April 19–25, 2019 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 AWP 11
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1027 FLATBUSH AVENUE
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may 10
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Shanghai profi le
Exhibit explores Jewish exodus
from China to far off Brooklyn
EXHIBIT
Xu, who manages the library’s languages
and literature division. “The
theme is ‘What should people do when
another nationality is on the verge of
collapse?’”
The exhibit uses text and photos
to tell the story of more than 20,000
Jewish people who fled to the Chinese
city — one of the few places they
Relic of the past: This image of
Jewish refugee children posing
with Shanghai locals in 1945 or
1946 is part of the exhibit “Jewish
Refugees in Shanghai,” on display
at several branches of the Brooklyn
Public Library.
could travel to without a visa — in the
1930s and 40s to escape the Nazi regime,
and the smaller group of about
150 people who arrived in Brooklyn
after the war ended in 1945.
Part of the display focuses on the
ancestors of current-day Flatbush resident
Benson Chanowitz, whose father,
two uncles, and aunt escaped modernday
Belarus for Shanghai around 1940.
The group stayed there for about four
years, Chanowitz told this paper.
The Jewish and Chinese residents
of Shanghai mostly peacefully coexisted,
but the Japanese authorities
that occupied the city forced the Jews
to live together in a ghetto, leading
them to count down the days until they
could build better lives elsewhere,
according to Chanowitz.
“Their focus there was surviving
during the war, and then getting papers,”
he said. “They never had any
intention of resettling there.”
Chanowitz’s ancestors — all teenagers
and young adults at the time —
spent their years in Shanghai studying
at a yeshiva with other Jews from
their homeland, he said, and moved
to Kings County with a group of
fellow students.
“They were looking to congregate
with their own people — they wanted
to go to a neighborhood where there’s
synagogues and kosher food available,”
he said.
“They saw that there were already
established areas in Brooklyn, and
that’s where they went.”
The refugees dispersed throughout
various Kings County neighborhoods
once they arrived — including Borough
Park, Kensington, Williamsburg,
Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay — but
their experiences bonded them for life,
Chanowtiz said.
“They didn’t necessarily have
nametags saying, ‘I was in Shanghai,’
” he said. “But there was always
a camaraderie with anybody my father
would introduce me to who he was in
Shanghai with.”
The exhibit will be enhanced by
special events, including a screening
of the documentary “Survival in
Shanghai,” at the Central branch on
April 20 at 4 p.m. The library will
also host a discussion and screening
of another documentary, “Ark Shanghai,”
at the Kensington branch on May
2 at 5:30 p.m.
Join the Celebration
75 Years of No-Kill
Action and Compassion
By Julianne McShane
Brooklyn Paper
Check out Brooklyn’s least-known
refugees.
A new exhibit at several
branches of the Brooklyn Public Library
highlights the little-known, World
War II–era migration of Jewish people
from Europe to Shanghai to the
Borough of Kings. “Jewish Refugees
in Shanghai” — now on view at the
Central Library, and opening at the
Kensington branch on April 20 — illuminates
an overlooked part of the
past and draws parallels to our treatment
of refugees today, according to
one organizer.
“We want to explore the history to
see how much we can learn from it,
and how much use it can have in our
current reality,” said Bay Ridgite Frank
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Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum
“Jewish Refugees in Shanghai”
exhibit at Brooklyn Public Library
(Central Library, 10 Grand Army
Plaza at Eastern Parkway in Prospect
Heights; Kensington Library,
4207 18th Ave. between Seton Place
and Ocean Parkway in Kensington,
www.bklynlibrary.org). Through
May 10 at Central; April 20–May 31
at Kensington. Free.
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