A homecoming across China’s Jewish past

Even before those dark years, from around 1900 onward, many arrived simply seeking economic stability and a better life – like the Matlin family, who moved to Harbin and began trading in Mongolian cattle and racehorses. Cities such as Shanghai, Harbin, and Tianjin opened their doors to these Russian-speaking newcomers, who established synagogues, schools, and thriving business enterprises.

Thermal underwear, thick coats, and woolly hats filled seven overstuffed suitcases at Ben-Gurion Airport on a warm day in late fall.

Hainan Airlines was one of the few international carriers to continue operating for much of the two-year war with Hamas, offering a route from Tel Aviv to the ultra-modern, hi-tech miracle that is Shenzhen. The company restored its comfortable, roomy direct flights to Beijing in April 2025.

Clutching their Israeli passports – now stamped with visas featuring the Great Wall – seven members of the Association of Former Residents of China stood in line for the nine-hour flight to the Chinese capital. They had been invited by the Chinese Enterprises Association in Israel on a roots tour to visit the hometowns of their parents or grandparents and, in some cases, to visit family graves for the first time.

Even before takeoff, first-generation Mili slid a small, green, flowered diary across the departure-lounge table – her mother’s account of two visits to her birthplace of Harbin in 1999 and 2008. The neat script recounted her experiences returning to the city she had left at age nine – with a particular focus on ice cream.

“They used to say the ice cream in Harbin was the best in the world,” according to Jacob “Yaki” Matlin, chair of the association.

Their gracious hosts arranged visits to the awe-inspiring Great Wall, Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, and more. They also welcomed the delegation to a formal meeting in which the Chinese excel: ten CCECC executives sat across a lengthy conference table from their Israeli guests, flags of both nations dotting the table. Messages of support followed an overview of the company’s impressive civil-engineering achievements. The Israelis responded in kind, with accompanying diplomats from the Israeli Embassy in Beijing and chairman Matlin taking the lead.

Beautifully encased gifts were exchanged before everyone headed to an even more lavish electronic lazy Susan.

It was a 30-minute high-speed train ride from Beijing to Tianjin (also written as Tientsin), a “smaller” city of a mere 14 million. This is where the Jewish story began.

As many as 5,000 Jews called this city home in the first half of the 20th century. Today, the only remaining vestige is the former synagogue, completed in 1940. This church-like structure served as the focal point for the community, along with a school that housed around 150 students.

The synagogue was in use until 1949 and the establishment of the modern Chinese state, after which most Jews left for Israel, Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Over the years, the building became a Catholic church and later a storage facility before an earthquake caused significant damage.

After restoration, it became a restaurant, but traces of its Jewish past remain – particularly the outline of the lower half of a Star of David above the portico entrance and a stained-glass window depicting a hanukkiah.

But for this group of Israelis, the true emotional moment lay in Harbin, more than 1,000 kilometers to the north.

Today, the city is best known for its winter ice festival, beer production, and booming oil industry. Yet at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th, it was little more than a frontier outpost – until railways arrived from Russia, carrying the first émigrés: Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.

Anticipation grew as the high-speed train crossed eastern China in seven hours. The acrid smell of burning cornfields drifted in from nearby villages as the group boarded their bus at Harbin West Railway Station. As the local guide explained the region’s complicated history – Russia and Japan vying for influence in the 1880s and 1890s – the group half listened and half gazed out the bus windows, searching for signs of their ancestors.

It was Mili who first cried out excitedly: “There’s the Jewish museum!” housed in a former synagogue.

Before long, it became clear that as many as 30,000 Jews had shaped Harbin’s downtown – now home to some 10 million residents. The bus passed what had once been a home for aged Jewish women (where gentiles could also receive hot soup and a smile), a Jewish middle school, and the main synagogue, which still retains its Star of David and original exterior features.

The guide explained that Jews had been at the heart of the city’s founding. In the 1920s and 30s, Harbin was China’s flourishing success story, eclipsing even Shanghai. Jewish entrepreneurs were involved in banking, tobacco and flour production, commerce, and almost every walk of life in the burgeoning city.

During dinner on the first evening in Harbin, Galia called her mother, Tania, back in Israel. The group listened rapt as the 92-year-old described her memories: the Jewish hospital, her home, and the location of the grave of Galia’s grandfather, Gregori. Tears flowed.

It was time to visit the “new” Jewish cemetery. “It’s an hour out of town,” said the local guide.

Thus began a discussion on the tour bus about the cemetery’s relocation.

The Jewish cemetery was established in 1903, soon after the first Jewish merchants and railway engineers arrived with the Chinese Eastern Railway. The first recorded burial dates to May 28, 1903. As Harbin expanded, the burial site soon lay within the growing city.

In 1958, after the vast majority of Jews had left, local authorities decided to relocate cemeteries of all faiths downtown to make way for urban development. Families abroad were given almost no time to respond, and most were unable to return to arrange reburials. Surviving local Jews, together with other religious groups, protested, but the plan went ahead.

Of roughly 3,000 graves in the original cemetery, officials selected 853 identifiable ones for transfer. These were reinterred in a dedicated Jewish section of the new Huangshan Public Cemetery. Most graves, however, were not moved. Many remains were left in place, and numerous tombstones were dismantled or “deep-buried” – a bureaucratic euphemism that often meant they were broken up or covered with fill. The former cemetery site was eventually redeveloped; parts of it now lie beneath the Harbin Ice Palace and its fairgrounds.

Yaki found his grandfather’s grave marker in the new cemetery – he had also been named Ya’akov, or Jacob in English. Galia struggled to complete the Kaddish memorial prayer, weeping among the graves, the flames of her memorial candles seeming to rise to greet her sobs. Anat brought a brush and vigorously cleaned a family tombstone. Mili and her sister Liat placed stones to memorialize their great-uncle, while Gana sprayed water on great-grandfather Haim’s headstone.

It was a bittersweet moment. Silence. Introspection. Memories. Stories. Only the wind dared disturb the scene. A black squirrel studied the group before silently scurrying off in search of fallen nuts.

From here, the group flew to Shanghai to learn of the city’s role in hosting some 20,000 Jewish refugees during World War II. The excellent museum dedicated to their memory includes stories of bravery and friendship shown by Chinese citizens toward their Jewish guests in the face of Japanese atrocities, in addition to telling the personal stories of many from the community.

The adjoining synagogue, complete with a Torah scroll, is occasionally used by descendants for bar mitzvahs and other celebrations, while the almost Greek-temple-styled synagogue on the other side of town seems sadly neglected.

But for this group, their hearts remained in Harbin. Their ancestors did not arrive in China fleeing Hitler’s Final Solution; they came as pioneering entrepreneurs, initially seeking a decent living but eventually rising to prominence as perhaps the driving force behind Harbin’s extraordinary growth. They helped transform it from an unknown backwater into a major city.

As these Israelis handed their documents to passport control officers – Great Wall visas a keepsake from this pilgrimage – their thoughts turned to the “Great Walls” their parents and grandparents left behind: the grand structures, the broad boulevards, the specialized hospitals, the transformative commerce, banking and industry, and the cosmopolitan Jewish and secular music, art and education. A community that built a city, now revisited and remembered by some of its descendants.