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Some Impressions of China – Jewish Renaissance
trip
by Ruth Baumberg
Everything you already know about China (well, almost) from the Media
– newspapers, TV programmes, films – is true! The city
smog (not just Beijing), the traffic problems due to the replacement
of the bicycle by the car, the fast pace of economic development (still
8% in the credit crunch) and the concomitant rise in living standards,
the change from a Soviet style communist economy to a western individualist
consumer economy is everywhere apparent. The rise in mass higher education
and thirst for knowledge is impressive even in our fascinating but
necessarily brief glimpse of students of Jewish Studies at Kaifeng
University. This is a society in transition that is optimistic, hardworking
and exciting.
Our trip with Jewish Renaissance gave us a unique extra dimension
to the tourist itinerary of traditional sights – Forbidden
City, Temples, Terracotta warriors, Great Wall, Ming Tombs,
Old Beijing of the hutongs, Shanghai from its raffish past as
a Graham Green novel and more modern manifestation of its brash
waterfront of high rise buildings, incandescent shopping streets
with availability of anything produced by the usurped “factory
of the world” that used to belong in the UK. This was
the examination of the remains of Jewish Communities that had
passed into the realms of history – Harbin, the station
near the end of the Trans-Siberian railway line in Manchuria
that became a centre for Russian Jews fleeing Soviet persecution
in the 1920’s – Tianjin, likewise a Jewish centre
in the interwar period – Kaifeng, a Jewish community reaching
from the time of Marco Polo that reached its height in the Ming
dynasty until the community collapsed in the eighteenth century
but one of whose descendants was our local guide and finally
Shanghai, which became a refuge for Jews in the Hitler period
and through the war years. We had as our guide throughout the
two weeks, Professor Xu Xin, the director of the Institute of
Jewish Studies at Nanjing University who was a mine of information
on both Jewish and Chinese culture and who also spoke excellent
English. In each of these places we could see hospitals, synagogues,
houses , schools, cemetery now often converted to museums or
other uses, with displays detailing vanished communities. It
was made more poignant by members of our group that had family
members, fathers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles, whose homes
we could discover and wonder at. A salutary reminder of the
rise and fall of communities as of world empires Ozymandias-like
where nothing remained of the past glory.
But our concern for places not on the beaten track gave us also a
glimpse into daily and street life away from the tourist honeytraps
– a group of elderly women playing mahjong in the street, a
little Jewish museum in a descendant’s own modest house, an
art deco apartment block that had seen better days, but whose occupants
showed it off happily. Everywhere we were touched by the friendliness
of ordinary people, the smiles of the much-loved only children (and
the suspicion of strangers taking pictures of children was absent).
This was in addition to the cultural riches of traditional China,
from ceramics (of which I am an enthusiast) to Buddhist temples to
folk art of paper cutting, kites and shadow pictures, which made this
trip special. And of course we all carried more personal memories
of incidents such as the scream of one member of the group when a
Siberian Tiger made a sudden lunge towards her! Being a Jewish group,
it was good to find some likeminded fellow travellers, and conversations
over the ample and mostly excellent food cemented our enjoyment of
the holiday.
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