON
61. SASSOON CHARLES
62. SASSOON JOSEPH
63. SCHINDLER FERDINAND
64. SCHOENFELD HEINZ
65. SERBERENIK SOPHIE
66. SHMULEWSKY LEONID / LEIB
67. SOLOMONOV HAIM
68. SPRIA WILHELM
69. STEINBERN KALMAN
70. SUCHMAN MOSES
71. UNKNOWN ABRAHAM
72. UNKNOWN JOSEPH
73. UNKNOWN LEA ?
74. UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
75. UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
76. UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
77. UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
78. UNKNOWN ZIPE
79. VORON SARA
80. WACHSZNER ELSE / RIVKA
81. WEISS MOSES / MORITZ
82. WITANZEN ZALMAN
83. WULFSOHN BENNO / BENJAMIN
84. ZATZ FEIGE
85. ZISKIN URI?
86. ZUCKERMANN ELSE / Ester

Assistance

The assistance of the following people, the dedicated team and supporters is much appreciated:

• Family of the late Mr. Alfred Harris of Wimbledon, England.
• The Sino Judaic Institute in Stanford University.
• Mr. Elan Oved, Shanghai.

The Team:

• Dvir Bar-Gal
• Georgia Noy
• Anna D’Ettorre
• Mia Davids

Supporters:

• Our supporters in L.A
• Mrs. Sharon & Mr. Stan Joffe
• Mrs. Rina & Mr. Shimon Rojany
• Mrs. Betty and Mr. David Welsh
• The Shanghai Jewish Community Executive Committee:
• Mr. Maurice Ohana and family
• Mr. Elan Oved and family
• Mrs. Nurit Gabay and family
• The Hoffman family:Irit, Dani and Nir
• The Israeli consulate in Shanghai, Consul General Mr. Ilan Maor
• Vice consul, Mr. Eliav Benjamin

The Sino Judaic Institute in Stanford University.

• Mr. Albert E. Dien
• Prof. Vera Schwarcz
• Mr. S. Ehrlich
• Mrs. Rena Krasno

Thanks go to the kind Chinese people living in the villages and towns west of Shanghai who permitted collection of the lost headstones.

Sources

Jewish Tombstones
Accreditation to the Jewish Tombstones article from which much of the historical information has been sourced.

Tombstone image