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First person from Israel: Report on Kaifeng Jews from Israeli/American Ilan Yavor

[caption id="attachment_7412" align="alignleft" width="288" caption="Ilan Yavor (second from left) with his class of Chinese students in Israel"][/caption] As I was growing up in the largely Ashkenazic Jewish community in Milwaukee, I rarely met someone whose native tongue wasn’t Yiddish, English, or Hebrew. It was only after I made aliyah more than 12 years ago that I began grasping how diverse the Jewish people has become, having incorporated foreign peoples and cultures into its main body. In just over 60 years, the State of Israel has progressed from being a haven for Eastern European ideologues and refugees to being a burgeoning multi-ethnic society, the envy of nations throughout Europe and the Middle East. By the time I began studying for my masters’ degree at Bar-Ilan University, I had grown used to living among Ethiopians, Yemenites, Brazilians, Indians, Russians, and so on. But one Shabbat on campus, I discovered that I hadn’t known the half of it. For sitting in front of me was a young man whose facial features were undeniably East Asian. The young man spoke no Hebrew, but his English was impressive. He proudly informed me that he’s a scion of a once large and prosperous Jewish community from the city of Kaifeng in eastern China. We became friends, and he related the fascinating saga of a group of Persian Jewish traders whose livelihoods had taken them to Kaifeng, which, at the time, was an important trading center in Imperial China. In a land that never knew anti-Semitism, the community quickly flourished. Tragically, however, the community was nearly wiped out by a devastating 19th century earthquake, which claimed the lives of thousands, and reduced the synagogue to rubble. Driven into poverty, the survivors eventually sold off the communal relics, including their Torah scrolls. Assimilation and intermarriage were the last nails in the community’s coffin, and by the beginning of the 20th century, not one individual remained that traditional Judaism would consider a Jew. Were it not for the oral traditions of seven families from the original community, who educated their posterity about their family origins, hundreds of years of Jewish life in China would remain a sparsely documented phenomenon. My young friend — Shi Lei was his name — eventually returned to China, and we lost contact, but he had ignited in me a new passion: to learn more about these long-lost cousins of the Orient.