"A Great Miracle Was Here": Hundreds of Spinning Tops Prepared for the Jewish Community in China | Israel today

In honor of Hanukkah, Shavei Israel organized a special shipment of hundreds of Chinese spinning tops that he had prepared for the Kaifeng Jewish community and for the 20 members of the community who had already immigrated to Israel with the organization's assistance.

Kaifeng is a city in the center of Hanan District, southwest of Beijing, where the descendants of an ancient Jewish community that thrived in the area for more than a thousand years live.

Apparently these are the first spinning tops ever made in the Chinese language and engraved on them the traditional inscription "A great miracle was here" in the Chinese language.

According to Michael Freund, chairman and founder of the Shavei Israel organization, "Kaifeng is currently home to about 1,000 people who are descendants of the Jewish community, and despite the fact that Kaifeng Jewry was almost completely assimilated and assimilated into the local population two hundred years ago, their descendants continued to maintain Jewish customs." their".

The spinning tops prepared for the Jewish community in China, Photo: Courtesy: Shavei Israel

According to him, in recent years many members of the community have begun to search for their roots and re-adopt their Jewish identity - thanks in part to the Internet that opened up new worlds and allowed access to information about Judaism and the State of Israel that was previously inaccessible.

"The descendants of Kaifeng's Jews are the human thread that connects China to the Jewish people," Freund said.

"Despite the severe restrictions imposed on them by the Chinese government in recent years, the descendants of the community continue to lead a secret Jewish way of life, and we hope that the spinning tops we have prepared for them will give them some joy and light on Hanukkah."

The ancestors of the descendants of the Jewish community in Kaifeng were Jewish merchants from Persia or Iraq, who came to Kaifeng - then the capital of China - in the Silk Road in the 7th or 8th centuries.

In the Middle Ages, the community numbered about 5,000 people, and the city's main synagogue was built as early as 1163. In the middle of the 19th century the synagogue was destroyed due to heavy floods that hit the entire city, and due to assimilation and poverty, the community's Jews decided to sell the Torah scrolls. The ancient manuscripts for Christian missionaries.

Nevertheless, some families have maintained their identities to this day, and their descendants feel connected to their Jewish identity and roots, despite the particular difficulty of preserving this identity in the communist regime.

Shavei Israel is a non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Michael Freund, an immigrant from the United States, who works to strengthen ties between the State of Israel and Diaspora Jewry with Jewish descendants around the world. The organization is active in many countries around the world In Spain, Portugal, South America and elsewhere), the Subotnik Jews in Russia, the Kaifeng Jews (descendants of the assimilated community in China), the hidden Jews in Poland, the Bnei Menashe community in India and more.

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