Shanghai
צילום: איי פי
Shanghai restores historic synagogue
Chinese government announces restoration of one of Shanghai's remaining synagogues
Shanghai is restoring one of the city's two remaining synagogues as part of a growing celebration of the city's Jewish heritage, the government said on Thursday.
About 30,000 European Jews found a haven from Nazi persecution in Shanghai, whose status as an open city made it one of the last places they could flee to without visas.
Their presence expanded an already thriving Jewish community that included many of the city's top business leaders and supported German and Yiddish newspapers, schools, and at least seven synagogues.
Built in 1927-28, the Ohel Moshe synagogue was a center of the community in the Tilanqiao neighborhood, where Shanghai's Japanese overlords, under German pressure, forced German and Austrian Jews to live in the final years of World War II.
The refugees left after the war's end and the 1949 communist takeover, and in 1996, the city turned the synagogue into a museum of Jewish history. Its collection will be expanded under the fix-up that began last month, according to a spokesperson for the Hongkou district government.
Restoration is due to take five months. The project's budget wasn't known, although reports said the government has already spent 10 million yuan (USD 1.3 million; euro1 million) on restoring the surrounding area and promoting it as a tourist site.
Efforts to salvage Shanghai's Jewish history have been driven by both domestic and overseas scholarly interest, as well as by the growing numbers of Jewish expatriates in the city.
Not official religion
That trend in turn has been embraced by city leaders, who are eager to cast Shanghai as cosmopolitan and welcoming to foreigners. However, they have yet to respond to a call last year from surviving Shanghai Jews for the city to apply for UNESCO World Heritage protection status for Tilanqiao.
The city's other surviving synagogue, Ohel Rachel, is owned by the city's education bureau, which opens it for Jewish services only a few times a year.
Shanghai's estimated 2,000 Jewish residents worship mainly in private homes and Judaism is not recognized as an official religion by China's communist government, which strictly controls religious activities.
