In China where the internet is under full censorship and state control!
This Yom Kippur, Chabad Shanghai emissaries reflect on absence of inherent antisemitism in China
Shanghai’s Jewish community doesn’t announce itself with a grand facade. It lives in a modest building, adapted over time into a full community hub with a small synagogue.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, a look at the haven where Rabbi Shalom and Dina Greenberg have spent nearly three decades weaving together a far-flung family.
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Shanghai’s Jewish community doesn’t announce itself with a grand facade. It lives in a modest building, adapted over time into a full community hub with a small synagogue, a mikveh, and a kosher kitchen run day to day by local Chinese staff.
“We came here in 1998,” Rabbi Shalom Greenberg, founder of Chabad in Shanghai, told The Media Line. He moved to Shanghai with his wife, Dina Greenberg, co-director of Chabad Shanghai, to build something permanent after years of ad hoc holiday programming. “When we came, there were about two to three hundred Jewish people living here, all expats, and we started to build up the community,” he said. Rabbi Greenberg is from Israel; Dina is from Cleveland, Ohio. Both come from Chabad families and were raised similarly to the way they are raising their family today.
Greenberg traces Shanghai’s Jewish story back about 150 years, in three waves: Baghdadi Jews arriving via the British Empire’s Asian circuits; Russian Jews coming south along the new Trans-Siberian line through Harbin; and, in the late 1930s and ’40s, refugees escaping Europe—some on “Sugihara visas” routed through Japan—who discovered that all you needed to enter Shanghai was a boat ticket.
“At the end of 1945–1946, there were over 20,000… closer to 30,000 Jewish people living in Shanghai,” he noted. Most left after 1949; by the early 1960s, he says, “none” remained. The modern revival began in the 1990s as China normalized ties with Israel, drawing Jews from “all over the world” to form a community again.
Today, the crowd is deliberately mixed. “A nice group from the United States, a nice group from Israel, a nice group from France … We had two families from Australia, one family from South Africa, one family from England… from everywhere,” says Rabbi Greenberg. “Some people came here as expats, some as entrepreneurs, some for business, some to study—we had lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers, teachers, professors—people from every spectrum,” he added. Some arrive with their families, and most stay only a few years, making this a necessarily transient community that relies on shared space, rhythm, and support to feel connected.
That ecosystem scaled up before the pandemic. “In 2018, we had about 5,000 Jewish people, then COVID affected us numerically; we had three locations before… we were very active,” Greenberg notes. “Now we have only one location… but we are going back to the numbers that we had when we just started,” he noted.
Elsewhere in China, centers opened after Shanghai—in Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, Yiwu, and Chengdu—proof that the Jewish presence in China is expanding.
Daily life here turns on trust and patient translation. “It was very difficult for Chinese people to understand the concept of kosher,” Greenberg recalls of those early years—especially the separation of meat and dairy and the need to check every egg for a blood spot. Staff learned by doing, and culture met cuisine in small ways that built respect and routine.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-869245