Amy Qin writes about the musical revival in Harbin, a city in the northeastern region of China:
During the 1920s, the city was home to as many as 20,000 Jews. Some were refugees who wanted to escape czarist pogroms in Russia and, later, the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I. But unlike the Jews in Shanghai and other China cities with large Jewish communities, many in Harbin were also merchants and entrepreneurs who had come from Russia and Europe seeking economic opportunities.
“In a sense, the Harbin Jews were more wealthy and aristocratic than the other Jews in China,” [said Dan Ben-Canaan, director of the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center at Heilongjiang University in Harbin]. “They built a much richer and stronger foundation for culture.”
Read the rest in the New York Times.