Shanghai, China – Jewish Tombstones In The Middle Of a Chinese Cabbage Field

Shanghai, China – Israeli photojournalist Dvir Bar-Gal discovered Shanghai’s graveyard secret: hundreds — maybe thousands — of Jewish tombstones are scattered around Shanghai’s outlying villages, used as everything from building beams to washboards.

Read below article that appeard this past week in Mishpacha Magazine

As the old, dilapidated villages around Shanghai are being redeveloped into upscale neighborhoods, Israeli photojournalist Dvir Bar-Gal is racing the clock, scouring swamps, construction sites, riverbeds and cabbage fields for the slabs of stone that mark the city’s Jewish past.

What turned into his mission of the decade began by accident, when he discovered a Hebrew tombstone in a Shanghai antique shop in 2001. Since then, he’s become Shanghai’s “gravestone sleuth,” unearthing burial markers in the most obscure places around the bustling Chinese metropolis.

Bar-Gal, a photojournalist from Tel Aviv, was in Shanghai to learn more about the city that served as a refuge for Jews for a century, when he hooked up with a tour led by fellow Israeli expatriate and Shanghai resident Georgia Noy. When the tour ended, Noy sent the journalist what she thought might be a story lead for him: a photograph of two Jewish gravestones, adding that she had found the stones in an antique shop in the city, where they were up for sale. The name Yachne bas Reb Shmuel Poliak was engraved on one stone; the other stone bore the name Raizel bas Reb Moshe Abramowitz, written in both Hebrew and Russian.

“At first I wanted to ignore the pictures,” Bar-Gal told Mishpacha. “Who is interested in graves today? But Georgia told me she received many inquiries from Jews looking for their ancestors’ burial places, and although Shanghai had a large Jewish community, there was a big mystery. There was not a grave to be found. I smelled a good story, and decided to check it out.”

Bar-Gal approached Mr. Shu, the store owner, but one of the stones had already been sold, although the dealer didn’t realize the significance of the large marble stones he was selling. When he learned that they were gravestones, his face clouded; the Chinese believe that gravestones bring bad luck. Nevertheless, his superstition did not prevent him from haggling over the price of the remaining slab — agreeing to part with it for an overpriced fifty dollars.

“I told Mr. Shu we would be interested in buying more such stones. He took my number and said he would be in touch in a few months.”

Apparently, money talks — and quickly. Within a few days, the dealer reported that he had acquired another tombstone. Bar-Gal realized there was a story here — the dealer knew the people who were harboring these stones. So, armed with a camera and an interpreter, he set out on the journey that would change his life. “I had no idea where that path would take me,” he adds. And so began his recovery mission.

Gao, Mr. Shu’s antique dealer, consented to bring Bar-Gal to the village where he had been purchasing the tombstones for pennies from local residents, then selling them for a handsome profit. The village was located at the western end of Shanghai. He parked in the center of the village and inquired from passersby about gravestones, when the security guard of a small factory took them down the road, where they found an old, cracked slab of marble leaning against a wall. The Hebrew and Russian letters — which the locals could not decipher — announced that this stone marked the grave of one Reb Zalman ben Ren Binyomin Wittenson, who had departed from This World at the age of seventy-three.

Gao went to get a pail of water to wash the dust off the stone. Meanwhile, a number of local residents gathered around the visiting foreigners, curious to know what had brought them here. One of the villagers directed Bar-Gal to a nearby alleyway, where they found another gravestone. This one was even larger and more ornate, and it bore the name Chaim Rosenstein. The upper section of the stone, which contained the inscription in Hebrew letters, had cracked, and beneath it his name was inscribed in English and Russian.

The surprises, however, did not end there. Gao brought another pail of water to wash off this stone, and before the water even had a chance to dry, another bystander directed the group to a nearby courtyard. There, in the midst of a small cabbage patch, lay another two gravestones, used as stepping stones between the muddy rows of vegetables.

Gao brought a straw broom to scrape away the mud that had accumulated, and soon the inscription became legible: “Here, in this holy ground, is the grave of Moshe, a student in the yeshivah, the son of Rabbi Avraham Shochman, born in the city of Marinsk in Siberia.” That was a surprise to Bar-Gal: at the turn of the century, Shanghai — a bustling international city with a less-than-pristine reputation — was certainly no “holy ground.”
With the help of John, a translator who had accompanied them, Bar-Gal began to question the villagers about how the tombstones got to their village, and why they were lying abandoned at the side of the road and in nearby courtyards.

Stones in the Mud: The villagers were as curious as the researchers, and it quickly became clear that the younger residents had no idea how the stones had ended up in their small town. Some of the older locals remembered that the stones had been brought from a Muslim cemetery several kilometers to the east, closer to the city. For Bar-Gal, the mystery was just beginning to unravel.

The guards at the cemetery’s gate were not surprised by the visitors. They related that Jewish tourists had once come frequently to the cemetery and inquired about Jewish graves in the vicinity, but they had had no information to give them. They did tell the group, however, that the land had once been an international cemetery and had contained many Jewish graves. Bar-Gal and his companions found an elderly Chinese caretaker who couldn’t shed light on any Jewish graves in the area, but did confirm that there were gravestones in the village where he lived, although he had no idea if they were Jewish.

The old caretaker’s village was even more run-down and impoverished than the first one had been. The man showed them a large stone that was lying face-down at the side of the main road. It was a large tombstone, still intact. The local villagers who had gathered around helped John and Gao turn over the stone to reveal its inscription, while Bar-Gal, who had already decided to turn his hunt into a documentary video, recorded the process on film. To his great disappointment, the tombstone turned out to be from a Christian grave.

Undeterred, they went on to find a large number of other gravestones scattered across different roads throughout the village, but none of them turned out to be Jewish in origin. Then, as the sun was about to set, Bar-Gal’s small delegation found another Jewish gravestone behind one of the local houses, embedded in a block of cement that was used as a support wall.

How many other tombstones were scattered throughout the villages in this large, agricultural region in western Shanghai? Hundreds? Thousands?

The Pearl of the East: How did Shanghai become an unwitting storehouse of abandoned Jewish tombstones? Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Shanghai had been known as the “Pearl of the East;” from its origins as a tiny fishing town, it turned into China’s largest city and a bustling international port metropolis. At its peak, the Jewish community in the city numbered no fewer than 30,000 Jews.

The first Jews to settle in Shanghai arrived in 1845, when David Sassoon, an Iraqi Jew living in India, moved his family business to this city, China’s first city to open to the West. He was soon joined by the Kadoorie and Hardoon families, Baghdad merchants who eventually built their fortunes in Shanghai, where they occupied key positions in the city and made significant social and economic contributions to its development.

The next wave of immigrants to Shanghai included Russian Jews escaping the pogroms of the early 1900s. The Russian immigrants included a significant number of academics — doctors, musicians, and teachers. By the early 1940s, there were numerous Jewish institutions and services in Shanghai.

The last major group of Jewish immigrants to Shanghai is probably the most well-known of the three: European refugees who escaped the Nazi advance during WWII. At that time, China was the only country in the world where immigrants and refugees did not require entry visas, and many Jews used this to their advantage as they fled from the Nazi terror. The thousands of refugees who streamed to the city were mostly penniless, and they desperately needed the assistance that was extended to them by the established, wealthy Sephardic community. Japan occupied Shanghai during the war, but refused Nazi orders to deport or murder the city’s Jews. The additional 20,000 stateless Jewish refugees were confined to what became known as the Hongkou ghetto, and although disease and poverty were rampant, the Jews were spared the horrors of the Holocaust.

There had been four Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai until the 1950s, containing a total of about 3,700 graves. The first, known as the Israeli Cemetery, had already been founded in 1862.

In 1958, all four cemeteries were supposed to be transferred in an organized fashion to the west of the city, where an immense international cemetery had been constructed, including a Jewish section. The few Jews who remained in the city after the Communists came to power assisted in transferring the graves. During the 1960s Mao Zedong launched his “Cultural Revolution,” dispensing with the “old ways,” in his words: old habits, old modes of thought, old culture and old customs, which the revolutionaries considered deleterious. The cemetery was completely destroyed in this ideological deluge, along with China’s rich cultural heritage. The revolution turned the gravestones into meaningless slabs of rock, and they were uprooted and designated for various uses.

Thus, for example, in the first village that Bar-Gal visited, a pair of elderly women explained — accompanying their words with illustrative hand motions — that they used the tombstones as washboards, placing soiled garments atop the stones in order to scrub them. At the same time, Bar-Gal discovered that the Muslim cemetery where they were initially directed was located in the very spot where the Jewish section of the international cemetery originally stood. Thus, the remains of the Jewish deceased were undoubtedly still interred in unmarked graves in the cemetery itself. “I assume, however,” Bar-Gal adds, “that they recycled the coffins for their own use. There is almost no chance of finding an actual grave still intact in the cemetery.”

Grave Obesssion: As soon as Dvir Bar-Gal realized the extent of the story, it went from being a newspaper scoop to a mission. In the last few years, Bar-Gal himself has become a tour guide, taking Jewish tourists to explore Shanghai’s Jewish past, but always with an eye on his first project. He has spent the past ten years traveling through the villages around Shanghai, where the locals already recognize the “foreigner” who comes in search of tombstones.

The stones could turn up anywhere. What is the strangest place where Bar-Gal has ever found a gravestone? He thinks for a moment, then indicates one of the first stones he found. “It was leaning against a building, next to a newly dug sewer pit, and it was clearly intended to cover the sewer. They probably would have placed it over the opening upside down, in which case we would never have found it.” The stone was inscribed with the name Sarah Avramovna Veron.

The villagers turn the stones upside down for cultural reasons. They believe that tombstones bring bad luck, and therefore place them with the inscriptions on the underside, believing that they will no longer be considered tombstones once the inscriptions are no longer visible. And this local custom has greatly magnified the difficulty of the search, since every time a suspected gravestone is discovered, immense efforts must be invested to flip it in order to determine whether it is a Jewish gravestone.

Bar-Gal has established an information center where the names found on the various tombstones are listed, along with pictures of each tombstone and details of the location where it was found. With the help of the information bank, Bar-Gal located the daughter of the woman whose tombstone nearly became a sewer cover. She lives in Australia and had already come to China several times to search for her mother’s grave.

In fact, many people search for these graves. “I constantly receive phone calls from people looking for their relatives’ graves,” Bar-Gal relates.
When the woman in Australia learned that her mother’s tombstone had been found, she arrived in China with her entire family to see the tombstone up close, and now hopes that the gravestone will be placed in a memorial site along with all the other stones that Bar-Gal has located.

Without the ability to locate the graves themselves, the stones have remained the last testimony to the existence of the many deceased. “When I began my project, I consulted Rabbi Sholom Greenberg, the rav of Shanghai and a Chabad shaliach, and he told me that the gravestones do not possess any kedushah. The kedushah is in the body of the deceased, and as long as the stone exists only for the purpose of perpetuating his or her memory, there is no problem with moving it.” Bar-Gal thus decided to gather the tombstones to a central location, where they will be preserved in memory of the deceased.

The uses the Chinese found for the tombstones were many and varied. “They were put to every possible use in construction,” Bar-Gal explains. When he spotted a small bridge over a stream of water, its oblong shape made him suspicious as to its origin. His camera snaked beneath the bridge and confirmed his suspicions: it was a genuine Jewish headstone. Later on, half a dozen Chinese porters would drag it to Bar-Gal’s waiting car, where it would be swept away to his storage room until a better place could be found.

Did the Chinese government designate these once-sacred stones for such mundane uses? Bar-Gal explains that the government did not actively take part in the pillaging of the stones, but it turned a blind eye. “The Cultural Revolution caused many people to lose their sanity, quite literally; they were brainwashed by its ideology. I doubt that it was a political issue. As soon as there was a possibility of using the stones, no one cared. To the villagers who lived in its vicinity, the international cemetery represented the foreigners that they had gotten rid of, together with their history, so they simply took the gravestones.”

Does Bar-Gal feel any kind of spiritual significance or excitement in the project? Dvir replies frankly, “I didn’t believe I would become excited. I am a cynical journalist from Tel Aviv, and I never thought that this project would touch me emotionally.” But his experience proved him wrong. “The humiliating sight of gravestones paving a path in the mud has strengthened my resolve to rescue what I can. But the truth is, I’m pessimistic about uncovering many more gravestones. Yet every time Hebrew or Jewish symbols appear under the layers of dirt, it gives me the burst of energy to keep searching.”

Bar-Gal once found a tombstone at the bottom of a river, which proved a link to a family in New York. A local villager admitted to Bar-Gal that he had thrown it in the river, and was even able to identify its location. Bar-Gal brought in a bulldozer to fish the stone out of the water.
“As the stone emerged from the water, the inscription was facing upward, and at that moment I knew that it was what I was looking for,” Bar-Gal relates. While the bulldozer was at work, Bar-Gal’s camera was filming the scene, and his own excited shouts can be heard clearly in the background.

How did the tombstone end up at the bottom of the river in the first place? Apparently it was used as a type of boardwalk on the riverbank in the 60s and 70s. At some point it was no longer needed, and the villagers, believing that it represented bad luck, pushed it into the water. The tombstone had once marked the grave of Tzipa Aronova Kalbanoff, a Jewish woman who had been born in Russia in 1866 and had passed away in Shanghai in 1944. Almost by chance, her granddaughter, who lived in New York, was discovered two years later.

“Someone with connections to Shanghai knew her in New York, and she asked me if there were any tombstones that did not appear in my information center, because it sometimes takes time before I can update the information. I replied that there were another seven stones;. When I mentioned this name, she told me that she knew the family. She contacted her acquaintance, who turned out to be the woman’s granddaughter.” Lily Blake (Kalbanoff) came to Shanghai full of excitement and gratitude to Bar-Gal; she was astonished by where her grandmother’s tombstone had been found.

Chinese Auction: Today, Bar-Gal has unearthed 105 tombstones and located about thirty of the families of the deceased. “The same day we located the most recent stone, we were able to locate the deceased’s son, who lives in America,” Bar-Gal relates. “We called him, and his wife said that he is sick with Parkinson’s disease and is unable to speak on the telephone. I discovered that he had contacted me by e-mail five years earlier, to tell me that he was searching for his father’s gravestone. I felt a pang; perhaps we had found the stone too late for him? But at least I was able to speak with his wife.”

The thousands of dollars Bar-Gal has spent recovering the gravestones has been covered in part by a grant from Stanford University’s Sino-Judaic Institute, the Israel Consulate, some private Israeli companies, and donations from visitors who take his guided tours of the old Jewish Hongkou district. But China doesn’t officially recognize Judaism as a religion, and historical preservation is a low priority in a country that destroyed much of its own history and culture.

Bar-Gal wants to open a memorial center for the tombstones that are now being held in a storage facility, and has spent the last decade trying to interest the Chinese authorities in the idea, but they have pushed him off repeatedly, preferring to ignore the past. He still hopes to receive government permission to build a Jewish memorial in a small park in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto. Meanwhile, his story is still waiting for a good ending.