Shanghai Restores a Lost Synagogue as a Historic Site

By Craig S. Smith
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 29, 1998

Aba Toeg, short and stout, holds his hand above the green-marble dais of Ohel Rachel temple and says, rather too loudly, "I remember the railing was about this high."

Half a dozen Chinese workmen crowding around the 63-year-old Israeli look to Seth Kaplan, Mr. Toeg's young colleague in helping to restore Shanghai's only surviving synagogue after decades of disuse. Mr. Kaplan, 31, repeats the words in Chinese broadened by a New York accent. The workmen nod and smile.

More than 40 years after this city's vibrant Jewish community scattered across the globe; its most venerable temple is being revitalized. But neither Mr. Toeg, who worshiped in the synagogue as a child, nor Mr. Kaplan, one of the city's new Jewish residents, knows whether Jews will ever be allowed to worship here.

Unrecognized Religion

Though Shanghai owes much of its growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Jewish immigrants, Judaism is no longer recognized as a religion in China, where spiritual matters are tightly controlled by the state. Shanghai's new Jewish community of executives and entrepreneurs even enlisted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ask the city's mayor for access to the synagogue on holy days, but there has been no clear answer so far. "Even the mayor apparently doesn't have the authority," shrugs Mr. Toeg from beneath his black yarmulke.

So, after serving for decades as a Maoist lecture hall and city warehouse, the ivy-cloaked Greek-revival building, angled on its lot to face Jerusalem, is destined to be a tourist stop. And the city's new Jews will continue to hold Shabbat services in hotel rooms and each other's homes while the government continues to turn a blind eye.

In a small upstairs room where he and other Orthodox Jews once gathered for daily prayers, Mr. Toeg points to a spot on the hardwood floor. "My father sat here," he says, "and I sat there beside him, every day for 10 years."

That was half a century ago, when Ohel Rachel (or House of Rachel in Hebrew, after one of the four Jewish matriarchs, as well as the wife of the synagogue's founder) was the center of spiritual life for wealthy Sephardic Jews like Mr. Toeg's father. Their factories, banks and trading houses helped build Shanghai into the "Paris of the East." Then the Communists came, and Mr. Toeg's family, along with scores of others, was asked to leave (and to leave everything behind).

Invited Back

They sailed for Hong Kong and finally Tel Aviv, where Mr. Toeg runs a synagogue and today works for the U.S. Embassy managing motorcades. He didn't expect ever to return until Mr. Kaplan called in May, asking for help putting Ohel Rachel back the way Mr. Toeg remembers it.

Jews left their mark on Shanghai more than any other city in the East. About a third of its grandest buildings - including Ohel Rachel - were erected by wealthy Iraqi Jewish businessmen, some of whom traded opium and then real estate here in the late 1800s. At one point, 40% of Shanghai's stock exchange members were Jewish, and the city boasted seven synagogues, four of which have since been torn down and one other that has been converted into an office building. . .

Mr. Toeg helped renovate the synagogue once before. After World War II, he shoveled manure out of the temple, where a Japanese garrison had stabled their horses. He helped cart back the pews, stored through the war under a tarp outside his father's red-brick mansion a few doors away. And he returned the Torahs, that has also been kept in his family's home, to the ark, a small, wood-paneled enclosure at the front of the synagogue. . .

When President Clinton sent three U.S. religious leaders to China earlier this year, Shanghai Mayor Xu Kuangdi promised the Jewish representative, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, that the city would restore the synagogue and open it to the public as a historic site.

Renovations are proving more difficult this time around. The oak benches that some Chinese remember seeing in the synagogue several years ago have disappeared. And 30 19-century Torahs from Baghdad, which were sent to Israel before Mr. Toeg's family handed the building over to the Communists in 1952, haven't been tracked down. Also gone is a Hebrew-inscribed marble block from above the ark where Mr. Toeg's cousin remembers Communist cadres hang a massive portrait of Mao Tse-tung even before the temple was vacated.

New Chandeliers

So Mr. Toeg and Mr. Kaplan resort to old photographs and Mr. Toeg's fading memories to get things right. The vaulted roof, ornate mouldings and high walls have been painted white. Workmen are scrubbing the marble columns and floor. Mr. Toeg ordered chandeliers to replace the bare light bulbs suspended from the ceiling since the original fixtures disappeared during the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago. . .