China is erasing its Jewish history

A historian of the far east warns that the most prominently communist country is erasing its Jewish history:

For the past decade, police have been stationed outside the door of one of China’s most prominent native Jews. “They see who goes in, who talks. They can hear who is saying what inside the house,” says that person’s sibling, who now lives in Israel (to protect their identities, this article will refer to the one living in Israel as Zhao Lao’er and the one living in Kaifeng as Zhao Laoda). The police monitoring Zhao Laoda’s life are national-level police. “They are like the FBI, not local Kaifeng police.” Several times a year, Zhao Laoda is hauled in by the police for questioning about activities in the Jewish community.

The recent crackdown under President Xi Jinping’s rule has focused on erasing Kaifeng’s Jewish history.

Most of what we know of the small Jewish community in this central Chinese city is carved in stone on four tablets that, for centuries, were located outside the Kaifeng synagogue, particularly the tablets from 1489 and 1512. Those tablets used to be the highlight of the former Kaifeng Museum, drawing foreign tourists willing to pay extra to see them. The old Kaifeng Museum, near the site of the city’s former synagogue, was shuttered early in the crackdown, in 2016. What became of the tablets remained unknown for several years.

A new museum opened in 2018 in Kaifeng’s distant suburbs. All mentions of the Jews had been scrubbed from the new museum, and the tablets were not on display. When Noam Urbach, an Israeli expert on the Kaifeng Jews, visited the new museum on opening day, he asked where the tablets were. Museum staff called around. Eventually they told him, “We have them, but they are not on display.” Later, Urbach learned from a source who entered the closed museum that the tablets had been thrown into an outdoor courtyard. Rebecca Bitterman, a curator at the Israel Museum, once asked Beijing to lend the tablets for an exhibition on China but was rebuffed. “They said they will never leave China,” she says. Today, the tablets China once considered too valuable to leave the country lie in the dirt of an abandoned museum.

This crackdown began in April 2015, when Rebecca Davis wrote about Kaifeng’s Jewish revival for The New York Times. She attended a seder hosted by a mix of foreign and Kaifeng Jews, with one government official present. “That article was a very big problem,” Zhao Lao’er said. Zhao Laoda was interrogated for 10 hours. Around this time, police were ordered to guard the entrance to their house, though a worse fate awaited the official who participated in the seder. “He was arrested,” Zhao Lao’er said.

The pressure spread. Rabbi Marvin Tokayer had been leading Jewish tours to Kaifeng. In 2015, he was stopped mid-tour and was not allowed into the city. Ester Guo Yan, one of the community’s leaders, was harassed by police, who demanded to check identification while she was guiding tours. Two years later, authorities shut down a small, unofficial museum of the Kaifeng Jews that she had cobbled together in an apartment next to the site of the old synagogue.

This kind of chilling news is exactly why I consider Ronald Reagan a phony when it comes to the war against communism - he may have gotten the original Russian regime to dismantle (and has been sadly clear since, it resurrected under Vladimir Putin), but he never stood up to the Chinese communist threat, and now, look where it's led to. What are the chances religious Israeli tourists aren't allowed to bring tefillin to pray there, or light prayer candles for Shabbat? A definite problem's come about, and no telling if it can be mended at ease. Indeed, does anybody sensible have the courage to protest the Chinese communist machine today?