An interesting article by Haaretz describes one of Israel’s smallest Jewish communities, that of the Kaifeng Jews, numbering just 10 souls:

Jin, 22, and Wang, 21, arrived in Israel at the beginning of 2006, together with two other friends from Kaifeng on tourist visas. They received temporary resident status after they begun conversion studies and received citizenship after undergoing a conversion ceremony in a rabbinical court. Wang explains that as children their parents and grandparents “told us we are Jews and that one day we’d return to our land.” Jin Jin boasts, “We have a family burial plot that goes back dozens of generations, and we have genealogy books showing our connection with earlier generations of Jews.” 

The town’s Jews reconnected with mainstream Jewry thanks to visits by Jewish tourists, who brought learning materials and religious objects to local Jews. Jin’s uncle Shlomo Jin went to the Israeli embassy in Beijing eight years ago seeking to immigrate to Israel. Embassy officials didn’t want to hear about it, so he eventually came to Israel with his family via a European country. Shavei Israel, an organization which reaches out to lost Jewish communities, helped community members get accepted into a conversion program.

And an interesting yet disturbing paragraph from the Wikipedia page about Kaifeng Jews:

While the official attitude toward the descendants of Kaifeng’s Jewish community is comfortable, their treatment by their fellow-citizens is not always so. Kaifeng is home to a dynamic Muslim community, which is very cohesive, having survived 50 years of isolation and officially sanctioned hostility (largely, presumably, because of the relationship between the Hui, Uyghur, and Kazakh ethnicities and the Chinese government). In that period, the descendants of Kaifeng’s Jewish community were protected and helped by Muslims, to the point that they became largely indistinguishable from the Muslim community.

That changed with the opening up of China, when Kaifeng’s Muslims reestablished links with Muslims elsewhere. The community received assistance from Muslim nations, and adopted much of the prevailing anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish attitude. The Kaifeng mosque propagates “Conquered Jerusalem” anti-Israeli propaganda, and the local Muslim population has developed an increasingly hostile attitude toward Jews. Since few outside Jews ever visit Kaifeng, this hostility is channeled toward the descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community.

There are rumors of pogroms, information about which is reportedly censored by the Chinese government. Because of this situation, many descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community prefer to pass as ethnic Han.

Back in 2005 I went up to Haerbin on China’s May vacation. Haerbin once had a prosporous Jewish community, with two Synagogues and a Jewish school. The Synagogues are still standing but remain closed to the public and the old Jewish school is now a Korean girl school. Dr. Irena Vladimirsky writes a fascinating article on the history of Judaism in Haerbin (if you are surfing from China try this link).

Haerbin also has the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East, currently located outside the city in a place called Huangshan. According to www.Jewishgen.org, in 1958, 853 graves were transferred from the old Jewish cemetery located at the end of Bolshoi Prospekt behind the Russian Orthodox Usenski cemetery. 23 graves were added before Nov. 20, 1965 when the Jewish community stopped functioning.

I took a trip out to the cemetery. The taxi driver found it very difficult to find and most local residents did not know where it was. The cemetery itself is well kept, although it is quite clear that it does not see a lot of visitors. One notable exception was, now prime-minister, Ehud Olmert’s visit in 2005 to visit his grandfather’s grave. As can be seen in the picture below Joseph’s Olmert’s grave was obviously restored prior to the visit and unlike most other graves you can see small stones on the grave, which are placed by visitors with accordance to Jewish tradition.

Here are some other photos.