Featured Scholar: Prof. Dan Ben-Canaan

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For over twenty years Prof. Dan Ben-Canaan (丹•本-卡南 教授), the foremost scholar on Jewish life in Harbin, has called that city home. The close relationships he has forged with a broad array of Chinese government officials and educational institutions, often in collaboration with Israeli universities, has led to the establishment of key academic and cultural organizations dedicated to the research and celebration of Jewish life in Harbin. 

The historical scope of his work and that of the organizations he has established, spans the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants to Harbin in the late 1800s via Siberia, who were fleeing pogroms in Russia when Harbin was just a cluster of small villages on the banks of the Songhua River, to the thriving Jewish community it became by the 1920s and 30s, replete with synagogues, Jewish newspapers, hospitals and Jewish schools in what had by then become the northeastern capital of Heilongjiang Province. His work continues well into the modern city that is Harbin today, where architectural landmarks built by the original Russian Jews who settled there over a century ago, can still be seen, and newly renovated synagogues can be visited.

In 2003, shortly after his own move to China, he founded the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center, followed in 2014 with the creation of the Harbin Jewish Culture Association. In between the establishment of those two key organizations, Prof. Ben-Canaan undertook projects which will have a lasting effect on the preservation of Jewish sites in Harbin for decades to come. 

Between 2012-2014 Prof. Ben-Canaan headed the reconstruction project of the Old (Main) Synagogue, the old Jewish High School, the Teacher’s Building, and a private Jewish home on what has been called “the Jewish Block” – Tongjiang Street, in the historical Daoli District of Harbin. He has also overseen the renovation, preservation, research, mapping, and photographing of Jewish tombstones in Harbin’s Jewish cemetery at Huangshan, as well as the renovation of the New Synagogue and curation of the “History of the Harbin Jewish Community” exhibition which was held there from 2005-2008.

Most recently, Prof. Ben-Canaan was preparing an exhibition for the Jewish Museum at Eldridge Street in New York, "Harbin, China: Past/Present," which was then to travel throughout the United States. Since the museum had to close to outside visitors as a result of the outbreak of the coronavirus, it has been put on hold. The Museum described it as an exploration of "... the fascinating story of a flourishing Jewish community in a remote Chinese town at the turn of the 20th century. Shaped by industry, politics, culture, and community, Harbin is a singular place that, surprisingly, draws compelling parallels to our own American Jewish enclaves like the Lower East Side. 

The exhibition unites personal stories, historic photos, and contemporary art to explore the past and present of this remarkable place. Like the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a grand synagogue stands in Harbin, China that serves as a museum and a relic of a time when it was the center of a flourishing Jewish community. And much like the Lower East Side, many of Harbin’s Jews eventually left the home they had created there."
 

Prof. Ben-Canaan has almost single-handedly ensured a place for the study and appreciation of Harbin’s Jewish roots within Chinese academia and the Chinese populace in Harbin at large. 

Without Prof. Ben-Canaan’s scholarship, tenacity and dedication to seeing these many projects through, it is safe to say that Harbin's Jewish history may never have been brought to life for Chinese and Western scholars, nor for the new possibilities it has opened more broadly for tourism in the city of Harbin as well.

Echoes of Harbin: Reflections on Space and Time

Prof. Ben-Canaan’s upcoming book, Echoes of Harbin: Reflections on Space and Time, uses a special narrative that tailors his own Chinese autobiography with historical studies of the Jewish community of Harbin. The study presents the new “foreign” city in the perspective of its place within Manchuria, arguing that its space and time cannot be separated from those of the overall regional experience. 

The book highlights the story of the Jewish community of Harbin through the daily life of its people. It includes statistical data and tables, showing Manchuria as pivotal to the birth of the Chinese nation, and offers a critical view of China’s Jewish history and the Chinese perception of the Jewish people, bringing insight into Chinese anti-Semitism, or lack thereof. It gives a comprehensive and new look to the Jewish experience in China, and to the Chinese awareness of the Jews amongst them.