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Harbin, a forgotten chapter in the history of Jews in China
Amram Olmert likes to entertain the Chinese he encountered as science and agriculture attache at the Israeli embassy in Beijing with a particular joke.
"I tell them I'm a true capitalist," said the brother of Industry, Trade, and Labor Minister Ehud Olmert during the home stretch of his four-year posting in Beijing. No doubt this phrase immediately gets the attention of the citizens of a country suffering from a massive economic identity crisis, where centrally controlled socialism and Wild West capitalism are at either end of the world's most intense game of tug-of-war.
"I say, 'I've got plots of land all over the country: One in Tianjin, one in Harbin and one in Shanghai.'"
The plots of land to which he refers are the final resting places of the members of his family who were just several of the hundreds of thousands who left Russia in the first three decades of the 20th century, originally settling in what may appear to be the unlikeliest of places: Harbin, China.
By the time Olmert's grandfather came with his family to Harbin in 1917, the city had already become "Little Moscow": The Russian population was about to reach 200,000.
"It was, in a way, the most convenient place to go," he explained. From Harbin, his family spread across China, and later, to Europe, Russia and Israel.
Just over 20 years earlier, Harbin had been a collection of tiny fishing villages in a desolate and bitterly cold corner of northeastern China, then known as Manchuria, the home of the Qing Dynasty, which was ousted in 1911. But when the Russians decided to expand the Trans- Siberian Railway into China via Harbin, the collection of villages began to take the form of a city. The population began to rise - and diversify. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1932 drove most of the foreign population from Harbin, a population served by consulates from 16 countries, and composed of residents hailing from 30 nations. It was also home to at least 20,000 Jews.
Coverage of the subject of Jews in China is generally focused upon two cities: Kaifeng and Shanghai. In Kaifeng, a central city regularly slammed by the...