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.
After Bar-Ilan, I spent five years in the Israeli army; and like so many post-army Israelis, I was determined to travel during my “gap year,” and China was the obvious choice of destination.
I spent a few months brushing up on conversational Mandarin, and then headed east for three months, making my way from Hong Kong to Beijing.
Mid-way through my trip, I boarded a rusty train packed with migrant workers from central China to Kaifeng, in the central province of Henan, and spent the nine-hour ride daydreaming about what I might encounter in this unlikely destination.
My attempts to contact members of the community had failed, so I was on my own. To make matters worse, I was greeted in Kaifeng with a downpour of torrential rain, threatening to keep me indoors.
Undaunted, I set out to defy the deluge and find the municipal museum, which was supposed to have an exhibit of Jewish relics. “Closed for remodeling until May.” Oh well.
My last option was to visit the “Street of the separators of the sinew,” a small downtown alleyway. Lacking other cultural references for the Jews, the Chinese identified them with the practice of removing the sciatic sinew after the kosher slaughter of an animal.
There was no need for me to struggle to make conversation. The locals knew exactly what I was after, and pointed out the way.
Their directions led me to the boiler room of the Sixth Peoples’ Hospital, and there, an old man shifted a piece of plywood laying at the center of the room, exposing a deep well. He pointed, and muttered something unintelligible. Later, I found out that this well, probably used to kasher utensils, was all that was left of the once proud community.
Somewhat disappointed with my findings in Kaifeng, I got back on the train and continued traveling, and a month later, returned to Israel. I continued studying Mandarin through Internet sites. I felt it could always prove useful at some point in time.
One day I had been surfing on Youtube, and a clip caught my attention. It was about seven young men from Kaifeng who had been brought by an organization called “Shavei Israel” to Israel.
These individuals had decided to come to Israel for an undefined period of time in order to learn about the traditions of their ancestors, and eventually, convert to Judaism.
“Shavei Israel” is a non-governmental organization founded by Michael Freund. It aims to help descendants of Jews to reconnect with their roots. The organization had sponsored these young men, and put together a program to acquaint them with Israel and modern Jewish society.
Minutes after I saw the clip, I was on the phone with Rabbi Chanoch Avitzedek, an employee of the organization responsible for “the Chinese program.” My heart raced. Was this my chance to play my tiny role at a momentous moment for Jewish history?
I eventually met the rabbi, and I was also to meet the Chinese, but geography and my full-time job prevented me from making any long-term commitments. When I left my full-time job, I tried to reconnect.
By that time, the Chinese guys had been studying at a yeshiva in Gush Etzion, not far from Jerusalem, and the rabbi said I was welcome to come in and teach them something from time to time, on an informal volunteer basis. “Why not?” I thought,“What better opportunity to connect to this fascinating history?”
But what would I teach them? They had been in Israel for more than 18 months and were studying Jewish texts, Shabbat and holidays, etc. Eventually, I thought of teaching them Jewish history, to give them some background on the lives and communities of our nation’s foremost thinkers and leaders.
Our first class was shaky. My students were exceedingly courteous and respectful — not surprising given their place of origin. But despite hours of preparations and endless notes, I saw plenty of blank stares. I was speaking in English, and though several of the students had a high level of comprehension, others were lost.
I tried again a week later, and not much had changed. I had to find a way to get through to them, and to make them love history as much as I do.
Several weeks later, Rabbi Menachem Weinberg, a rabbi at the yeshiva, contacted me. The Chinese students’ regular teacher had to leave for India, to help a local Jewish community with Passover preparations, and would be gone for more than a month, he explained. They were in dire need of a replacement, and he asked me if I was interested.
I was, but how could I be more successful with the students? “Why don’t you just teach them in Chinese?” he asked.
I had barely had a conversation in Mandarin since returning from China. Would they have patience for me? It was a crazy idea, but worth a try. So I told him I’d be happy to teach them three times a week, three hours a day.
After an evening of cramming, note-taking and translating, my first days as a substitute teacher had arrived. Armed with my trusty Beijing-bought dictionary, I stepped into the classroom. I took the bai ban bi — the whiteboard marker — and scribbled what to me were Chinese characters and to them was probably unsightly graffiti. The room went silent.
In a rare moment of courage, and in my best Ashkenazi Mandarin accent, I announced: “Today, we’re going to discuss how the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem affected Jewish communities in Israel and the Diaspora, and how a lay leadership class had begun to develop in both Roman Palestine and Babylonia.”
All eyes were now intently focused on me. No more blank stares, I had gotten their attention now.
For the next two hours, we had a painfully slow but nonetheless engaging class on ancient Jewish history. I had a dictionary and an English-Chinese vocabulary list on the table in front of me, and I improvised the rest. The more bilingual students helped me out with the words I didn’t know, which I listed on the right side of the whiteboard.
It wasn’t perfect, but all things considered, it worked. The Chinese students were thrilled, or maybe just amused at the sight of the sweat collecting on my forehead during my painful attempts to string together a grammatical Chinese sentence.
Two hours were enough for me, though, and I asked their permission to finish the class in English. I wasn’t worried. There were another 12 lessons to go, and either my Chinese would get better, or they would get fed up with me. I hoped for the best.
The class became my main activity for the entire month. To complicate matters, every western name, from Einstein to Eleanor Roosevelt, has a specific Chinese equivalent, which often sounds nothing like the original to our western ears. Thus, Maimonides becomes “My mung nee de,” and Purim is “Pooh are jie.”
I guess the Chinese have already thought of everything; my job was only to apply it. Oh, and to expand my Chinese vocabulary to include concepts like political emancipation, the Reform and Conservative movements, ghettos, pogroms, religious Zionism, and more.
I taught the first several classes in a mix of Chinese, English, and Hebrew, but as we progressed, I found the experience of teaching in Chinese more gratifying than anything else. My students were also very knowledgeable and advanced, and this was very helpful.
One student — his name is Shai — was particularly talented at translating written texts, and I often brought in supplementary quotes, often belonging to reputable rabbis or philosophers, which he would translate out loud. Another student, Gidon, was my official transcriber for the whiteboard.
As our relationship grew stronger, the scope of the class grew. The students began asking me questions taken from a list given to them by the beth din, before their conversion can be finalized.
I began to get to know these seven remarkable young men — their families, their histories, their hopes and desires. The more I familiarized myself with them, the more my respect for them grew.
Everyone knew that once they had finished converting to Orthodox Judaism, returning to Kaifeng would be practically impossible. Most of them would need to make aliyah or integrate into Jewish communities elsewhere.
Conversion in Israel is a complicated matter that demands an incredible amount of patience and perseverance. In China, however, patience is a virtue that is nurtured from childhood, as echoed in a well-known ancient proverb: “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.”
With the Jewish people now more in control of their destiny than any time during the past 2,000 years, I hope that, with some patience, we’ll see more brave and inspired individuals rejoining the Jewish people, diverse in background, but sharing a common hope for the future.
Milwaukee native Ilan Yavor, 34, moved to Israel 12 years ago and works in marketing communications.
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