80 TOMBSTONES

“It was serendipity that I found my father’s Tombstone”

by Ralph Harpuder

Thanks to Dvir Bar-Gal*, a 40 year old Israeli photojournalist and TV producer on documents, 80 headstones from Jewish graves have been found. Dvir Bar-Gal moved to Shanghai four years ago to write stories about the changes in China. While living in Shanghai, he became interested in the Jewish history of Shanghai, and began his research on the lost Shanghai Jewish cemeteries. The headstones he uncovered can be found on one of Bar-Gal’s Website:

www.shanghaijewishmemorial.com

Many of the headstones were discovered by his team in Chinese villages and Buddhist cemeteries. It was serendipity that I found my father‘s headstone on the Internet while doing some unrelated research. Needless to say, it was a great surprise and something I never expected. In Figure one, we see the headstone as it appeared when it was uncovered in March of 2004 from dirt and debris. (Photo courtesy, Dvir Bar-Gal) In Figure two we see a photograph of my father‘s grave and headstone taken shortly before our departure from Shanghai.

It was in Minzhu Village, about 25 kilometers west from central Shanghai where my father‘s tombstone was found. It was also in Minzhu Village where all the foreign cemeteries from Shanghai were moved to in 1958 and later destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The former Point Road Cemetery where my beloved father was resting in peace before the revolution was located in the northern section of Shanghai, an appreciable distance from where his headstone was found.

Jewish history tells us that the first thing on the agenda by Jews arriving in a strange land is to find a place to bury their deceased. Russian Jews that fled the pogroms established after they arrived in Shanghai a Chevra Kadisha (Sacred Burial Society) and maintained two cemeteries, among them, the one on Baikal Road.

In 1940, the Juedische Gemeinde (Communal Association of Central European Jews) established their own cemetery on Columbia Road. Another cemetery at previously mentioned Point Road soon followed on account of the vast increase in deaths among Jewish refugees. Alone, there were between January 1940 and December 1945, a total of 1432 deaths among Central-European Jewish Refugees living in Shanghai (Reference, courtesy Sonja Muehlberger and Peter Nash).

It was in the Jewish Ghetto of Shanghai where my father‘s untimely death occurred at age 44. His death certificate, documented by the Council of the Jewish Community, is illustrated in Figure three and states the Point Road Cemetery where he was buried.

In 1947, while standing with my mother on the ship behind the railing, watching it pull out from the dock and heading to America, our new home, we sadly realized that we would probably never see my father‘s grave at the Point Road Cemetery again. Yours truly also knew, as I flew back to Shanghai in 1999 to show my wife where and how we lived and survived, that I was not able to see my father‘s grave again during our visit.