"I've carried it with me all my life -- Harbin is my hometown," said 74-year-old Isaac Shapiro, who returned last week to revisit his early childhood home in the far northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

Although 70 years have passed since he left the city, Shapiro still remembers his days there.

"In my childhood memory, Chinese people were all around -- in the candy store, in the shops and in my grandfather's factory," he recalled.

"I grew up surrounded by so many kind-hearted Chinese people, and I never felt I was a foreigner. We spoke Chinese and Russian, we had traditional Jewish food and Chinese dishes, and Chinese kids could also be seen in the Jewish school."

In the late 19th century, large numbers of Jews migrated to Harbin to escape the persecution of Czarist Russia and other European countries, said Li Shuxiao, deputy head of the Jewish Studies Centre affiliated to the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.

By the 1920s the number of Jews living in Harbin topped 25,000, making it the largest Jewish community in the Far East at that time. They built their own community and maintained their own ways of life and customs. They were called the "Harbin Jews," said Li.

Harbin and other Chinese cities, Shanghai in particular, also gave refuge to Jews fleeing Europe's Nazi Holocaust. In recent years, more than 100 Jews have visited Harbin each year tracing the paths of their families and to pay their respects to ancestors who lived out their lives in China, Li said.

Shapiro is one of them. He said he has many fond memories of his early childhood in Harbin, especially the traditional Chinese festivals, when he and his young friends went to see colorfully dressed people performing acrobatics and walking on stilts.

Even after his family emigrated to the United States, his mother often spoke of the old days in China.

"My mother told me that the Chinese people had always been friendly towards Jews and had never stopped helping Jewish people, even though they themselves were in a national crisis," Shapiro recalled. "My mother said Chinese people are admirable."

Following the Japanese invasion and occupation of China's northeast regions in 1931, anti-Semitic activities, supported by Japanese and German fascists, became rampant.

Looting of Jewish stores and schools, the destruction of synagogues and kidnapping of Jewish businessmen occurred frequently in Harbin, once a place of refuge for Jews.

Shapiro's mother often spoke to him about the "Kaspe Incident" of August, 1933. Simon Kaspe, the son of a Jewish businessman and a talented pianist, was kidnapped and murdered on his way to meet his girlfriend, who later became Shapiro's mother.

The "Kaspe Incident" ignited widespread protests against the Japanese invaders in the northeast by Jewish communities in both Harbin and Shanghai. Thousands of Chinese also joined the Jews in demanding that the Japanese authorities punish Kaspe's killer.

But with persecution escalating across continental Europe, more Jews fled to China and settled in various Chinese cities. Shanghai alone hosted more than 30,000 Jewish refugees from Europe between 1933 and 1941. By December 1941, about 25,000 Jews still remained in Shanghai. The number given sanctuary by China was more than the total received by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India at the time.

Wang Jian, deputy head of the Jewish Studies Centre affiliated to the Shanghai Municipal Academy of Social Sciences, said almost all Jews in China survived the war thanks to the support given by the Chinese people and Jews in other parts of the world.

Unforgettable memories

And the Jewish people have not forgotten their Chinese friends, neighbors and those who helped them in their darkest of hours. Today, Jewish people who formerly lived in China, but have since made their homes in other parts of the world, have set up many organizations to commemorate the old days in China and their friendship with the Chinese people.

In June 2004, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert paid his respects at his grandfather's tomb in the Harbin Jewish Cemetery.

During his visit, Olmert said: "Thank you for protecting the memory of our family and restoring dignity to the memory of those who were part of this community, a reminder of a great Jewish life which was part of Harbin."

For Shapiro, returning to the streets where his earliest memories lie, was deeply moving. "I feel comfortable, just like returning to my childhood. You can walk around where you lived and the synagogues are still there. In the cemetery I recognized many names I knew as a boy."

In the minds of "Harbin's Jews" and their descendants, the city is a place of rebirth and a hometown, just as famous Israeli photographer Sara Ross wrote in a photo album she presented to the city: "Harbin enriched our childhood, gave us hope and happiness in our youth and guaranteed us the greatest dignity."

Much has been done to protect Harbin's Jewish Cemetery, which covers 836 square meters with about 600 tombs and is the largest of its kind in the Far East. The city government has spent 1 million yuan (about US$120,000) repairing and preserving the tombs and has established records for families of the identified tombs.

Li Fangbin, a worker at the Harbin Jewish Cemetery, said each year during the Qingming Festival, or tomb-sweeping festival in China, cemetery workers clean each tombstone inscribed in Hebrew and Russian and lay bundles of flowers in front of them.

The tomb-sweeping festival is one of the few traditional Chinese holidays to follow the solar calendar, and always falls in early April. The festival is a time when Chinese people tend the graves of, and pay their respects to their deceased forbears.

(China Daily May 13, 2005)