Welcome

By Jonathan Goldstein, Irene Clurman and Dan Ben-Canaan

Early History

Harbin, China, is located 1,500 miles inland in Heilongjiang Province, a region also referred to as Manchuria. The fundamental factor that explains Jewish settlement in Harbin is the city’s status as a railroad hub, constructed in 1898 by Czarist Russia on land leased from China. It is located at a point on the Sungari, or Songhua, River where the railroad intersects with extensive river traffic. Jews developed  businesses ranging from the export of furs to maritime insurance to the  management of hotels. They exchanged goods and services with their kinsmen in European Russia, China, Japan, Korea, and America as well as with ethnic Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and native Siberian  peoples. 

By the  end of the 19th century, Jews in Czarist Russia were desperate to escape  the country’s poverty, pogroms and institutionalized anti-Semitism. Visas to America did not grow on trees, and Jews had trouble obtaining permits for any kind of travel, even within Russia. However, in a little known footnote to history, the Czar who plagued and reviled his Jewish subjects also offered them an out (Read more)

Bamsa, Mark. The Many Faces of Hotel Moderne in Harbin (2011)

Ben-Canaan, Dan. Jewish Footprints in Harbin: Concise Historical Notes (China Heilongjiang Education Press, 2018)

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Ben-Canaan, Dan, Frank Grüner, Ines Prodöhl, eds.  Entangled Histories: The Transcultural Past of Northeast China. (Switzerland: Springer International 

Publishing, 2014) 

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_____. “The Last to Leave, The Jews of China: Kaifeng, Shanghai, Harbin, Beijing," in Jewish Renaissance (Vol. 4, Issue 2, January 2005): 29.

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_____. “1898-1958: Politics, Prosperity, Adversity.” Paper presented at the 

Symposium on Jewish Diasporas in China, John K. Fairbank Center for East  Asian Research (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, August 16-18, 1992)

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 Quarterly (99:1, Winter, 2000): 97-115.

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Clurman, Irene. A Manchurian Footnote to Jewish History Shemot (April)

_____.  Homage to Harbin

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Communities in Harbin 1899–1930," in Robert Bickers and Christian Hermich eds., New Frontiers in East Asia 1842–1953 (Manchester 2000): 88–108.

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Japanese and the Jews During World War II (Gefen Publishing House, 2004)

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_____. "The Tiny Island of Russian Jews," Jewish Communities of China (March 19, 2012)

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