Welcome

Zoom Lecture by Rabbi Anson Laytner

Book Group Discussion of Pearl S. Buck's Peony

Seaside Jewish Community

Rehoboth Beach, Delaware 

Guest speaker Rabbi Anson Laytner, President of the Sino-Judaic Institute and co-editor with Jordan Paper of The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng: A Millennium of Adaptation and Endurance (2017), will give a talk on the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng as a prelude to the Seaside Jewish Community's Book Group discussion of Pearl S. Buck's 1942 novel on the Chinese Jews, Peony. 

Shanghai: Safe Haven During the Holocaust 

 Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Northern Trust Gallery

The Joseph L. & Emily K. Gidwitz 

Memorial Foundation Gallery    

In 1946, American photojournalist Arthur Rothstein began a project documenting the lives of Jewish refugees who now called Shanghai’s Hongkew District “home.”  This exhibit sheds light on a lesser-known moment in Holocaust history: European Jews who had been shut out of country after country while trying to escape Nazi persecution, only to find  a beacon of hope in China. 

Kensington Library - Brooklyn, New York 

In collaboration with Amud Aish Memorial Musuem

and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum 

This multi-branch exhibition includes images and ephemera of European Jews who were displaced during the war, films and lectures about their time in China, and a discussion about their eventual emigration to the United States. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, he issued a series of anti-Semitic decrees, depriving Jews of their civil rights. With the outbreak of WWII, many Jews chose to flee their hometowns, and a considerable number of them took refuge in Shanghai, China— a city they could travel to without a visa.  Around that same time, students from the Mir Yeshiva in Vilna, Lithuania, also made their way to East Asia to escape the Nazi regime, setting up yeshivas in their new home. Many of these students—and their families—emigrated to Brooklyn, NY, following Japan’s surrender in 1945.

Historic Shanghai Cocktail Cinema: 

Shanghai Exodus

(2009 Documentary)  

What was it like to grow up as part of Old Shanghai’s fabled international community? In this powerful documentary, the story of Shanghai’s history is told through rare historic footage, interspersed with the personal stories and reminisces of the men and women who grew up in 1920s-40s Shanghai, during an era of turbulence and drama—a story with special resonance today.  

Historic Shanghai Book Club

Witness to History from Vienna to Shanghai:

A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience  by Paul Hoffman and Jean Hoffman Lewanda .

On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser.   

January Walks Offered by Historic Shanghai

"Inside the RockBund Series"

Its quiet beauty houses a rich heritage: Sephardic Jewish businessman B.A. Somekh hired Moorhead, Halse & Robinson -- the firm which had designed the Ohel Rachel Synagogue and the Shanghai Club -- to build him a prestigious legacy. Tragically, he died the year it was completed. He left a fortune to his sons and a building in which a century’s worth of history resides.  

For more on the series: 

https://www.historic-shanghai.com/inside-the-rockbund/