Now, a permanent reminder for 13,732 of those guests is in place following the dedication Wednesday of the “Wall of Names of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During the 1930s and 1940s.” The 34-meter bronze wall stands on the site of a synagogue-turned-museum in the Shanghai neighborhood where many Europeans restarted their lives as exiles.
The wall—along with a newly installed relief sculpture of six people meant to represent the estimated six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust—is a reminder of how thousands of European Jews starting in the late 1930s found sanctuary on the opposite side of the world simply because Shanghai didn’t require entry visas.
Chinese authorities are also using the works to make a contemporary political statement: the commemoration was a key part of the Shanghai government’s contribution to the first national celebration of Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Jabs at Japan also appear on the wall—two of the 10 highlighted quotations on it from former residents snipe about Japan’s wartime rule.
China remains angered by Japan’s wartime aggression. But European Jewish refugees’ views were more conflicted: despite Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany and heavy hand in China, it allowed the Jews to live in Shanghai.
Despite the museum’s historic symbolism, it is a source of tension, Jews say. Judaism isn’t among China’s five officially sanctioned religions; the museum is better known to the Jewish community as the Ohel Rachel Synagogue, which ceased to function in 1952 once Mao’s communists were firmly in charge.
“The Jewish residents look forward to the day that the Chinese government allows them to officiate regularly in the Ohel Rachel Synagogue and re-establish this beautiful edifice as a permanent center of Jewish life,” said one recent statement from the Shanghai Jewish Center. Shalom D. Greenberg, the center’s rabbi, said he wasn’t invited to the wall dedication.
The local government said in addition to work by local bureaus, the wall project won German government financial assistance and private funding from the U.S. Israel’s consul general in Shanghai, Arnon Perlman, says he provided input.
People familiar with the project say the name list was drawn largely from an August 1944 census of foreigners undertaken by the occupying Japanese forces.
The list came to public notice in 2000, when it was distributed as a supplement to a book co-written by one of those former Shanghai residents, Sonja Mühlberger.
Ms. Mühlberger, who says she got the dusty 473-page list from an Austrian woman who also grew up in district, advised on the wall project.
Her own life points to the difficulties of setting straight the historical record: though she was born near the synagogue in 1939 following her parent’s harrowing escape from Nazi Germany, none of their names appeared on the census list.
But now on the wall, she’s mistakenly listed twice, both by her maiden name, Krips, and her married name, Mühlberger. She says her role was a rushed edit of the list and that local authorities made the final decisions about which names to include. “I tried to do my very best to correct every name,” says Ms. Mühlberger.
The Shanghai government says more than 18,000 European Jews took refuge in the city. Other estimates put the figure many thousands higher, including a sign inside the museum that cites 23,000. Ms. Mühlberger figures 30% of the refugees aren’t listed.
Squaring the wartime anomaly won’t be easy. “There were several lists,” says Dvir Bar-Gal, an Israeli who runs tours and has documented Shanghai’s Jewish community for more than a decade. “This list was one of many.”