[Notes below by Tom Gross]

MEDIA SILENT AS ANOTHER UKRAINIAN SYNAGOGUE IS FIREBOMBED

Western media and politicians have made a great deal of fuss in recent days about leaflets threatening Ukrainian Jews. These are, it now turns out, probably the work of Ukrainian nationalists trying to discredit separatists in the majority Russian-speaking east of the country.

But, as I have noted before, Western media and politicians continue to all but ignore a series of actual attacks on Jewish persons and buildings elsewhere in Ukraine, likely to be the work of far-right Ukrainian nationalists, some of them represented in the new Western-backed government in Kiev. (Russian President Putin may be a thug but this shouldn’t serve as an excuse for Western media to fail to report properly that Putin is right when he points out that Ukraine is the only country in Europe with a Fascist party, Svoboda, taking part in government, and that Western governments last month agreed to provide that government with an enormous $27 billion in aid. Such aid should, in my opinion, have been conditional on Ukraine’s government not awarding ministerial positions to Svoboda – Svoboda holds five senior government posts.)

The latest attack on Jews in Ukraine came yesterday (at 2 am on Saturday morning, during the week-long Passover holiday) as several firebombs were thrown at the synagogue in the southern city of Nikolayev.

The attack was caught on the synagogue’s CCTV video system, and posted online by Yisroel Gotlieb, the son of the city’s Chief Rabbi, Sholom Gotlieb.

You can watch a four-minute video of it here:

In February, the Giymat Rosa Synagogue in Zaporizhia, southeast of Kiev was firebombed. A number of Jews have been stabbed in recent weeks in Kiev and elsewhere.

 

KANSANS FORM AN “ANGEL WALL” TO PROTECT FUNERALS OF MURDER VICTIMS

[This is a follow-up to the first item in last Monday’s dispatch: Three dead in pre-Passover shootings at Jewish buildings in Kansas City.]

After the Westboro Baptist Church, an extremist anti-Semitic religious hate group, said it would picket the funerals of the victims of last Sunday’s murders at two Jewish institutions in Kansas, over 2,000 people turned out to protect mourners at the funerals from the Westboro protesters.

Some of the counter-protestors wore Jewish phylacteries and prayer shawls in solidarity with Kansas’s Jewish community.

In a statement before the funerals, the Westboro Baptist Church said “God sent the shooter to punish the Jew-lovers for their vile sins.”

The church said that such funerals have become “pagan orgies where they worship these corpses instead of the Lord their God.” It called those who were murdered “faux-Christians” who are part of a “filthy community”.

(The church is also infamous for picketing the funerals of American servicemen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for its extreme anti-homosexual statements.)

The 2,000 Kansan counter-protestors – organized through a Facebook page – formed an 80-block-long wall surrounding the funerals of Dr. William Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson Reat Underwood, two of the three victims of last Sunday’s shootings, to protect mourners from would-be disrupters.

The murderer, Frazier Glenn Cross, is a self-confessed “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and an admirer of anti-Zionist websites, in which he sometimes praised articles defaming Israel by extreme anti-Zionist Jews.

 

[I sent this item to some people a few days ago.]

MISSOURI MAYOR SAYS HE “KIND OF AGREES” WITH KANSAS KILLER ABOUT JEWS

The mayor of Marionville, Missouri, near where Frazier Glenn Miller used to live, said this week that he agreed with Miller’s views.

“He was always nice and friendly and respectful of elder people, you know, he respected his elders greatly,” Mayor Dan Clevenger told the local ABC TV affiliate KSPR. He added, laughing, “as long as they were the same color as him. [He was] very fair and honest.”

Mayor Clevenger then went on to say that he “kind of agreed with [Miller] on some things but I don’t like to express that too much.”

“What kind of things?” asked the KSPR reporter.

Clevenger replied: “There are some things that are going on in this country that are destroying us. We’ve got a false economy and some of those corporations are run by Jews,” he said. “The fact that the Federal Reserve prints up phony money and freely hands it out, I think that’s completely wrong. The people that run the Federal Reserve, they’re Jewish.”

This is not the first time Clevenger has publicly supported Miller’s anti-Semitism. KSPR unearthed a letter he sent a decade ago to the Aurora Advertiser, in which the mayor endorsed Miller.

“I am a friend of Frazier Miller helping to spread his warnings,” wrote Clevenger. “The Jew-run medical industry has succeeded in destroying the United State’s workforce… Made a few Jews rich by killin’ us off.”

www.kspr.com/news/local/marionville-mayor-i-agree-with-frazier-millers-beliefs-not-behaviors/21051620_25503568

 

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY SPOKESMAN ACCUSES AL-QAEDA LEADER OF BEING A “ZIONIST”

The spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party has accused al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri of supporting “Zionism”.

He was responding to an audio recording published on Friday night on a Jihadi website, in which al-Zawahiri criticized Egyptian presidential candidate Abdel Fatah el-Sissi, American President Barack Obama, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Abbas is a traitor who sold Palestine,” Zawahiri said, among other things.

The Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot notes today that Fatah spokesman Ahmad Assaf replied to Zawahiri on his Facebook yesterday: “Ayman Zawairi’s statements confirm once again this man’s involvement along with al-Qaeda in the Zionist project and scheming aimed at tearing apart the Arab and Islamic nations.”

“Since when has this hypocrite and his group cared about Palestinian cause? We haven’t seen one [terrorist] action carried out by them against the Israeli occupation,” he complained.

 

MEDIA SPECULATES ON THE “MEANING” OF HILLARY CLINTON’S “JEWISH” GRANDCHILD

Since Chelsea Clinton and her Jewish husband Marc Mezvinsky announced last Thursday that they are expecting their first child, there has been considerable media speculation about whether Bill and Hillary Clinton’s first grandchild will be raised as a Jew.

Several Jewish publications said they welcomed the news that the child is likely to be raised with a Jewish identity – just as Chelsea’s wedding had many Jewish components.

But the orthodox newspaper, The Jewish Press, ran a headline: “Chelsea Clinton Pregnant With Non-Jewish Child,” adding that the pair was “effectively pruning away that 3,300 year old Jewish branch of the Mezvinsky family.”

Orthodox and Conservative Jews believe a child is only Jewish if the mother is Jewish (or the child converts) but Reform and Reconstructionist Jews are more flexible in their definitions.

The extreme-right media have also been covering the story. The leading anti-Semitic publication Stormfront (which incidentally often reproduces extreme left wing articles by Israel-bashing Jews) ran the headline: “Chelsea Clinton pregnant with jew spawn,” noted the JTA.

Tom Gross adds: There is a reasonable chance that Hillary will be America’s next president although I very much doubt that the way her grandchild is raised will make any difference to her Middle East policies.

In the past Hillary has on occasion appeared to sympathize with the Middle East’s only democracy, but at other times she has strongly criticized her.

 

ITALIAN POLICE RAID HOMES OF PROMINENT ANTI-SEMITES

Police and prosecutors in northern Italy have raided the homes of people associated with the anti-Semitic website “Holywar” and charged them with racial discrimination and incitement to harm a long list of well known Jews – and of those who have expressed sympathy for Jews, such as Pope Francis.

The Italian news agency ANSA noted that the website “depicted the pontiff in photoshopped images dressed as a bearded Orthodox Jew waving the Israeli flag with a swastika at the center of the Star of David.”

Other non-Jews targeted in letters, brochures, CDs and DVDs, because they supposedly expressed support for Jews include Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi and actor/director Roberto Benigni, who won an Oscar for his Holocaust-era film “Life Is Beautiful”.

 

DUTCH STUDENT EXPOSES POST-WAR AMSTERDAM HOLOCAUST SCANDAL

Charlotte van den Berg, was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam’s city archives, when she discovered a trove of letters from Dutch Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city authorities in Amsterdam were forcing them to pay municipal taxes and late payment fines with interest, on property seized and used by Dutch and German Nazis while they were being held in Nazi concentration camps.

The Associated Press reported two days ago:

How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”

AP continued: “Following her discovery four years ago, Van den Berg waged a lonely fight against Amsterdam’s modern bureaucracy to have the travesty publicly recognized. Now, largely due to her efforts, Amsterdam officials have finally admitted the cover up and are considering compensating Holocaust survivors for the taxes and other obligations, including gas bills, they were forced to pay for homes that were occupied by Nazis or collaborators while the rightful owners were in hiding or awaiting death in the camps.”

Van den Berg and other students found 342 cases from 1947 in which the city demanded that returning Jews pay the taxes and penalty fees for getting behind in their payments.

Two Dutch newspapers, Het Parool and De Telegraaf, published leaked copies of the documents this week. Many of the homes were lived in by Dutch Nazi collaborators who left the bills unpaid and fled at the end of the war.

75 % of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust – the highest proportion of any country in Western Europe. And contrary to popular myth, far from putting up much resistance against the Nazis, the Dutch were particularly keen collaborators. Only 30,000 Dutch Jews survived the war.

Last year, Van der Berg heard that the documents were “one signature away” from being destroyed, as other documents from the era had been. In desperation, she said, she turned her findings over to the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool.

A Dutch Jewish leader, Ronny Nafthaniel, this week called Van der Berg “an absolute hero”. “She pushed her bosses and all the civil servants around her to open up these files, even when they told her not to bother,” he said.

 

STABBING POOR COWS IN THE EYE IN GAZA

Animal welfare activists in Australia have released new video footage documenting alleged abuse of Australian cattle in Gaza, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Animals Australia” says videos taken between February and last week show that live export regulations continue to be ignored with “horrific consequences” for Australian animals. [Warning, graphic footage: animalsaustralia-media.org/upload/photos/live-export-gaza2014/]

The organization says it has reported six incidents in Gaza to Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry since the start of this year, “but that mistreatment in Gaza is continuing to occur on a nightly basis.”

One piece of footage shows a bull being stabbed in the eye.

“Animals Australia” says investigators shot the videos at the one Hamas government-approved slaughterhouse in Gaza, as well as a number of unauthorized abattoirs.

(Tom Gross adds:: It would be nice if Australian rights groups would also complain to Hamas about the regular use of live rocket fire used to indiscriminately target Jewish civilians in Israel.)

 

THOUSANDS HOLD JERUSALEM RALLY CALLING FOR THE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA

After thousands of people turned up for a pro-marijuana demonstration in Israel’s capital last night, that police had to seal off the park next to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to head off protestors.

The protesters were still blocking the entry road to the Knesset early this morning, forcing police to move in to try and clear the road, leading to clashes with police. 25 people were arrested in what was billed as the “Big Bong Night Protest.”

Many in Israel – which is some respects is one of the most liberal countries in the world – support the legalization of marijuana and say the police should stop wasting resources prosecuting people who use it. At least 11 members of the Knesset have publicly admitted taking cannabis in the past.

***

Among related dispatches, please see:

* UN chief admits bias against Israel (& Getting high beyond the Green Line) (August 17, 2013)

* Daily Muslim call to prayer on British public TV (& Israeli rabbis: Weed “can be kosher”) (July 3, 2013)

* Burgers, fries and marijuana (& Knesset members join the fun) (June 9, 2012)

* Israeli army to combat stress with cannabis (and other items) (August 6, 2004)

 

“ECHOES FROM A LOST WORLD”

In a dispatch last week, I thanked Haaretz writer Gideon Levy for mentioning me in passing at the end of an article on his grandparents, but I failed to say anything more about the article. Several people wrote asking to know more. You can read it here:

In Hebrew.

In English.

[Notes above by Tom Gross]

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

3 DEAD IN PRE-PASSOVER SHOOTINGS AT JEWISH BUILDINGS IN KANSAS CITY

Three persons (including a 14-year-old boy and an elderly woman) were shot dead at two Jewish-related locations in Kansas City, yesterday. A 74-year-old man (some reports say he is 73), Frasier Glenn Cross, Jr. from Missouri, who is a known anti-Semite and former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and has been arrested. He is also reported to be a comment leaver (under the name “Glenn Miller”) and fan linking to the anti-Zionist website run by extreme left-wing Jew Max Blumenthal.

The first shooting took place at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas, and the second at the Village Shalom center, an assisted living facility.

The suspect asked people if they were Jewish before opening fire, CNN reported.

Witnesses said that the suspect yelled “Heil Hitler” as he was being led away in handcuffs by Overland Park police.

Two of the victims at the Jewish Community Center were not in fact Jewish, but just visiting the center.

 

JOHANSSON: ANTI-SEMITISM BEHIND CRITICISM OF ISRAEL AND ME

American actress Scarlett Johansson, who has a Jewish mother, has said for the first time that she believes anti-Semitism is to blame for many of the vicious attacks on her and Israel following her endorsement of the Israeli company SodaStream, which employs equal numbers of Israelis and Palestinians working together.

“There’s a lot of anti-Semitism out there,” Johansson tells Vanity Fair, in an interview which will appear as the cover story of the May edition next month.

Johansson resigned from her position as ambassador for (the anti-Israel charity) Oxfam in January, after the organization objected to the actress’ promotion of SodaStream. She said at the time that she was stepping down from the role because of a “fundamental difference of opinion.”

***

For background on this, please see this dispatch:

Palestinians to Oxfam: Back off and let us work (& ScoJo to visit Israel).

 

SPANISH VILLAGE SAYS IT MAY AGREE TO REMOVE WORDS ‘KILL JEWS’ FROM ITS NAME

The village of Castrillo Matajudios near Leon in northern Spain has invited the population to a town hall meeting this week to discuss whether to change the village’s name.

The Spanish regional daily Diario de Burgos reported on Friday that Mayor Lorenzo Rodriguez, will suggest to residents to change the village’s name back to Castrillo Mota de Judios, which means “Castrillo Jews’ Hill,” which was the village’s original name before the Spanish Inquisition.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that in parts of Spain, locals use the term “killing Jews” (matar Judios) to describe the traditional drinking at festivals held in city squares at Easter. The name originates from medieval times, when converted Jews would be publicly executed in show trials at around Easter / Passover.

 

TEACHER AT TOP LONDON SCHOOL TELLS JEWISH TEEN TO GO TO THE GAS CHAMBERS

The Mail on Sunday (in Britain) reports yesterday that a teacher at one of London’s top girls schools told a distraught Jewish pupil “Go to the back of the queue, or I’ll send you to one of your gas chambers.”

Many of the girl’s family died in the Holocaust. Like many elite London schools, the school, North London Collegiate School, previously had quotas to ensure not too many Jews were able to attend, but with the lifting of the quotas Jews have excelled at the entrance exam and now account for about 25 % of the pupils.

Former pupils of the prestigious institution include film star Rachel Weisz, TV personality Esther Rantzen and Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The teacher has admitted making the remark but the school has so far not said it will take disciplinary action against the teacher.

***

A reader adds: One can only imagine the outcry if she’d said to a black student “I’ll have you whipped and sent into slavery” or something similar. She’d be fired pretty quickly, and rightly so.

 

VIDEO: “DRUNK WITH FREEDOM”

This is a Passover video in which students at Israel’s Technion show how to devise a machine that can “cross the Red Sea, and fill a glass of the wine on the Passover Seder table” -- all without human intervention.

You can watch the video here:

 

ABRAMOVICH “BOOKS ALL 111 ROOMS OF LUXURY ISRAELI HOTEL FOR PASSOVER HOLIDAY”

Roman Abramovich, the Russian-born billionaire owner of Chelsea football club, has reportedly booked all 111 rooms in the Beresheet Hotel in the Israeli Negev desert resort of Mitzpe Ramon, to host family and friends between Sunday and Thursday this week for the Jewish Passover holiday.

A Passover Seder will take place in a specially constructed tent in the desert – not too far from where the biblical Passover story occurred. The cost of the hotel and rooms for the week is said to amount to $450,000.

Abramovich has two children, Aaron and Leah, with his partner Darya Zhukova. Zhukova, who is a fashion designer and businesswoman, is reported to be a billionaire in her own right. She was born in Russia but grew up in California with her Jewish mother after her parents divorced.

Last time Abramovich spent Passover in Israel, in 2009, he only rented an entire floor of 36 rooms in the Royal Beach Hotel in the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

Abramovich has reportedly been to Israel several times in the past year, visiting technology parks with a view to making investments in the country’s high-tech sector, which is a world leader.

 

FRANCE’S FORMER FIRST LADY CARLA BRUNI: “I’M CRAZY ABOUT ISRAEL”

France’s former first lady Carla Bruni has said she is “crazy about Israel” and loves the country. “It’s full of life,” she added.

The remarks come as more and more celebrities are declaring their support and sympathy for Israel while others are urging a cultural, economic and academic boycott.

Bruni, a singer, guitarist and former model, is scheduled to give a concert in Tel Aviv on May 25, and said that she hoped to bring both her husband, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and her son with her.

Italian-born Bruni has a Jewish father. She has visited Israel twice before.

Bruni’s remarks have been picked up in the Arab press, for example, here:

english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2014/04/13/France-s-former-first-lady-is-crazy-about-Israel-.html

 

EGYPTIAN COLUMNIST DEMANDS COMPENSATION FOR 10 PLAGUES

Ahmad Al-Gamal, a prominent Egyptian columnist, has written an article stating: “We demand that the State of Israel pay compensation for the ten plagues that our forefathers in Egypt suffered thousands of years ago as a result of the curses of the Jewish forefathers.”

“The Jews caused the land to be stricken with locusts and all agriculture destroyed, turned the Nile red with blood so that one could drink its waters, sent darkness, frogs and killed the firstborn.”

“What is written in the Torah is that Pharaoh discriminated against the children of Israel. What have we to do with it?” wrote Al-Gamal.

He also recommended that Egypt bring charges against France, Britain and Turkey for those nations’ historical conquests of Egypt.

The Egyptian column has been picked up by the Israeli press. One columnist in Israel wrote in response that Egypt needs first to compensate Israel for keeping the “Jewish forefathers” as slaves for hundreds of years and for killing all male Jewish babies in the generation prior to the Exodus.

Another pointed out that “The Pre-Islamic Arab race never existed at this time. Ancient Egypt was not Arab.”

Another said: “Just don’t take the case to the U.N. Or ask Obama-Kerry to settle it.”

I attach two articles below.

-- Tom Gross

 

EXTRA NOTE

I don’t always agree with his articles on the Middle East, but I would like to thank Haaretz writer Gideon Levy for mentioning me in passing in today’s Passover edition of Haaretz (Hebrew edition). It is an article on his grandparents.

***

One of the previous dispatches was blocked from being delivered to almost 100 subscribers on this list (including to those using Gmail and Hotmail). If you have not seen it and wish to read it, you can do so at the link below.

There are 15 different items in it:

Pakistani baby goes on trial for "plotting murder" (& the world's most beautiful bookshops).

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

ASSAD’S FORCES ACCUSED OF NEW POISON GAS ATTACK

The increasingly bloody war in Syria (and the fate of millions of Syrian refugees) remains disgracefully under-reported. There has been even less reporting since President Obama and other Western leaders made it clear last summer that they would not become involved even after Assad used chemical weapons to murder hundreds of children. Most of the savagery is still being committed by regime units, often under Iranian command and using Russian weapons.

The leading Arab TV news network Al Arabiya (which has generally been proven correct in its reporting on Syria) reports yesterday:

Syrian opposition activists on Friday again accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of using chemical weapons near the capital Damascus on Thursday, publishing the video of an apparently unconscious man lying on a bed and being treated by medics.

Activists from the opposition “Jobar Revo” group posted the video on YouTube of a man being treated with oxygen and being injected by medics. A voice off-screen said Thursday’s date and that there was “a poison attack in Jobar.”

(The rest of the piece is here.)

 

FORMER ARSENAL SOCCER STAR “JOINS JIHADI FIGHTERS WAGING WAR IN SYRIA”

From the print edition of today’s (London) Daily Mirror:

Former Arsenal footballer ‘joins Jihadi fighters waging war in Syria’
By Josh Layton
Daily Mirror
April 5, 2014

A former Arsenal star is thought to have joined a band of ruthless Jihadi fighters waging war in Syria.

The gun-toting fanatic is said to have grown up playing with Real Madrid galactico Cristiano Ronaldo.

The militia man turned his back on a footballer’s playboy lifestyle after becoming radicalised two years ago, it is claimed

He is filmed wielding an AK47 and proclaiming holy war in two terror videos on an extremist website.

Fellow jihadists say the fighter – who now calls himself Abu Issa Al-Andalusi – was brought up in Portugal before signing for the Gunners.

In the footage he appears in a mask calling on Muslims to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – an al-Qaeda off-shoot group behind murders and beheadings.

The faction has been blamed for extreme violence against other Islamist groups, Kurds and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.

(The rest of the piece is here.)

 

BIN LADEN EVEN WATCHED THE EUROPEAN CUP WINNERS’ CUP FINAL

The Daily Mirror adds:

Osama bin Laden was an Arsenal fan during his time living in London.

Fans even used to chant: “Osama, woah-woah, Osama, woah-waoh, he’s hiding in Kabul, he loves the Arsenal”.

The figurehead for global terror was said to have attended a number of matches at Highbury [TG adds: The then Arsenal stadium] in the 1990s.

He watched the Gunners’ run to the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in the 1993/94 season.

Bin Laden was also said to have bought his eldest son, Abdullah, an Ian Wright [TG: who was an Arsenal star] replica shirt.

Arsenal enacted a ban in when the reports first emerged in late 2001. A club spokesman said: “We’ve seen the reports in the papers. Clearly he wouldn’t be welcome at Highbury in the future.”

 

U.S. GOVERNMENT ALLOWS BOEING TO SELL PLANE PARTS TO IRAN

(What about the regime stopping its nuclear weapons program first? -- TG)

Iran News reports:

U.S. Government Allows Boeing To Sell Plane Parts To Iran
April 5, 2014

Aircraft manufacturer Boeing says it has been granted a license from the U.S. Treasury Department to export spare parts for commercial airplanes to Iran.

A spokesman for the company said on April 4 that the license covered a “limited period of time” and allowed the company only “to provide them spare parts that are for safety purposes.”

The sales would be the first acknowledged dealing between U.S. aerospace companies and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

(The rest of the piece is here.)

 

AFGHAN PHOTOS

Here is a selection of photos from the wonderful Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus who was murdered in Afghanistan on Friday, shot dead by a policeman because she was not wearing a face covering.

 

PAKISTAN: NINE-MONTH-OLD BABY ACCUSED OF PLANNING MURDER

Pakistan is supposed to be a democracy where the rule of law is applied in a reasonable way. Not so.

 

WHAT PASSES AS INTELLIGENT WRITING ABOUT “ZIONISTS”

British historian, author, and BBC broadcaster Dominic Sandbrook, writing in Friday’s (London) Evening Standard, cites Avraham Stern as “one of the most dangerous men in the world” -- in 1942!!

 

DEAF WOMAN HEARS FOR FIRST TIME

This is a very moving video. The moment a 40-year-old woman hears for the first time in her life, thanks to cochlear implants.

 

TEN OF THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKSHOPS

The BBC has a nice round-up and some beautiful pictures here.

I particularly like the picture of Buenos Aires’ El Ateneo bookshop, housed in the former Teatro Grand Splendid.

 

THE VLADIMIR PUTIN & SARAH PALIN PHONE CALL ON THE “TONIGHT SHOW”

One has to hand it to Sarah Palin for her good humor and self-deprecation here.

 

THE EUROPEAN DISUNION

Atlas of Prejudice – 20 ways to slice the European continent.

 

PUTIN ANNOUNCES HISTORIC G1 SUMMIT

Some satire from Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker:

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report) – Russian President Vladimir Putin made history today by scheduling the first-ever summit of the newly formed group of nations called the G-1.

The summit, which Putin has set for June in Sochi, is expected to be attended by the G-1 member nation Russia.

Putin pronounced himself delighted by Russia’s attendance, telling reporters, “It is an auspicious start for the G-1 to have the participation of all its member nations.”

In addition to what he called “a free exchange of ideas on issues of importance to the G-1,” the summit is expected to elect the first president of the G-1, a position for which Putin is widely considered the frontrunner.

Putin denied he was a candidate for the post, but added, “It’s an honor just to be in the mix.”

 

15 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOUR IPHONE COULD DO

Here. #2 is pretty neat. If #4 had been used, someone might have spotted that missing Malaysian plane.

 

CAN YOU DIE OF A BROKEN HEART?

Apparently, love can kill. But then poets have always known that – science is catching up.

 

IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY…

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the only time any band or artist has occupied all five top positions in America’s Billboard charts.

It was, of course, The Beatles. The Fab Four’s Fab five.

The top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 ranking on April 4-11, 1964 was:

1. Can't Buy Me Love

2. Twist and Shout

3. She Loves You

4. I Want to Hold Your Hand

5. Please Please Me

[Notes above by Tom Gross]

CONTENTS

1. “The Chinese believe that the Jews control America. Is That a Good Thing?” (By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Tablet, March 27, 2014)
2. “‘I am very good at working with Jews,’ says Chinese tycoon trying to buy WSJ” (South China Morning Post, Jan. 9, 2014 )
3. “The first Chinese rabbi in 200 years” (By Michael Freund, The Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2014)
4. “China’s ancient Jewish enclave” (By Matthew Fishbane, New York Times travel section, April 4, 2010)

 

ARTICLES

GROWING CHINESE INTEREST IN JEWS AND ISRAEL

The Chinese Believe That the Jews Control America. Is That a Good Thing?
By Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Tablet (online magazine)
March 27, 2014

“Do the Jews Really Control America?” asked one Chinese newsweekly headline in 2009. The factoids doled out in such articles and in books about Jews in China – for example: “The world’s wealth is in Americans’ pockets; Americans are in Jews’ pockets” – would rightly be seen to be alarming in other contexts. But in China, where Jews are widely perceived as clever and accomplished, they are meant as compliments. Scan the shelves in any bookstore in China and you are likely to find best-selling self-help books based on Jewish knowledge. Most focus on how to make cash. Titles range from 101 Money Earning Secrets From Jews’ Notebooks to Learn To Make Money With the Jews.

The Chinese recognize, and embrace, common characteristics between their culture and Jewish culture. Both races have a large diaspora spread across the globe. Both place emphasis on family, tradition, and education. Both boast civilizations that date back thousands of years. In Shanghai, I am often told with nods of approval that I must be intelligent, savvy, and quick-witted, simply because of my ethnicity. While it is true that the Chinese I’ve met are fascinated by – rather than fear – the Jews, these assertions make me deeply uncomfortable.

So, it was with a degree of apprehension that I recently traveled to the former imperial capital of Nanjing to spend the day with Prof. Xu Xin, director of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute of Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing University. The first thing Xu did was suggest lunch. As we sat down to a steaming tofu hot pot, he woefully conceded that many Chinese believe the Jews to be “smart, rich, and very cunning.” Just before my visit to Nanjing, the Chinese tycoon Chen Guangbiao made international headlines by publicly announcing his ambitions to buy the New York Times and later the Wall Street Journal. In a TV interview he explained that he would be an ideal newspaper magnate because “I am very good at working with Jews” – who, he said, controlled the media.

Yet Chen presumably, like the majority of Chinese, has few concrete ideas about the reality of Jewish history or practices. Xu, the 65-year-old pioneer of Jewish studies in China, is campaigning to change that – and, by doing so, challenging entrenched stereotypes. The diminutive professor has made it his life’s pursuit to present a more nuanced view of the Jewish race and religion to his countrymen: one based on scholarship rather than rumor. To this end he launched the Institute of Jewish Studies in 1992, the first of its kind in Chinese higher education.

Today there are more than half a dozen similar programs across the country, many started by Xu’s former students. In Nanjing, Judaica courses – from Ancient Jewish History to Rabbinic Literature to Holocaust Studies – have proved popular. According to Xu one of the best-attended courses in the institute is Jewish Culture and World Civilization, in which 18 topics are covered in a 20-week semester. It attracts roughly 200 undergraduate students per term. Survey of Judaism and Study of Monotheism, both graduate courses, have enrollments of around 30 to 40.

Strung up around the unheated classrooms of the institute are dated photographs of Jerusalem and fuzzy black-and-white images of the death camps. Bookshelves boast Chinese translations of the Haggadah and Xu’s own books, including his best-selling A History of Jewish Culture. In a glass cabinet sit various teaching tools: embroidered kippas, bronze menorahs, and polished shofars. Thankfully, there is not a “get rich quick” manual in sight.

***

The institute is funded largely by foreign Jewish donors, who have their own interest in seeing portrayals of Judaism propagated in a more balanced way. “Hatred and intolerance are bred in ignorance,” the executive director of the China Judaic Studies Association, Beverly Friend, a patron of the institute, wrote to me in an email. “The institute provides knowledge.”

Xu was first introduced to Beverly Friend and her husband Jim in the mid-1980s, when the latter was teaching English at Nanjing University; Jim was the first Jew Xu had ever met. In 1986 Xu traveled to America for the first time, where he stayed with the Friends in Chicago. The trip was revelatory: Not only did he learn how to use a fork but he started attending Shabbat dinners and other Jewish celebrations. It convinced him that China might be able to learn something from the West – and in particular, from Jews.

This conviction was rooted in his own country’s recent resurfacing from a traumatic past. Like many teenagers at the time, Xu was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, one of the zealous youths who helped destroy much of China’s own heritage. “I participated in the Cultural Revolution. We all went through the Great Leap Forward,” Xu said, referring to Mao’s push for industrialization that helped lead to a famine in which more than 30 million perished. “We started to feel from the bottom heart there is something wrong with society. China needed new ideas.”

As China began to open up again to the West, Xu read Western literature, which had been banned under Mao. He’d soon realized that his favorite writers – J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth – were Jewish (today, many of their works are translated into Chinese and studied by college and graduate students in China). As psychology became popular, Xu delved into Freud; he also held immense respect for Henry Kissinger, who orchestrated the start of American relations with China. Like Salinger, Bellow, Freud, and the godfather of Communism Karl Marx, Kissinger was a Jew. “He was a refugee and an immigrant to the U.S., but within 20 years he had made his way to become secretary of State. How come?” Xu wondered.

The search for an answer to that question became Xu’s mission. He returned from two years in the United States, and a formative official trip to Israel in 1988, convinced that Judaism could provide lessons for a young and hungry new China. “Once we learned, we wanted to teach,” he said. Xu set up university classes, attended international seminars, and translated the Encyclopedia Judaica into Chinese. Eventually, once diplomatic relations between Israel and China were established in 1992, he founded the Institute of Jewish Studies.

***

If Xu had the sense of discovering something new, the Jews were not exactly strangers to China. Jews likely first arrived in China via the Silk Road almost 1,000 years ago. In the mid-19th century, following the Opium Wars, Iraqi Jews settled alongside British traders in Shanghai, where many made their fortunes. China later accepted Jews taking flight from Russia, who made their homes in the bleak snowy landscapes of northern Harbin. In World War II, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany flooded Shanghai: Most left for Australia, America, or Israel when the Communists gained power in 1949.

Chinese state media has long championed positive portrayals of the Jews, in part because Judaism, with its ethnically based and non-evangelical nature, has proved less of a threat to the Communist Party than other foreign monotheistic religions, like Christianity or Islam. (China’s own Jewish population, the Kaifeng Jews , have being almost completely assimilated.) High-profile Jewish figures in the Chinese Communist Party’s own history include Sidney Rittenberg (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg), the first American citizen to join the party, and the journalist Israel Epstein, whose funeral was attended by former Chinese President Hu Jintao and former Premier Wen Jiabao.

China’s relationship to the Jewish state is more complicated. In 1990, Xu was invited to participate in a closed meeting of Chinese intellectuals, military personnel, and party officials, which posed the question: Should China initiate formal diplomatic relations with Israel? The answer was no – but times have changed. Today China’s authoritarian government is invested heavily in the oil states, including Iran and Iraq. But it is also increasingly forming ties with Israel . In 2013, Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to China, the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister in six years. Many believe the trip signals growing Chinese interest in Israeli technologies, as China attempts to transform itself from a manufacturing to an innovation-and-knowledge-based economy.

“China is learning more technology from Israel, trading more,” said Xu, who was in the process of creating a specific course on Israel to reflect this change. “China finally decided to establish former diplomatic relations with Israel [in 1992] because they believed that being friendly with Jews is good for China’s development and to change China’s image internationally.” If China’s global clout does not yet match its status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, developing closer ties with Israel and the Jewish Diaspora may be a relatively easy way to widen China’s influence, or so some Chinese leaders seem to believe.

Support of Israel also underpins American patronage of the institute. “Bringing China and the Jewish people and specifically the Jewish state, Israel, closer together has merit,” said John Fishel, a consultant for the Glazer Foundation. “There are increasing exchanges between Israel and China on a number of levels including academic, cultural, and economic. The growth of both Jewish Studies and Israel Studies in Chinese universities seems to be creating opportunities for the knowledge base to grow.”

***

Yet on a human level, at least, the geopolitical rationale for greater Chinese-Jewish understanding may pale next to the role that the Jews play in China’s own search to rediscover itself. When Liu Nanyang first studied history of the Middle East at Nanjing University he became interested in how Israel had managed to survive. “There were many Middle East wars, but Israel was still there,” he said. “So, I wanted to know why.”

Now Liu, 28, is a doctoral student conducting research into the Jewish roots of Christianity (he spent one year in Jerusalem as part of his studies). As we sat in the university, clutching paper cups of hot green tea to keep us warm, Liu earnestly rattled off similarities between Jewish and Chinese culture. “Even if some people believe in Buddhism or Daoism or Christianity, they live their everyday life according to Confucianism,” he expounded. “The Jewish people believe in [different] denominations like reform or liberal or even nonreligious. But usually their lives follow traditional ideas.”

Then he paused. “Maybe I should add a difference,” he said cautiously. “Chinese culture is not so tolerant.”

Liu comes from a family of farmers. They are also Christians. In China, where religion is perceived as a threat to the ruling Communist Party, Christians are routinely persecuted and worship is allowed only in officially sanctioned churches. “Any ideas or philosophy or cultures are controlled. In the past it was controlled by the imperial emperors and now by the party,” said Liu. “But Jewish people don’t have such a strong political power. So, [Judaism] has more pluralism.”

It is this space and allowance – even encouragement – for debate that has helped Jews make cultural and scientific strides in the world, Liu said he believed: “In the Talmud, for one question they have different answers. But in China we have [either] correct or incorrect. If someone has different opinions, it is difficult to live.”

“Do you know how many Chinese Nobel Prize winners there are?” asked Liu, not waiting for an answer. He didn’t have to. The Chinese have long articulated ambitions to win more Nobel prizes. (No Chinese-born scientist, for example, has ever been awarded a Nobel Prize for work in the mainland.) “The Jewish population is very small but the Chinese is big,” Liu said. “Compare that, if you will. When we know that the Jewish people are so successful in both science and human studies, we feel that maybe we can learn from them.”

As the afternoon drew to a close, I mentioned Chen Guangbiao, the billionaire who declared he is good at working with Jews. Liu was exasperated by such reductions.

“In their minds, Jewish people control the banks in America. It means for them that Jewish people control the world, controls the governments,” he railed, shaking his hands in disbelief. “I feel it’s a joke.”

Prof. Xu was more understanding. “Stereotypes are overemphasized. But in China this is positive,” he said calmly. After all, he added: “Had the Jews achieved nothing, no Chinese would be interested in them.”

 

“I AM VERY GOOD AT WORKING WITH JEWS”

“I am very good at working with Jews” Says Chinese tycoon trying to buy the New York Times/Wall Street Journal
By Stephanie Butnick
South China Morning Post
January 9, 2014

Chen Guangbiao, a recycling magnate and one of China’s 400 richest people – and a high-profile philanthropist; he’s known for what he calls flashy philanthropy – recently announced his intention to buy the New York Times.

But when Guangbiao, whose fortune was estimated at $740 million in 2012, was rebuffed by the Internet, he changed his tack: he checked to see if the Wall Street Journal was for sale.

And why shouldn’t he own an American newspaper? After all, he boasts what is apparently the most important skill required to do so: he’s good at working with Jews.

Chen had said earlier that he was “serious” about purchasing the Times, so he could work on “rebuilding its credibility and influence” by reforming its award-winning coverage of China.

Chen said he was aware that many American papers were Jewish-owned. He said he was up for the job since he had “equally competent IQ and EQ” compared with Jews.

“I am very good at working with Jews,” he said.

It’s sort of like that Chinese firm who was looking to hire a Jew a few years back, but opposite. Or something.

Guangbiao also got attention this week when his English-language business card, which says things like ‘Most Charismatic Philanthropist’ and ‘Most Well-Known and Beloved Chinese Role Model,’ was published online. Want one for yourself? Try Slate’s superlative-laden business card generator. I’ve already added ‘good at working with Jews’ to mine.

 

THE FIRST CHINESE RABBI IN 200 YEARS

The first Chinese rabbi in 200 years
By Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
March 27, 2014

Standing silently in the middle of an open field at his family’s burial plot, Yaakov Wang gazes at his late grandfather’s tombstone, seemingly lost in thought. Just over a year has passed since Yaakov, a descendant of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, completed his conversion before a rabbinical court in Jerusalem. And now he has come back to pay his respects at the grave of the man who first taught him about the family’s unique Chinese Jewish heritage.

The symbolism of the moment is powerful and highly emotive, embodying in a microcosm the tentative rebirth that is taking place among the remnants of Chinese Jewry. Growing up in Kaifeng in the 1990s, Yaakov’s grandfather revealed to him that their family was descended from Jews. And while he knew little about Jewish life or lore, he succeeded in imparting to Yaakov a strong sense of Jewish pride. He also told his young grandson that the Jews had a land of their own, very far away, and that all of them, one day, would return there.

The disclosure had a profound impact on Yaakov. Whenever he went out for dinner with his friends, he refrained from eating pork, despite the central role it plays in Chinese cuisine. And when Yaakov told his fellow students in school that he was Jewish, many responded by saying, “now I know why you are cleverer than me.”

As Yaakov grew older, and began to delve more deeply into Kaifeng’s Jewish past, he learned that it was a community with a rich and ancient heritage, much of it unfamiliar to most of world Jewry.

Jews are believed to have first settled in Kaifeng, which was one of China’s imperial capitals, in the 8th century during the Song Dynasty, or perhaps even earlier. Scholars say that they were Sephardi Jewish merchants from Persia or Iraq who made their way eastward along the Silk Route and settled in Kaifeng with the blessing of the Chinese emperor. The Jews quickly established themselves in the city, where they found an environment of tolerance and acceptance, in sharp contrast to much of the rest of the Diaspora.

In 1163, Kaifeng’s Jews built a large and beautiful synagogue, which was subsequently renovated and rebuilt on numerous occasions throughout the centuries. At its peak, during the Ming Dynasty (1368- 1644), the Kaifeng Jewish community may have numbered as many as 5,000 people.

By the 17th century, a number of Chinese Jews had attained high ranks in the Chinese civil service, but along with success came the blight of assimilation, which took an increasingly heavy toll on the community and its cohesion. As a result, by the mid- 1800s, the Chinese Jews’ knowledge and practice of Judaism had largely faded away. The last rabbi of the community is believed to have died in the early part of the 19th century, and the synagogue building was all but destroyed by a series of floods which struck the city in the 1840s and thereafter.

Nevertheless, against all odds, Kaifeng’s Jews struggled to preserve their Jewish identity, passing down whatever little they knew to their progeny.

In the 1920s, a Chinese scholar named Chen Yuan wrote a series of treatises on religion in China, including “A study of the Israelite religion in Kaifeng.” Yuan noted the decline the community had endured, but took pains to recall that the remaining descendants still tried as best they could to observe various customs and rituals, including that of Yom Kippur.

“Although the Kaifeng Jews today no longer have a temple where they can observe this holy day,” Yuan wrote, “they still fast and mourn without fail on the 10th day of the month.”

Nowadays, in this city of over 4.5 million, there are still several hundred people – perhaps a thousand at most – who are descendants of the Jewish community.

Because of intermarriage in preceding generations, most if not all are no longer considered Jewish in the eyes of Jewish law.

But in recent years, an awakening of sorts has taken place, especially among the younger generation of Kaifeng Jewish descendants, many of whom wish to learn more about their heritage and reclaim their roots.

It was this stirring which prompted Yaakov Wang and six other Jewish descendants from Kaifeng to make aliya in October 2009. They were brought to Israel by Shavei Israel, the organization which I founded and chair.

Previously, we had brought a group of four young Kaifeng Jews to Israel in 2006, all of whom successfully completed the conversion process as well.

And with God’s help, we plan to bring more in the coming years.

It is hard to overstate what a miracle this is. By any measure, Chinese Jewry should have disappeared long ago. Between assimilation and Communism, the Jewish flame in Kaifeng should have been snuffed out. And yet, even here, in this far-flung corner of China, the pintele Yid – the Jewish spark in each and every one of us – refuses to be extinguished.

After his solemn visit to his grandfather’s grave, Yaakov reiterates something that he has told me before: he wants to study to become a rabbi – the first Chinese rabbi in 200 years – so that he can help other Kaifeng Jewish descendants to draw closer to Judaism.

Given his intelligence and determination, along with his sense of purpose, Yaakov will undoubtedly succeed, and before long he will bear the title of rabbi and spiritual leader.

While his grandfather did not live to see his own dream of return fulfilled, his soul will undoubtedly derive great satisfaction in knowing that Chinese Jewry is once again coming to life.

And that after nearly disappearing, his own progeny is at last returning home, to rejoin our people in our own Land.

 

WELCOME TO THE TEMPLE OF PURITY AND TRUTH

China’s Ancient Jewish Enclave
By Matthew Fishbane
New York Times travel section
April 4, 2010

THROUGH a locked door in the coal-darkened boiler room of No. 1 Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Kaifeng, there’s a well lined with Ming Dynasty bricks. It’s just a few yards deep and still holds water. Guo Yan, 29, an eager, bespectacled native of this Chinese city on the flood plains of the Yellow River about 600 miles south of Beijing, led me to it one recent Friday afternoon, past the doormen accustomed to her visits.

The well is all that’s left of the Temple of Purity and Truth, a synagogue that once stood on the site. The heritage it represents brings a trickle of travelers to see one of the more unusual aspects of this country: China, too, had its Jews.

Ms. Guo, who identifies herself as a Jew, says she hears it from scholars, visitors and Chinese people alike: “‘You Chinese Jews are very famous,’ they say. ‘But you are only in the history books.’”

That seemed a good enough reason to come looking, and I quickly found that I was hardly alone. Ms. Guo and I were soon joined by a 36-year-old French traveler, Guillaume Audan, who called himself a “nonpracticing Jew” on a six-month world tour of “things not specifically Jewish.” Like me, he’d found Ms. Guo by recommendation, and made the detour to see what the rumored Kaifeng Jews were all about.

Earlier, Ms. Guo had brought us into a narrow courtyard at 21 Teaching Torah Lane – an alley once central to the city’s Jewish community, and still home to her 85-year-old grandmother, Zhao Cui, widow of a descendant of Chinese Jews. Her one-room house has been turned into a sort of dusty display case, with Mrs. Zhao as centerpiece.

“Here are the Kaifeng Jews,” Ms. Guo said, a little defiantly. “We are they.”

We were surrounded by signs that supported Ms. Guo’s statement: A mezuza was attached to the door frame. A copy of the Sh’ma, widely considered the most important of Hebrew prayers, decorated with Chinese lettering, hung on the wall. A menorah sat by a Chinese-style altar displaying a black-and-white portrait of Mr. Zhao.

Indeed, some 50 descendants of Kaifeng’s Jews are embracing this legacy and relearning Jewish ways. And a few, like Ms. Guo, are tapping a quirky vein of religious tourism.

From the 10th to the 12th century, Kaifeng was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty and a cosmopolitan center on a branch of the Silk Road, attracting Chinese imperial suitors and Persian merchants with camels. Amid this ferment was a small community of Sephardic Jews, who arrived most likely from Persia and India as traders, or perhaps fleeing the Crusades.

Scholars still debate the time of their first arrival, but for at least 700 years, Jews prospered free of persecution, largely out of mind of the various Chinese dynasties that dubbed them “blue-hatted Hui” – people from the West. They settled into trades and, around 1163, built a synagogue. In 1605, the peripatetic Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci met one of their emissaries in Beijing and reported their existence back to Europe.

But time, isolation and assimilation took their toll. When European missionaries in Kaifeng purchased a 17th-century Hebrew Torah in 1851 (it is now housed at the British Museum in London, one of 15 known Kaifeng scrolls), no locals could read it. The synagogue, which had fallen into neglect after repeated flooding, was never rebuilt.

Yet for 150 years following the death of the last rabbi, tiny embers of a heritage still glowed in Kaifeng. Grandparents told their grandchildren, as Mrs. Zhao told Ms. Guo: “You are a Jew.” Without knowing why, families avoided pork. And at Passover, the old men baked unleavened cakes and dabbed rooster’s blood on their doorstep.

Most Jewish-themed tours of China skip Kaifeng, focusing instead on the immigration of persecuted European Jewry, in cities like Shanghai, Harbin, Tianjin and Beijing. Thanks to American, Israeli and European support of places significant to their own past, Harbin and Shanghai, for example, enjoy a regular flow of tourists to museums and sites of synagogues, restored though no longer used for prayer.

Kaifeng, by comparison, attracts word-of-mouth backpackers and three or four rabbi- or scholar-led Jewish heritage groups a year. Most visitors, according to Shi Lei, a 31-year-old descendant of Chinese Jews who has been leading tours here since he was sent to Israel to study Hebrew and Judaica, stay for a day, “have a look, and leave.”

Part of that has to do with the lack of actual sites to visit. Like an old battlefield, Jewish Kaifeng exists mostly in the imagination of the visitor. Here stood a synagogue. Here once lived the Chinese Jews, who made unleavened bread and ate no pork.

China does not recognize Judaism as one of its five approved religions. And unlike the Muslim Hui people, who populate much of Kaifeng, Jews are not considered one of the country’s 55 minorities. Though foreign Jews are allowed to practice their religion while on Chinese soil, there are currently no officially active synagogues in China. The state, in short, holds that no Chinese Jews exist.

“Teaching Torah Lane gets historical landmark status,” Mr. Shi said, walking me down the narrow alleys of the city’s Muslim quarter, “but no Jews exist in China. What is this history of, then?”

Local authorities seem to tolerate discreet activity from the Jewish community and the visitors it draws. In the Kaifeng Municipal Museum, it takes an extra 50 renminbi and a request to be led to the locked room with three barely legible 1489 and 1512 steles describing the Jewish presence in Kaifeng.

And to see the Jewish pavilion at Millennium City Park, a Song dynasty-period-costumed theme park modeled on a famous painted scroll, Mr. Shi had to ask an attendant to bring keys. The modest exhibition there was put together a decade ago by China’s foremost scholar on Chinese Jews, Xu Xin, who told me the limited access to his display was “a very complicated issue.” With this in mind, Ms. Guo and Mr. Shi both label their tours with a wink: they are taking you to meet “descendants of Jews,” not “Jews.”

On Friday evening, after buying some bread from a Muslim street stand, Ms. Guo took Mr. Audan and me into a half-completed shopping center. She marched purposefully around several corners, past closed shops, to a second-floor balcony of empty stores. Smoggy daylight was waning, but through a curtain in one of the shops came the distinct yellow glow of candles. An Israeli flag was just visible through the glass door. And inside, around a simple gray table, sat a dozen people bowed before ritual books in both Chinese and Hebrew, about to begin their Sabbath prayers. The men wore yarmulkes. The women were perched under a poster of the 10 Commandments, written in Chinese script, hung below photos of their ancestors.

Then the group, most of whom requested anonymity, took turns reading from Hebrew prayer books. Mr. Audan put on a cap and joined in the singing. When the Sabbath meal of spiced shredded potato, Chinese wine, peanuts and kumquats had been shared (with chopsticks), he passed on a gift from Parisian friends to Ms. Guo for the Zhao family: a ceremonial knife from the Sydney Jewish Museum gift shop.

The day before, Mr. Shi had led me down Yiyuanhou Lane, a hutong, or alley, where his Jewish grandfather used to live, past half-demolished houses and plots full of felled bricks. Last October, residents there, as in many places in China, were told to move out, as the old neighborhood had been scheduled for redevelopment.

Mr. Shi’s mini-museum to Kaifeng Jews on Yiyuanhou Lane is a one-room collection of photographs of visits by Westerners, reproductions of historical documents used as evidence of Kaifeng’s Jewish past, and a few donated objects, including a menorah, under glass. He wasn’t sure where to put the museum now that it had to move.

“Next year,” Shi Lei said with a disapproving click of the tongue, “this hutong will disappear from the map.”

IF YOU GO:

The closest airport to Kaifeng is in Zhengzhou, reached from major Chinese cities. Shuttles from Zhengzhou Xinzheng International Airport to downtown Kaifeng take one and a half hours.

You can book a two-day detour to Kaifeng through Ctrip (866-992-8747; ctrip.com), which also suggests hotels.

Xu Xin’s authoritative book “The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion” (Ktav, 2003) is worth reading.

To explore Jewish Kaifeng, you will need a guide. Shi Lei (jewishchinatours.com) is licensed, charming and experienced. Guo Yan (yisrael-kaifeng@hotmail.com; 86-387-115-2704) has built a mini-museum of her own and is happy to take you to a Sabbath gathering. At Passover, you may find yourself sharing food with a group of 50 or more.

In 1985, Wendy Abraham, on the board of the Sino-Judaic Institute, recorded oral histories of the last generation to remember a Jewish past in Kaifeng. (kaifengtours.org)