Jewish Harbin
I received a wonderful PowerPoint presentation about the Jewish life in Harbin, a major city in northeast China. It consists of 31 pages, mostly photos by Charles B. The sources for the textual information are Shiri Lev Ari’s “Harbin’s Jews: Isle of calm for embattled nation“, an online essay by Dr. Irena Vladimirsky, titled The Jews of Harbin. To view the presentation:
- Download it from here.
- Double click it. (You will need to have Microsoft PowerPoint or its player)
- Click the space bar or the right arrow to process from one slide to the next.
Enjoy!
Out of the seven books related to the Jewish experience in China we have, I would like to recommend one that actually mentions Harbin: “Jews in old China; studies by Chinese scholars,” edited by Sidney Shapiro. It contains 23 essays ranging from 4 to 50 pages. Shapiro and his Chinese colleagues detail their analyses to reveal that Jews were not only present in Kaifeng, known as Bianjing in the Song dynasty, but that they lived in large numbers in other Chinese cities as well. This scholarly volume includes not just an epilogue, bibliography and index, but also a chronological table, which came useful for me to get a big picture view of the history covered,
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