Jewish communal and Zionist organisations in China

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Jewish communal and Zionist organisations in China
Type Historical communities and contemporary expatriate bodies
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Jewish communal and Zionist organisations in China are two sequences, not one. The first ran from the treaty ports and Harbin into the 1940s: Baghdadi merchant congregations, a Russian-speaking community, wartime refugee bodies, and Zionist funds and youth movements that sent money and people to Palestine. The second begins after the People’s Republic was established and the old communities left. What remains on the mainland is an expatriate network, opened after China and Israel established diplomatic relations in January 1992, plus a continuous set of congregations in Hong Kong. Chabad-Lubavitch in China is the largest of the new bodies. It is not the heir of the Harbin or Shanghai kehillot.

The communities

Four populations are usually run together and should not be.

The Kaifeng Jews are a historical Chinese community, documented from the Song and Ming periods, with a synagogue that did not survive the nineteenth century. They are not part of the treaty-port organisations, and they are not the constituency of the modern Chabad houses. State policy does not treat them as a recognised minority, and foreign Jewish groups have been told not to proselytise or to organise them.

The Baghdadi, or Sephardi, merchants arrived with the treaty ports after the Opium Wars. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tianjin were the seats. The Sassoon, Kadoorie, Hardoon and Abraham families built synagogues, schools, hospitals and newspapers. Ohel Leah Synagogue in Hong Kong, opened in 1902, is the surviving building. The Shanghai synagogues, Ohel Rachel and Beth Aharon among them, are buildings or museums, not working congregations of those families.

The Russian-speaking community followed the Chinese Eastern Railway into Harbin from 1898, and then into Tianjin and Shanghai. Harbin had a full communal structure: burial society, hospital, schools, a rabbinate under Aharon Moshe Kislev, and a political range from the Bund to Agudat Israel to Revisionist Zionism. Dr Abraham Kaufman was the dominant communal figure. Most left for Israel, the United States, Australia and the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1950s.

The wartime refugees are the third foreign wave. Shanghai required no visa. Holders of Sugihara papers and others brought the 1938–41 total to something in the order of 18,000 to 20,000 European Jews, alongside the existing Baghdadi and Russian communities. The Mir yeshiva and a group of Tomchei Tmimim students sat out the war there. The Japanese confined stateless refugees to the Hongkew ghetto in 1943. After 1945 most left. By the early 1960s the mainland communities were gone.[1][2]

Role

In the treaty-port decades the communities did three jobs. They were the religious and welfare structure for foreign Jews who did not become Chinese citizens. They were a business class inside the colonial and concession economies, above all in opium, cotton, property and finance, which is why the Kadoorie and Sassoon names sit on hospitals and schools as well as synagogues. And they were a fundraising periphery for the Jewish national home. That third job is the Zionist one.

A 2010 study in Middle Eastern Studies argued that China was not cut off from the Zionist centres. Branches of the Jewish National Fund are listed in Central Zionist Archives files for China and the Far East. A Keren Hayesod campaign bulletin was issued in Shanghai on 15 May 1924. Eliezer Kadoorie (Eleazer Silas Kadoorie) headed the Zionist organisation in China. Kadoorie money went to land for the Hebrew University, to Ha’emek hospital, and to an agricultural school in the Galilee. The point of the article is the disproportion: a small community, a high rate of gifts, explained by Baghdadi wealth and by organised Zionist work.[3]

Harbin was the political end of the same map. Kaufman and Kislev’s community is described by the former-residents’ association as overwhelmingly Zionist. Betar was the largest youth movement, named for Joseph Trumpeldor, who passed through Harbin in 1905 on the way to a Japanese prison camp. Maccabi carried the General Zionists. The Harbin Jewish Women’s Association, linked to WIZO, was founded in 1922. Jabotinsky’s Revisionists used the Russian-speaking city as their East Asian entry. The Bund, under Lazar Epstein, was the anti-Zionist pole. After 1948, Ya’akov Liberman organised a seaborne departure for Israel. The Israeli association of former residents, Igud Yotzei Sin, was founded in June 1951, largely by Harbiners.[2][4]

The postwar role is different. The mainland has no recognised Jewish nationality and does not license Judaism as a religion for Chinese citizens. The houses that reopened after 1992 serve embassy staff, corporate expats, teachers and traders. A Foshan shliach has said the local authorities allowed services for Israelis and tourists and forbade the house to host Chinese citizens. The communities are also a soft-power surface. Beijing’s shliach has written for China Daily thanking the state for wartime shelter. Business chambers and the Israeli embassy sit beside the synagogues. The old Zionist youth movements are not reconstituted. The Zionist content of the new network is the link to Israel as home, funder and political reference, carried by Chabad, by the Israeli diplomatic posts, and by visitors’ organisations, rather than by a local JNF branch.[5]

The state relationship

The congregations are not the bilateral relationship. Aron Shai’s China and Israel: Chinese, Jews; Beijing, Jerusalem (1890–2018) is the survey of the informal channel: Morris Cohen beside Sun Yat-sen, Ya’akov Rosenfeld in the Chinese Red Army, and Shaul Eisenberg as the carrier of the first military contacts, the figure Israeli reporting calls “the king of China.” A RAND report of March 2019 tracks the expansion since the early 2000s in trade, investment, construction, universities and tourism, and the constraint of the United States alliance. Chen Yiyi’s chapter in The Image of Jews in Contemporary China is a Chinese academic view of the same exchange. Yang Meng’s July 2026 essay in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune argues that both sides misread the other: China took Israel as a technology source, Israel took China as a market, and the portrayal of a natural partnership did not survive October 2023.[6][7][8][9]

Pressure groups, as mapped in 2026

A congregation list does not cover the bodies that try to move Chinese policy. Walid Abd al-Hay, in an October 2026 paper for the Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations, classes five channels as Israeli pressure groups. He defines the term as Israeli, Jewish and Zionist organisations seeking to influence Chinese policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The synagogues are not in his list.[10]

SIGNAL Group (Sino-Israel Global Network and Academic Leadership), founded in 2011 and based in Israel, is the longest entry. The paper says it has run more than a thousand forums, 60 to 70 a year, with support from US Jewish organisations and the Israeli government. Since 2011 it has put Chinese lecturers through a semester in Israel. More than 75 of them teach Israel-studies courses. The paper’s figure is more than 2,000 students a year, at universities from Chongqing to Beijing and Shanghai. In 2023 it launched the Goodman Fellowship for mid-level Israeli civil servants. Its annual conference series began in 2016. The ninth, in May 2025, was titled “China, Israel, and the Post-October 7 Middle East.” Abd al-Hay writes that China has not punished Israel for criticism of Xinjiang, or for official visits with Taiwan, and that this “cannot be separated, without overstating the case,” from SIGNAL. That causal claim is his, and he qualifies it.[10]

The second channel is the Israel-studies institutes and the scholarship he, citing Mary Ainslie, calls philosemitism. Nanjing University’s Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies was founded in 1992 by Xu Xin, who visited Israel in 1988. The Israeli consulate in Shanghai gave him a prize in 2023. Also named: Yiyi Chen; Fu Youde at Shandong University, and a joint institute with Tel Aviv University; Hu Hao at Henan University; Huang Renwei, on SIGNAL’s advisory council; Sun Degang of Fudan University; and Zhou Xiaozheng of Renmin University, author of “Israel Is Definitely a Good Country.” Campus deals cited from a 2020 Anadolu piece are Tel Aviv University with Tsinghua University (2014), the Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology (2015), Ben-Gurion University with Jilin University (2016), and Haifa University with East China Normal University.[10]

StandWithUs is described as an American advocacy group trying for a China branch since 2009. Michael Dickson is quoted calling China a country in which the group could make a difference. Ayala Sherman-Oren, its Asia director, is quoted on social media, campus programmes and networking aimed at “the next generation of the Chinese leadership.” The Israel-Asia Center and the American Jewish Committee are named, and referred to a 2015 Diplomat article by Mohammed Al-Sudairi, rather than documented in the paper.[10]

On population he follows an Anadolu Agency analysis: about 40,000 Jews migrated to China between 1845 and 1950, and about 2,500 remain, mostly in Beijing and Shanghai. That 2,500 is his figure. The houses put the served population higher. Shalom Greenberg has spoken of more than 2,000 in Shanghai alone before COVID, and the Hong Kong page has used a figure above 2,000 for that city. The two counts are not of the same thing.[10]

After 7 October 2023 he treats Beijing’s refusal to condemn the Palestinian resistance as a shock to these bodies. SIGNAL called the war the first Middle East war of great-power competition and argued for a shift toward the Indo-Pacific, India in particular. Dale Aluf, its research director from 2017 to 2024, noted an October 2024 foreign-ministry line that Palestinian national rights should be realised and Israel’s “reasonable security concerns” taken seriously. Informal dialogues continued. Abd al-Hay’s closing advice, on mapping the Chinese party elite and on the Uyghurs, is a recommendation to Palestinian diplomacy. It is not a finding about the organisations.[10]

Contemporary organisations

Body Place Character
Kehillat Beijing Beijing Lay-led, founded 1979. Friday services at the Capital Club. Affiliated to the Union for Progressive Judaism. Predates Chabad in the city
Chabad Lubavitch of Beijing Beijing Shimon Freundlich, from 2001. Ganeinu, Rohr Family Chabad Community Centre
Kehilat Shanghai Shanghai Lay-led progressive community, affiliated to the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Torah given in 2015 by ARI of Rio
Chabad Lubavitch of Shanghai Shanghai Shalom Greenberg, from 1998. Three centres, including Pudong and the Shanghai Intown Jewish Center
Ohel Leah Synagogue Hong Kong Baghdadi congregation, building opened 1902. The continuous Orthodox seat
Hong Kong Jewish Community Centre Hong Kong Communal centre beside Ohel Leah
United Jewish Congregation of Hong Kong Hong Kong Progressive
Kehilat Zion / Hechal Ezra Hong Kong Sephardi
Shuva Israel Hong Kong Separate community centre
Chabad Lubavitch of Hong Kong Hong Kong Mordechai Avtzon, from 1986–87. Kowloon and Lantau branches
Chabad Lubavitch of Shenzhen, Chabad of Shenzhen Downtown, Chabad Lubavitch of Foshan, Chabad Lubavitch of Yiwu, Chabad Lubavitch of Chengdu Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan Trade-fair and inland posts, 2006 onward
Jewish Historical Society of Hong Kong Hong Kong Heritage body
Igud Yotzei Sin Tel Aviv Association of former residents, founded June 1951. Publishes on Harbin, Tianjin and Shanghai. Not a China-based body
Israel-China Friendship Society Israel Formed on the Igud’s initiative after diplomatic relations. Hosts Chinese delegations
Sino-Judaic Institute United States Research and heritage network. Not a congregation

University centres, among them the Institute of Hebrew and Jewish Culture Studies at Peking University and the Jewish-studies posts in Harbin and Chongqing, are academic. They are not communal organisations, though they are where the wartime story is taught to Chinese students.

Timeline

Year Event
Song–Ming Kaifeng Jews documented. Synagogue does not survive the nineteenth century
1840s– Baghdadi merchants in the treaty ports
1898 Chinese Eastern Railway. Russian Jewish settlement in Harbin begins
1902 Ohel Leah Synagogue, Hong Kong
1905 Joseph Trumpeldor passes through Harbin
1920s JNF branches and a Keren Hayesod campaign in Shanghai. Eliezer Kadoorie heads the China Zionist organisation. Betar, Maccabi and WIZO in Harbin
1938–41 European refugees enter Shanghai without visas
1941–45 Mir yeshiva and Tomchei Tmimim students in Shanghai. Hongkew restricted area from 1943
1948–51 Departure for Israel. Igud Yotzei Sin founded June 1951
1950s–60 Mainland communities dissolve
1979 Kehillat Beijing founded
1986–87 Chabad Lubavitch of Hong Kong
January 1992 China and Israel establish diplomatic relations
1998 Chabad Shanghai
2001 Chabad Beijing
2006 onward Shenzhen, then Foshan, Yiwu, Chengdu

Bibliography

Open or official:

Publisher pages, not open:

  • Pan Guang, A Study of Jewish Refugees in China (1933–1945): History, Theories and the Chinese Pattern, Springer and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2019. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-9483-6. A scan is on the Internet Archive as 1933-1945_202109.
  • Marcia Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai, Stanford University Press, 2001. No open full text.
  • Maisie J. Meyer, From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai, University Press of America, 2003. No open full text.
  • Irene Eber, Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China, University of Chicago Press, 2008. No open full text.
  • Ya’akov Liberman, My China: Jewish Life in the Orient 1900–1950. Participant account. No stable open full text.
  • Jonathan Goldstein, ed., The Jews of China, two volumes, M. E. Sharpe. No open full text.
  • “The Jews of China and their Contribution to the Establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”, Middle Eastern Studies, 46:4, 2010. Taylor and Francis. No open full text.
  • Aron Shai, China and Israel: Chinese, Jews; Beijing, Jerusalem (1890–2018), Academic Studies Press. Paid.
  • Chen Yiyi, “China’s Relationship with Israel, Opportunities and Challenges”, doi:10.1515/9781618114211-011, a chapter in The Image of Jews in Contemporary China (2019), not a standalone De Gruyter monograph.* Chabad Lubavitch in China, and the house pages for Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ In Shanghai, preparing for Yom Kippur, Jews feel safe, The Jerusalem Post, 1 October 2025.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Detailed history of Harbin, Igud Yotzei Sin.
  3. ↑ The Jews of China and their Contribution to the Establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 2010.
  4. ↑ About, Association of Former Residents of China in Israel.
  5. ↑ Made in China, VINnews, 25 May 2023.
  6. ↑ Aron Shai, China and Israel: Chinese, Jews; Beijing, Jerusalem (1890–2018), Academic Studies Press.
  7. ↑ The Evolving Israel-China Relationship, RAND Corporation, RR-2641, March 2019. PDF.
  8. ↑ Chen Yiyi, “China’s Relationship with Israel, Opportunities and Challenges: Perspectives from China”, in The Image of Jews in Contemporary China, doi:10.1515/9781618114211-011, 2019.
  9. ↑ Yang Meng, The End of Illusions: How China and Israel Misread Each Other, Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, July 2026.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 Walid Abd al-Hay, Israeli Pressure Groups in China, Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations, October 2026.
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