HARBIN MEMORIES FROM
YAACOV LIBERMAN
These
excerpts are from MY CHINA: Jewish Life in the Orient
1900-1950 by Yaacov Liberman. Copyright © 1998 Gefen Publishing House, Ltd.
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House, Ltd. 6 Hatzvi Street, Jerusalem 94386, Israel
The Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705 USA
Permission to print granted by Gefen Publishing House, Ltd., on April 10, 2007.
The book also includes chapters on the author's experiences in Shanghai,
Tientsin and other cities in Asia, as well as additional chapters on Harbin.
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter
1
THE
IMMIGRATION TO HARBIN
Between the end of the nineteenth century and 1930, Harbin
was
slowly transformed from a small unknown Chinese village into a modern city,
often called "The Pearl of the Far East." Much credit for this transformation should go to its
Russian immigrants, many of whom were the employees of the Sino-Eastern Railway
and to others who were desperate exiles from the Bolshevik "paradise"
of the recently formed Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. Among
them were a significant number of Jews. Whether moderately well-off or
penniless, the Russian Jews of Harbin were united in a common desire to create
an acceptable environment in which to live, work and worship with as little
outside interference as possible.
After the 1917 Revolution, a small but significant number of
Jews chose Harbin as
their temporary home. Eventually, some of them would spread further and would
become instrumental in the development of the Jewish communities of Tientsin
and
Shanghai.
With
great eagerness, the Jewish emigrants to Harbin established businesses - factories, restaurants, import-export offices and
shops. Those with less means, as well as the younger generation, including
neophyte entrepreneurs, found employment among the affluent members of the
community. The more destitute were assisted, first on an individual
[Page 17]
basis, and then gradually, by organized charitable institutions
and societies such as the Home for the Aged and a Public Welfare Kitchen.
Eventually, a well-equipped, modern hospital with its own clinic serviced all
newcomers, most especially the destitute in need of medical care. All of these
charities were run by devoted men and women who gave selflessly of their time,
money and talent. A unique bonding of individuals and community soon came about.
*
* *
My parents contributed significantly to this community
solidarity. My father, Semyon Liberman, emigrated to
Harbin
out of
economic necessity. Born in 1893 in
Sevastopol, in
the Crimea, he
grew up in a home in which money was scarce. Immediately upon graduating from
high school, he had to help support his three sisters and a brother. When in
1916 he was offered a job as an accountant in Harbin, he
moved his siblings to this story-book city in the faraway Orient, where they
began a new life.
No
two backgrounds could have been more different. My mother, Gisia Zuboreva, was
born into wealth in the city of Nikolaevsk on
the Amur River, a city of Russia's Far East. Her
father was the respected head of an industrial fishing complex that operated its
own fleet of barges and ran a canning factory. For many years, until the
Communists took over, the small lake by my grandparents' estate, in
Grandfather's honor was named Zuborevsky Protok [Zuborev Channel]. In 1918, as
the Bolsheviks approached, Grandfather Zuborev escaped empty-handed with his
family to Harbin. With
him went his wife, his two sons and two daughters. My mother was among the
family members who fled. However, her older sister, Sarah, by then a married
woman, remained behind.
Once in Harbin, the
Zuborevs settled into a small apartment on Birzhevaia Ulitsa [Stock Exchange Str.],
where they set up housekeeping.
[Page 18]
In
1920, my parents "discovered" each other. Next year - they were
married. Although Dad was not ideologically inclined, he joined the General
Zionists of Harbin.
However, communal activities were more to his liking, and his favorite would be
the founding of the Jewish Hospital and Clinic (Mishmeres Holim), of which he
was a long-term president.
*
* *
As my parents, like other newcomers, would discover, schooling
in Harbin was provided by a variety of
educational facilities. Although the instruction in most primary schools was
given in Russian, in two English-language schools and a Talmud-Torah (Jewish
school), the Hebrew language was also taught as part of the curriculum. For
secondary school education, however, the majority of the Jewish youth in town
flocked to the Kommercheskoe Uchilishche (the
Commercial School), a Russian-language high school of such high standards that
its graduates matriculated with ease to the best European and American
universities.
The
Talmud-Torah occupied a very special place in the life of the Jewish community of
Harbin and loving memories of the
devoted leaders and teachers of the only Jewish institution in town remain
embedded in many a heart. The religious needs of the community were provided by
Chief Rabbi Kiseleff, a man of great knowledge and wisdom, patient and tolerant;
a man who bore a fathomless love for his people. He had the full support of the
Jewish Spiritual Society, which oversaw Jewish life in
Harbin. The
main synagogue became more than the religious center of the community. Jews
flocked to this magnificent structure on holidays, to mark a Bar Mitzvah, to
observe memorials and to attend communal meetings of protest and solidarity.
Services were enhanced by the presence of our talented Cantor Zlatkin and an
excellent boy's choir. Other functionaries in the ritual life of the community
were its shohet, Reb Litvin, who for
many years supervised the ritual slaughter, and our mohel,
Reb Rolband, who was a master of the ritual of circumcision.
[Page 19]
From his emigration to Harbin
in the
1920s, up to his brutal arrest and deportation to the
Soviet
Union
in
1945, Dr. Avram Yosefovich Kaufman remained its leader. A gifted organizer,
fervent Zionist and an excellent lecturer, orator and writer, he was a charming
and brilliant human being as well.
*
* *
The foundation of Harbin's Jewish community goes back to
the early twentieth century, when a few Jewish families from Russia
began
to establish themselves in the muddy village on the Sungari River. This
was a period when Russia,
encroaching on Manchurian territory to the north, won the right to build and
supervise the Chinese Railway that one day would connect Khabarovsk with
Manchuria.
Together, the Russians and the Chinese would transform Harbin into
the center of northern
Manchuria
and endow the city with an unmistakable European-Russian
character that has remained its hallmark to the present day.* To the outside
world, China's
weakness was the result of internal animosity and dissent. At the very time when
the Jews of Harbin were consolidating a Jewish community, China was undergoing
constant political changes and bitter fratricidal strife that toppled the Ch'ing
dynasty from the throne, allowed warlords to usher in anarchic rule and
ultimately made possible the advent of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Throughout this turmoil,
Harbin's tiny Jewish population remained unaffected and continued its tireless
efforts to build a vibrant community that one day would number some twelve
thousand.
These
early Jewish arrivals, however, were not a homogenous group. Although schooling
and a house of worship were of primary concern to the early settlers in Harbin, the
newcomers came with wide-ranging and extremely diverse ideological affiliations.
Indeed, social and philosophical
__________
*See Irene Eber. "Passage through China," in the Exhibition Album dedicated to Far
Eastern Jewry. (Tel Aviv: Bet-ha-Tfuzoth - The Museum of the Diaspora.)
[Page 20]
quarrels were endemic to the Russian Jews. Debate was continuous among Russian
Jewry in general. Political tolerance within the community would only come with
its maturity. Russian Jewry, politically active during turbulent years in Russia,
brought with it all of the sophisticated political "isms" of the day.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Zionism occupied
a prominent place among these social philosophies, and consequently, a variety
of Zionist parties sprang up in Harbin. The
most permanent of these was the General Zionist Organization, or the party of
the Algemein Zionists. While Professor Chaim Weizmann was their world leader,
Dr. Kaufman, the popular head of the Harbin community, was their local chief. He managed to bring all varieties of Zionists
together for practical purposes.
That
spirit of rapprochement and consolidation, however, eluded the Bundists, whose
politics were an amalgam of Judaism and Socialism. A continuous source of
dissent and divisiveness during the formative years of the Harbin Jewish
community, the Bundists in their opposition to Zionism were remote from world
Jewry's goals of political rejuvenation and Jewish solidarity. Gradually,
Zionism prevailed, the Harbin Bund disintegrated and the unity of the three
Jewish communities was assured.
Elsewhere
in China during
the first two decades of the century, attempts to create Jewish centers arose
wherever Jewish immigrants lived and worked. These were organized by Jews fleeing
Russia, who
either stopped short of, or passed by the great city of Harbin.
Communities were established in Mukden, Tzitzigar, Chiefu,
Tsingtao
and
Dairen.
Short-lived, in many instances these were remarkable communities, in that no
matter how small their membership (at times they numbered no more than a dozen
people), they coalesced out of an intense desire for communal belonging. In a
tiny community in Manchuria, for
example, this effort resulted in the actual purchase of land and the building of
a synagogue and a small school!
[Page 21]
Towering
above them all, however, and outlasting them by several decades was the Jewish
community of Harbin. Its vitality was not due simply
to the large numbers of Jews who flocked to this city, but rather to the
unrelenting devotion of those early pioneers and their loyal followers, who
molded a group of refugees into a proud and creative Jewish community.
Continue to Chapter
2
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