by Dr. Robert Rozett

The core events of the Holocaust happened far from China—geographically and culturally—and far from the consciousness of the 1.3 billion Chinese. Nevertheless, for one week early in July, in the sweltering heat of Kaifeng, the ancient capital and home of the vanished Chinese Jewish community, a handful of foreign educators and some 80 Chinese professors and graduate students entered into a dialogue about the history of the Holocaust and how to teach it.

The second conference on Holocaust Education in China was sponsored by the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. The Chinese participants represented a variety of disciplines related to Jews or WWII, including Jewish history, Bible, International Relations and the harsh Japanese occupation of eastern China. In addition to the writer, there were educators from the London Jewish Cultural Center, the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Wannsee House, and the Holocaust Museum in Houston. Each brought his own perspective on the most important aspects of the topic to teach members of the largest nation in the world, most of whom know nothing about the events of the Holocaust.

The level of interest among the Chinese participants was remarkable. One participant, Dr. Zhong Zhiqinq, spent time at Ben-Gurion University and is today a specialist in Hebrew literature. She converses knowledgeably in English and Hebrew about the most important fictional writing on the Holocaust, and is currently translating Amos Oz’s writings into Chinese. Another attended an ulpan in Israel, and teaches Hebrew in the academic institute in Shanghai, in a section devoted to researching the history of Jews who reached China’s shores during the Nazi era. At least two attendees—an established professor and a young researcher—are currently composing studies on antisemitism, a concept most Chinese apparently find difficult to grasp.

The spores of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, nevertheless, have reached China, chiefly via the Internet. The graduates of the Kaifeng seminar, armed with knowledge and enthusiasm, constitute a vanguard in the effort to suppress the growth of antisemitism on the Chinese landscape, to increase awareness about the Holocaust and its significance, and to build bridges of understanding between the Chinese and the Jewish people.

The author is Director of the Yad Vashem Libraries.

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