Tuesday Oct 5 Shanghai

We got up to go on the Jewish tour.  I was feeling OK; not great, just OK.  We went to the Peace Hotel, an old classic art deco place from the 1930s.  We met the group, who were not hard to spot.  Our guide was Dvir Bar-Gal, an Israeli journalist who came here 9 years ago for a story and stayed.  More about his story later.  I won’t go into all the details, but basically the story of the Jews here comes down to 3 families:  the Sassoons, the Khaduris, and the Harduns.  They were Iraqi Jews who came to China to do some trading of opium starting with Elias David Sassoon in the mid 1840s.  The Khaduris and Hardouns came later as clerks for the Sassoons, and struck out on their own.  The Peace Hotel, which once was the tallest building in Shanghai, was built and lived in by one of the Sassoon descendents.  When troubles began in Europe in the 20s and 30s, Jews came here because of a long standing tradition of open immigration in Shanghai.  No visa needed, just show up and test your luck.  When the Germans really began to crack down in the later 30s and during the war, several Japanese Righteous Gentiles, Mr Sugihara and Doctor Ho wrote thousands of exit visas in Lithuania and Vienna respectively to allow people to get to Shanghai, then in Japanese hands.  The Germans tried to impress on the Japanese how unsuitable the Jews were, but they really had no history of anti-Semitism, so they really could care less.  They did accommodate them by making a ghetto for “stateless persons” arriving after 1937, which certainly did not include all the Jews.  After the war, most of the Jews left for Israel or America, but there are a number remaining. 

Dvir also told us of his “calling” and why he has stayed in Shanghai.  In looking for the Jewish cemeteries, he found that none were left.  One was the site of an office, one a shopping center, etc.  What happened to the headstones? He began looking and found them as walkways, chopping blocks, buried in swamps, etc.  He has been collecting them and is trying to convince the Chinese government to allow a memorial site in the old ghetto area.  Chinese bureaucracy is Chinese bureaucracy.  He is still working at it, but wasn’t even able to ask for donations, as he is still too far from approval fro the project.

We had lunch at a snack shop in the Bund area where the Peace Hotel with a couple from New York who was on the Jewish tour.  The 4 of us then went to the Expo.  Here was our only rip-off of the entire trip, although it wasn’t much.  The taxi took us on a very long ride around Shanghai until we reached the entrance gate.  I wasn’t completely sure until the ride home was less than 1/3 the price.

The Expo is huge.  People, people, people.  And we were there late in the day when the crowds were less!!  We walked in by the huge China pavilion, but the lines were 2-3 hours long.  Israel was nearby, and we went to the VIP entrance, and flashed our passports with Israeli stamps from our trip in the spring.  Sometimes it helps to be Jewish!  The exhibit emphasized Israel’s strong intellectual prowess and technological achievements.  They finely tuned the message to match the Chinese exhortation of A Better Life.  The one thing I was surprised they didn’t include was a reference to the age of the Jewish People.  The Chinese are always talking about the fact that they have been a people for 5000 years with the same language to which I say “So?”.  But al least now the Chinese have some value in tradition and history, and we can share that with them.

After Israel, we hit Cambodia and the Shanghai City exhibits, both of which were pretty lame.  We chose our sites by the line length and how far it was to walk.  Very practical, but enough already.  We had walked around for a few hours at the Expo, and most of the day on the Jewish tour.  We were beat.