Shanghai remembers its Jewish concertmaster
OrchestrasThe Shanghai Symphony Orchestra has put up a placard on Fuxing Road in memory of Ferdinand Adler, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish violinist who arrived as a Hitler refugee in 1939 and was appointed concertmaster of the city’s orchestra. He was also made professor at the Shanghai Conservatoire.
Adler left China in an enforced exodus of Europeans in 1947. He became concertmaster of the Vienna State Opera, which was then playing at the Volksoper. He died of a heart attack during rehearsal on February 21, 1952, at the age of 49.
So far as is known, he has not been commemorated at the Vienna State Opera.
Asia is the only place left on earth that doesn’t have an anti-semitic bone in its history or cultural sensibility.
The Japanese vice-consul in Kaunus, Soviet-occupied Lithuania, issued visas to thousands of Jews, enabling them to escape to Japan, and then onward.
It’s rarely remembered now that Shanghai was a refuge for more than 20,000 European Jews escaping the Nazis and the Holocaust.
There existed a Jewish community in Paris that had once lived in China. I imagine they fled from China before the arrival of Mao. There must be history books written about their lives in China, culturally and economically speaking. -an interesting, rather neglected topic.
4 years of civil war followed WW2 in China. As mentioned in the article (‘an enforced exodus of Europeans in 1947’) almost all Jewish refugee left long before CCP took Shanghai in 1949, some (like Ferdinand Adler and the ones you mentioned in Paris) back to home in Europe but most ended up in North America or Australia
Niloiv: This would make an excellent subject for a book. Historians: à vos plumes!
The last member of the Shanghai Jewish community — who had acted as custodian of the community’s assets — left, finally, in 1962, I believe. Not to return “home” to Europe or anywhere else: Shanghai was home. Hong Kong then became home.
That would be during the Japanese control of Shanghai, no?
I’m surprised they are commemorating anything of that period.
A new concert opera set in the Jewish emigre community of Shanghai has been recently premiered by the Shanghai Symphony, recorded for DG (available on YouTube), and will be given its European premiere in Berlin in October:
https://www.dso-berlin.de/en/concerts/summary/emigre/