Kaifeng Comes to Toronto

“Hello Canada. Shalom Darchei Noam.” So Shi Lei, the direct descendant of the historic Jewish community in Kaifeng, greeted the standing-room only audience at Darchei Noam Synagogue in Toronto.

He was eager to tell his story and to connect with Jews here. Speaking in barely accented English, the 34-year old resident of Kaifeng, the only place in China with an ongoing Jewish community, came to talk about the Jews of Kaifeng.

Kaifeng is a city in the eastern part of China, about 900 kilometres south of Beijing. In the 11^th Century, during the Soong Dynasty, it boasted one and half million people and was the capital of China. One of the cities on the Silk Road, it was well known throughout the ancient world. Traders came regularly, even from Palestine.

When the Muslims entered Persia, Jews were discriminated against and persecuted. They decided to settle in Kaifeng. About 1,000 embarked on the arduous long journey, traveling through deserts on camels to arrive in the place they would never leave for a thousand years.

Shi Lei explained that the emperor of China welcomed them warmly and ordered them to “respect the traditions of your ancestors and hand them down to your children.”

“Never was there ever any anti-Semitism in China,” he said. “In World War Two, Shanghai was the only city to open it’s arms to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis.”

In 1163, they built a synagogue that looked like a huge pagoda, with its red tiled curved roofs. They called it “The Temple of Purity and Truth.”

The main philosophy in China was Confucianism. Jews realized that to be successful they would become Chinese officials and to do that they had to pass civil service exams in Confucianism. “For 2,000 years and even today, this philosophy has influenced the Chinese,” he told the warmly receptive audience.

The synagogue was destroyed by torrential flooding of the Yellow River. Intermarriage became common. The last Rabbi died in 1810. Neglected and overlooked by the rest of the Jewish world, by the 1850s the Jews assimilated into Chinese society and “our community fell apart,” said Shi Lei.

But remarkably, even though “we abandoned Torah and tradition, we always remembered that we are from Israel and Jews. This never stopped.”

Influenced by a visiting rabbi from New York, Shi Lei felt the stirring of his Jewishness grow into a mission. He went to Israel to study Jewish history and religion at Bar Ilan University, continuing his studies at Machon Meir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Now he lives in Kaifeng and teaches his community Judaism and Hebrew. Eighteen young people from Kaifeng are now studying in Israel.

A tour guide, Shi Lei leads private and group tours to Kaifeng and other Chinese cities with Jewish sites of interest, including Beijng, Harbin, Xi’an and Shanghai.

Cut off from the Jewish world for hundreds of years until it was “discovered” by a Jesuit priest in 1605, the Kaifeng community was intact until the 19^th Century, when it disappeared from the Jewish map. Today, it is undergoing a remarkable resurgence, thanks in part to Shi Lei, a descendant of one of the original Jewish families believed to have settled in Kaifeng between 960 and 1127 CE.

Kulanu, who organized the evening, has arranged a speaking tour for Shi Lei that will take him to the major centres of North America.

Kulanu, founded in 1994, supports dispersed and emerging Jewish communities around the world, many of whom have long been disconnected from the worldwide Jewish community.

Large segments of the Jewish community were “lost” because of forced conversions, war and exile, such as the ten northern Israelite tribes, conquered by Assyria in the eight century BCE. Their descendants can be found today in India , Burma, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China.

During the forced conversions to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, in the 15^th Century, another large group was “lost”. Many of these “Marranos” continued to practice Judaism in secret. Their descendants can be found in Brazil, Mexico, the southwestern United States and Majorca, as well as mainland Spain and Mexico.

They also assist communities without ancestral Jewish backgrounds who want to embrace Judaism. For example, the Abayudaya, a group of Ugandans who have been practicing Judaism since 1919.

To learn more about Kulanu, visit their website: www.kulanu.org.