(Author: Tony Leon, Vol. 64, #3, Chanukah, 2009)
The Jews of Harbin existed for only 82 of the 6000-plus years of Chinese history recorded since the advent of the Xian Dynasty founded in 2100 BCE. Yet, in many ways, like the Jewish community of South Africa, the origins of the Harbin community in Northern Manchuria – in its time the largest settled Jewish population in the Far East – drew its provenance and origins from similar arcs of history to those which are embedded into the community DNA in our own country.
Like many of our own community founders, the Harbin Jews originated from Russia, and the community’s growth to nearly 20 000 in the early 1930s was also occasioned by the gloomy and brutal trajectory which explains the provenance of the South African Jewry: namely, escaping pogroms, warfare and oppression. But the ground of Northern Manchuria proved to be infertile for Jewish community longevity: by the 1930s, for example, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and its puppet regime subjected Jews and other groups, particularly minorities, to doses of terror and oppression.
A distinguishing characteristic which differentiates the Harbin Jews from the South African branch was that the footprint in China was to prove relatively ephemeral. It lasted for barely eight decades; 1962 marked the end of the community in a formal sense and the last Jew left the precincts of Harbin in 1985.
I had the great honour in May 2008 of launching the outstanding and rich scholarly work of Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa. The authors record that at all times the Jews in South Africa constituted “a significant minority in terms of achievement, not numbers”. The same might be said of the much briefer sojourn of our Harbin counterparts. For example, Harbin’s development as the capital of Heilung Kiang province in Northern Manchuria gained traction when construction commenced on the Chinese Eastern railway. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chief engineer of the building board was born into a Jewish family, although one which converted to orthodox Christianity. Nor was he the only prominent transplanted citizen who lifted that small community to prominence.
The Jewish community in Harbin sharply increased in number due to the influx of Jewish refugees during World War I and as a consequence of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War. Yet, among their number, they created a Jewish national bank, modern hotels, shops, cafés, newspapers and public houses. Each of these centres of entrepreneurship was initiated by members of the Jewish community. They created cultural centres and the full paraphernalia of communal life, secular and religious. It also threw up some outsize personalities, one of whom was to spawn one of the most distinctive, and controversial, figures in modern Israeli politics.
Mordechai Olmert’s great-grandfather was kidnapped as a young child by the Tsar’s army, and forced to serve in it for 25 years. When finally released, he settled in the city of Samara on the River Volga, and when asked for his name gave it as Olmert (possibly remembering it in a distorted way from his childhood, since there is no trace of the original name). Mordechai Olmert himself was born in 1911. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the unleashing of all the antisemitic forces on both the Red and the White side, the Jews of Samara became classic scapegoats. According to the family history, it fled “what had become a madhouse” to Manchuria in North Eastern China, where they had business connections and where Jews and Russian Christian communities were emerging as part of the Russian drive towards Manchuria.
The Olmerts settled near Harbin, where from an early age the 16 year-old Mordechai was drawn to Zionist activity. As described in the family history:
Convincing a group of other young people, he established a local chapter of the Betar Youth Movement, an involvement that became the focus of his life. There, at that time, he met his life-long partner and companion, Bella, herself a dedicated member of the Betar Movement. Betar became the dominant movement in Harbin, and Mordechai was forever proud of the fact that many Jewish members of other movements, including communists, joined Betar. Unlike many other Jews, Mordechai insisted on studying at a Chinese rather than a Russian high school. He never in his life forgot the Chinese language.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] View of Harbin Jewish cemetery (acknowledgements:www.bjreview.com.cn/…/node_18781.htm) By 1930, he began his long road to Palestine and, after an extraordinarily circuitous route, arrived in Israel in 1933. For fourteen years, he and his wife Bella were active in missions for the Irgun of the Revisionist Movement. After his activities in the underground, he became a member of the Knesset and headed the Settlement Department of the Herut Movement. His son, Ehud, became the Prime Minister of the State of Israel in May 2006, serving for three, tumultuous and controversial years. The platform on which Harbin Jewry stood proved to be much less durable than for other communities such as our own, yet, in many ways in terms of their achievements, their accomplishments and their contribution, they left behind monuments which had been preserved up to the present time: old Jewish schools, streets and houses that are still intact or which have been renovated to perfection. The legacy includes two synagogues, a rabbinical school and the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East, in which there are 700 gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions. But if, in fact, the Jews of Harbin were more noted for their golden past than their present or future, it is perhaps worth reflecting on the words of the masterful Russian writer Yuri Slezkine, who in his book The Jewish Century said the following: The modern age is a Jewish age, and the 20th Century, in particular is the Jewish century. Modernisation is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious and occupationally flexible. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernisation, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish. Those words are worth reflecting upon, and are indeed apposite, because when you think of the history of modern China after the Jews of Harbin had left, you will see basically that nearly half a century of madness followed World War II. The brutality of the Japanese gave way to the tyranny of Chairman Mao, foreign oppression thus making way for domestic tyranny, and the results were equally calamitous. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing a dream, he caused the deaths of 38 million people and the greatest famine in history. In all, according to the authors Jung Chang and John Halliday (Mao, the unknown Story, 2006) well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s rule – in peacetime. The enormity of one man’s misrule which held China in its grip and created an entire fetish of ideology across much of the world only ended in the late 1970s, when Deng Xiao-Ping reformed China, opened its markets and kicked over the last traces of the Cultural Revolution. This put China on the path to economic modernity and growth, if not political freedom. I do not want to overstretch the analogy between our own community and the short-lived but deeply impressive Jews of Harbin. Indeed, it was the late Abba Eban who made the point in his masterful final work, Diplomacy for the Next Century: I see no role for analogy except its exclusion from serious diplomatic historiography. Some American historians have got it right: ‘History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or local grooves: it plays havoc with our generalisations. It breaks all our rules. History is Baroque.’ But in the Baroque and complex history of the Harbin community, we can see many communal strands which have inspired and informed our own growth. Our challenge as a South African Jewish community is to make sure that we don’t just leave historical monuments and museums for the next generation. What we must strive for is to leave a living testament of achievement, accomplishment and active citizenry to inspire the next generation of Jewish South Africans.
The former Jewish high school and old synagogue inTongjian Street, Harbin (acknowledgements:www.bjreview.com.cn/…/node_18781.htm)
Tony Leon is a former Leader of the Opposition in the House of Assembly and currently serves as South African Ambassador to Argentina. This article is based on his address at the opening of the exhibition “The History and Culture Exhibition of Harbin” at the SA Jewish Museum, Cape Town, 22 March 2009.
