Kaifeng Jews

For the first time, a group of seven descendants of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China has moved to Israel. The new arrivals, who were brought here by the Shavei Israel organization, arrived at Ben-Gurion airport late Tuesday night. The city of their birth, Kaifeng, sits on...

Jin Jin and Nina Wang are students in Hebrew University's preparatory program. They will soon commence their BA studies, but they already have long-term dreams. Jin wants to eventually serve as a diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. Wang hopes to use her diverse knowledge of languages to represent Israeli companies in China. The two women belong to one of the smallest Jewish communities in Israel - immigrants from Kaifeng, China - which numbers just 10 souls.  
A descendant of long extinct Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, weds new Oleh from United States in Jerusalem's Great Synagogue. 'I can't think of better example of ingathering exiles ' says Shavei Israel chair, who organized ceremony Ynetnews Israel Jewish Scene A groovy kind of love: A historic and very special ceremony took place last Thursday in the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem: Shoshana Rebecca Li, of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, wed Ami Emmanuel, am immigrant from the United States.  
For the past five years, Jin Wen-Jing and her parents, Jin Guang Yuan and Zhang Jin Ling - "Shlomo" and "Dina," as they are called in Hebrew - have lived in Jerusalem. The daughter, whose name means "tranquillity" in Chinese, and is known by that name ("Shalva") at the boarding school in the north that she attended after arriving in Israel, is the prism through which the parents see the country. She is their interpreter and spokesperson, and she guides them through the subtleties of Israeli culture and the labyrinths of the civil bureaucracy and the rabbinical establishment. She is 21, tall and thin, perhaps contrary to the stereotype of the Chinese as being short of stature. "My grandfather always wanted to come here, to Israel," she says, "and we also always wanted to live among Jews. We were not afraid that we would have a hard time."
Heirs of the once-great community of Kaifeng are looking at their past and hoping, with help from Israel and Jews worldwide Judaism seems to have vanished from the city of Kaifeng, situated on the fabled Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean. Once, a small but thriving Jewish community existed here centuries before Marco Polo, the great Venetian explorer, traveled through China; a thousand years of assimilation into China has dimmed the Jewish light in the Far East. Yet some sparks remain. "I am a member of the Jewish people and I want to go back to my roots," says 19-year-old Jin Jing in fluent English.
Jerusalem Post This past Sunday, Jin Wen-Jing, an 18-year-old student at the Yemin Orde youth village, went before a Haifa conversion court under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate. After administering an oral examination aimed at assessing her commitment to Judaism as well as her knowledge of Jewish law and tradition, the three rabbis comprising the Beit Din [rabbinical court] informed Wen-Jing that they had decided to accept her as a Jew. Speaking in fluent Hebrew, Wen-Jing was quick to express her joy, and relief, at the court's decision. "I was very nervous, but now I am very happy," she said. "This has always been my family's dream - to return to our roots."
Though he is only 23 years old, Shi Lei of Kaifeng, China, is laboring hard to reclaim centuries of Jewish tradition and heritage, much of which has all but faded away in his native land.   A descendant of a once prosperous and thriving Jewish community located on the south bank of China's Yellow River, Shi Lei (pronounced Sher Lay) is now enrolled in the one-year Jewish studies program at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, where he is busy studying Hebrew and learning about Jewish history and culture.