The more than 1,000 year old Jewish community in Kaifeng can only survive underground and fears that all signs of their existence may soon have disappeared.
Sophia Yan, The Telegraph
For this year’s Hanukkah festival, Amir lights menorah candles and recites blessings to celebrate the eight nights of the festival, like many Jews around the world. But he does so in secret, fearing that Chinese officials will come by – as they often do on religious occasions – to enforce the prohibition of Judaism and urge him to renounce his belief. Sometimes he is even summoned for interrogation. (…)
Since 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has waged a tough campaign against foreign influence and unsanctioned religions as part of a push to “Sinize” the faith. He has dismantled church crosses and demolished onion domes from mosques and imprisoned more than a million Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.
In addition to Christians and Muslims, Xi’s oppression has also hit China’s tiny Jewish community, whose ancestors settled along the Yellow River in Kaifeng, the then capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, more than a millennium ago.
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That such a small group can attract the wrath of the Communist Party shows how far the repression has spread. Only about 1,000 people in Kaifeng claim Jewish heritage for themselves, and of these only about 100 are or practicing Jews, experts say – hardly a drop in China’s sea of 1.4 billion people. Even at its peak around 1500, the church only had about 5,000 members.
“It is government policy – China does not want to recognize us as Jews,” a man who dreams of training to be a rabbi in Israel told him Telegraph. “Your goal is to ensure that the next generation does not have a Jewish identity.”
At home he teaches his child everything he knows, just as his ancestors – most likely merchants from Persia – did for generations. In this way, the Jewish legacy has survived Kaifeng’s dynasties, wars, natural disasters, and the Cultural Revolution when many destroyed their genealogical records to hide their ancestry. This is how they managed to do without a rabbi for more than 150 years. (…)
Even the five faiths recognized and regulated by the party – Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism – are under great pressure. In Buddhist temples, for example, portraits of Xi Jinping may be exhibited, but not pictures of the spiritual leader in exile, the Dalai Lama.
The Chinese authorities are also concerned about undue foreign influence if the Kaifeng Jewish community were allowed to connect with Jews abroad. “It’s so insignificant in number, but much, much larger in potential attention,” said Noam Urbach, an Israeli academic who studies Kaifeng’s Jews. Their existence can “attract a lot of attention in the international Jewish community.”
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In Kaifeng, stones that date back to 1489 and represent the faith and ancestry of the community have disappeared from a public exhibition that used to be part of a 12th century synagogue. An old well, which was the last vestige of the synagogue, was buried under a coat of cement. Authorities have also torn down the few Hebrew signs in the city that once marked the “path of Torah study”. (…)
The crackdown by the authorities is so severe that the Jewish residents of Kaifeng are afraid to eat together in public. “It’s a small place,” said a Jewish man. “The restaurant managers know we are Jews and would report to the authorities.” Across the city, the last vestiges of Jewish heritage appear to be two tombstones with the Star of David and inscriptions in Chinese and Hebrew – but even that, so fear she will soon be gone.
Yet the Jews in Kaifeng are remarkably resilient and have found ways to keep their faith alive underground.
(From the article „China’s tiny Jewish community in fear as Beijing erases its history“, Appeared in The Telegraph. translation by Alexander Gruber.)
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