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Established in the fall of 1996 by Professor Robert Gohstand to preserve and publicize the heritage of the many people from other countries and cultures who have resided and worked in China, the Old China Hands Archives holds a growing collection of materials donated by former Old China Hands, including correspondence, diaries, photographs, postcards, books, periodicals, newspapers, and other materials. These materials document the varied experiences of foreigners living in China during the early 20th century. Whether employees of the government of China, business persons, missionaries, maritime or military servicepersons, refugees from Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, civil administrators, or journalists, their documentation of cultural interactions, international travel, local economies, and their own personal experiences provide a fascinating window into a turbulent phase of China's history.

Within the Archives is an additional Old China Hands Oral History Project Collection, containing nearly 200 oral histories documenting a range of experiences. Interview topics include daily life in China, impressions of local culture and business, and experiences related to World War II, such as the Japanese occupation and internment of Allied country citizens residing in China. Transcripts are available for most audio interviews. 

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) were established  in Jerusalem in 1939. They hold the most extensive collection of documents, registers, and other records of Jewish history from the Middle Ages to the present day.  Files from the archives of the Jewish community in Tianjin(1920-1957) and documents and photographs relating to the activity of Rabbi Aaron Moshe Kiseleff (1938-1950), the last rabbi of Harbin, were all deposited at the CAHJP by Igud Yotzei Sin in Israel. Additional documents and photographs of Jewish institutions and prominent community members in Tientsin (predominantly in Russian, with some Yiddish and Hebrew); the collection of the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau for Emigrants (Daljewcib), covering the organization’s activity, first in Harbin and then in Shanghai (1918-1947) (in English, German and Yiddish). They also contain family trees of some Chinese families of Jewish origin, as well as interviews with some of the family members.

Located in Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College maintains an impressive array of primary source material. Its Rare Book and Manuscript Collection includes archival and literary manuscripts, including a unique Chinese-Hebrew collection. It is also one of only a handful of institutions which possess an original Torah scroll from Kaifeng, dating to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).

By 1943, over 16,500 Jewish refugees were living primarily in Hongkew, Shanghai, a ghetto established by the Japanese invaders at Nazi instigation. As conditions worsened, the JDC stepped in to provide food, education, and vocational training; built hospitals; and set up an emigration office.

The JDC Archives Names Database includes more than 500,000 names of individuals who have received assistance from “the Joint.” This important resource for genealogists and those searching their family history is drawn from JDC client lists and index cards from JDC operations across the globe. The Names Index includes numerous lists from the World War II era from as far and wide as British Mandate Palestine, Spain, China, Australia, Germany, and South America, among others. The database contains primary source documents as well as an index and covers activities ranging from 1915-1973.

The New York Public Library contains a repository of oral histories documenting the lives of Jewish refugees living in Shanghai. This special collection is part of the The New York Public Library: American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection which contains over 156,000 pages of transcripts, 6,000 hours of taped interviews, and 2,250 informants. 

The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum has registered 549 items documenting the Jewish experience so far, including tickets for the voyage from Europe to Shanghai, certificates for job applications and audio and video recordings of interviews with former refugees. The materials capture the chain of life of Jewish refugees. Documents related to Jewish refugees' lives in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s were listed in the municipality's legacy archives last year. The Shanghai Museum hopes that documents about Jewish refugees' life experience in Shanghai during World War II will eventually be listed in China's national legacy archives. 

Video:

Shanghai Museum Unveils Holocaust Memorial

The Sino-Judaic Archives at the Hoover Institution was created with donations of primary source material gathered by the Sino-Judaic Institute in the 1990s, through the indefatigable efforts of SJI Board member Rena Krasno, the Institute's first archivist. It contains correspondence, minutes, reports, publications, writings, personal identification documents, financial reports, bylaws, printed matter, and photographs, relating to Russian, Polish and other European Jews, as well as Jewish communal organizations, in China, especially in Shanghai. It also includes memoirs and other papers of individuals, and other collected material.

The archive contains material donated to SJI concerning the Jewish communities in China. Among the items already deposited is the register of the Polish Consulate in Nanjing and later Shanghai, which lists the name, religion, and age of each Polish citizen who arrived in either Shanghai or Nanjing between January 9, 1934 and October 29, 1941. The archives also contain the original cassette tapes of oral histories gathered by Dr. Wendy Abraham in the summer of 1985, of the oldest generation of Jewish descendants who shared memories of Jewish rituals and holiday celebrations dating to the early 20th century.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum contains archives of the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau Harbin-Shanghai from the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. It also contains administrative and personal files created by the Central Information Bureau for Jewish War Sufferers in the Far East, 

and correspondence from the Bureau with Jewish communities and international Jewish and non-Jewish aid and migration organizations in various parts of the world. Cables and correspondence, mostly in Yiddish and Russian, were sent during the interwar period starting in 1918 by the Bureau to facilitate the emigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. 

The personal files include approximately 3,000 emigration applications received in the years between 1938-1940 by the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland (Aid Society of the Jews in Germany) from Jews living in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Poland, asking for assistance with emigration to Harbin and Shanghai. These applications were forwarded to the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau (DALJEWCIB), often in response to job announcements posted abroad in Harbin or Shanghai. The personal files consist of a wide variety of personal documents, such as emigration applications, correspondence, photographs, curricula vitae, reference letters, name lists, search requests, and other documents.

The Shanghai Collection at YIVO relates to life in the ghetto and includes materials on the founding of the ghetto, relief groups such as JDC, ORT, HIAS, and SACRA (Shanghai Ashkenazic Collaborating Relief Association), political organizations including Zionist groups and the Bund, the rabbinate, the sick and benevolent society, a kitchen fund, commercial establishments, religious and secular schools, professional associations, art, theater and music activities, the Jewish press, and emigration from Shanghai after World War II.  There are also manuscript histories of the Shanghai Ghetto. A number of other YIVO archival collections have material on Jewish refugees in Shanghai. YIVO’s archival collections can be researched at Guide to the YIVO Archives. 

Among them:

Collection on life in the Shanghai Ghetto and emigration from Shanghai after World War II  

Papers of the Director of the HIAS office in Harbin, Meir Birman (1918-1955), and later of the HIAS office in Shanghai 

Papers of a resident of the Shanghai Ghetto, 1938-1950s