The Jewish Past of Harbin

choi

Gabrielle Jaffe, Chinese City Restores Century-Old Synagogue. Los Angeles Times, Oct 6, 2013.
http://www.latimes.com/entertain ... ture-china-20131006,0,2192588.story

Quote:

"Many Chinese cities have bulldozed their past in the country's rush to modernity. By contrast, since the late 1990s the northerly city of Harbin has invested millions of dollars in the careful preservation of its turn-of-the-century European architecture. St Sophia's, a 1907 onion-domed Russian orthodox cathedral, for example, was renovated in 1997 and made the focal point of a new city square.

"The [ongoing] restoration of Harbin's Old Synagogue 哈尔滨犹太老会堂, also in Belle Epoque style, which was completed in 1909, will be one of the city's most ambitious projects. * * * The New Harbin Synagogue 哈尔滨犹太新会堂, built in 1921, had a facelift in 2004 and is now a museum documenting Jewish life 哈尔滨市 犹太历史文化展览馆 [check images.google.com].

"Once an orthodox synagogue seating up to 450 people, the building [Old Synagogue] still resembles a Jewish place of worship from its exterior — a Star of David sits atop the rooftop dome. The interior, on the other hand, would be unrecognizable to former congregants.

Note:
(a) professor Dan Ben-Canaan
(i) Benjamin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin
(section 1 Name)

"Ben" means "son of."
(ii) He "establish[ed] the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center at Heilongjiang University"
That was 2002. 黑龙江大学 中国-以色列研究中心

(b) Saint Sophia Cathedral in Harbin  聖索菲亞教堂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sophia_Cathedral_in_Harbin
(a former Russian Orthodox church; built in 1907)
(c) "Despite the challenges, the women's gallery on the second floor, the men's prayer hall and rabbi's bimah platform all will be restored."

bima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bima
(c) "Today, Ben-Canaan is most likely Harbin's only permanent Jewish resident, but the city was once home to up to 25,000 Jews. Their story is closely entwined with the founding of modern Harbin itself. Now a metropolis of nearly 6 million people that is best known for its international snow and ice festival, until the 1890s it was a collection of sleepy fishing villages. The area transformed at the turn of the 20th century, when Russia constructed a rail line through Manchuria to gain quicker access to the port of Vladivostok.
The project's chief engineer was a Jew by birth, and in Harbin, an important stop on the line, many of the first foreign residents were Jewish entrepreneurs who came predominantly from Russia, Ukraine and Poland. The makeup of Harbin's community was quite different from that of the enclave that developed in Shanghai * * * ‘In Shanghai there were a handful of wealthy Iraqi Jewish families at the beginning, but most came in the 1930s and early 1940s. Escaping from Nazi Europe, they were mostly poor refugees,’ Ben-Canaan says. ‘Harbin's Jews, by contrast, were wealthy businessmen who came from Czarist Russia and created a thriving community.’  Harbin's first Jewish residents built empires by trading timber, furs and soybeans, and the extent of their success can be seen in the mansions they built along Central Street. In the early years of the 20th century, nine of the 17 members of the City Council were Jewish, and Jews busied themselves setting up hospitals, banks, cinemas, concert halls and a beer factory. But tensions existed with the White Russians who had fled en masse to Harbin after the Bolshevik Revolution, The Russian Fascist Party set up its headquarters in the city in 1931”
(i) Harbin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin
(capital and largest city of Heilongjiang province; Harbin was founded by Pole Adam Szydłowski in 1898, during construction of the Trans-Manchurian Railway, today known as the Chinese Eastern Railway [大清东省铁路--东清(铁)路 for short--or 中国东 省/方 铁路--中东(铁)路 for short; construction 1897-1902]; originally a Manchu word meaning "a place for drying fishing nets;" section 1.2 Foreign influence)
(ii) I can find nothing in English about the Harbin founder Adam Szydłowski.
(iii) Iwona Dakiniewicz, Iwona's Sources - Polish Colony in Manchuria. Polish Genealogical Society of America, Jan 15, 2012.
http://www.ipgs.us/iwonad/artdirectory/polcolmanchuria.html
(iv) Russian Fascist Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Fascist_Party
(1931-1943; Headquarters Harbin)

(d) “With the Jewish community long since extinguished, the renovated Old Synagogue and adjacent Jewish middle school will be used as a campus for a new music school, with the former prayer hall to be used for concerts. ‘It's fitting, because the Jews were instrumental in bringing classical music to Harbin and, by extension, to China,’ Ben-Canaan says.”
(i) Chinese music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_music
(section 11 Western Classical Music: Whereas orchestras organised by, run solely by and nearly always exclusive to the expatriate community in China are recorded from the early days of the International Settlement in Shanghai (ie 1850s) and a Russian orchestra was in operation in Harbin from the early 20th century,[6] the beginnings of a unique classical music tradition in China lie with the first foreign trained Chinese conductor, Zheng Zhisheng 尹自重 AKA (romanized) Yin Zizhong. Zheng (Yin or Wan depending on romanization) was [born and] raised in China's Guangdong province and affected by Western Church Music from an early age,[7] studying in Lyons and Paris before returning to China in the 1930s and being employed the first Chinese conductor of a Chinese orchestra - the Chongqing Symphonic Orchestra)
(ii) Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai, Rhapsody in Red; How Western classical music became Chinese. Algora Publishing, 2004, at 100-102
http://books.google.com/books?id ... 0harbin&f=false

The book did not say how, if at all, Jews in Harbin spread Western music.

* The web page from the publisher:
http://www.algora.com/194/book/details.html

Please click the heading “About the Book.”
* Jindong Cai, Music Director and Conductor. Stanford Symphony Orchestra, undated
http://sso.stanford.edu/conductors/
(“Jindong Cai joined the Stanford faculty in 2004 as the first holder of the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies Chair”)

蔡金冬: born in Beijing, 1983年毕业于北京首都师范大学音乐系, 1986年赴美留学, 先后在美国著名的新英格兰音乐学院 New England Conservatory (in Boston) 和辛辛那提大学音乐学院攻读硕士和博士