c. 1997 Religion News Service

BEIJING _ Greeting a visitor at the stone arch leading to his modest home along one of Beijing’s narrow alleyways, Sidney Shapiro appears to be an ordinary 81-year-old American retiree.

He tends the roses, lilacs and morning glories that bloom in his courtyard garden, swaps e-mail with his granddaughter in Michigan, chats in fluent Mandarin on his cordless phone, and thinks about his wife, Phoenix, who died last year.

Nothing suggests that the Brooklyn native, who became a Chinese citizen in 1963, is the most prominent guardian of Jewish culture and history in China _ and a passionate cheerleader for China’s ruling Communist Party. He is also a fountain of memories about the tremendous changes in the world’s most populous country during the past 50 years.

When Shapiro, then a young lawyer and Army veteran, first stepped off a freighter in Shanghai on April Fools’ Day 1947, rickshaws pulled by scrawny men competed with cars, pedestrians and huge mounds of garbage for space on the gridlocked city roads. Vendors hawked everything from clothing to Chinese currency.

Today, China’s roads are still clogged, but automobiles far outnumber rickshaws. Construction rubble has replaced garbage piles on the sidewalks and the once-blue sky is a perpetual gray.

China has made substantive progress and Shapiro gives the Communist Party full credit for the transformation.

The corrupt Kuomintang (Nationalist) government that officially ruled China in 1947 wasn’t doing much governing, and China’s still-feudal society desperately needed a revolution, he said.

“You would walk around, and the streets were literally littered with bodies of people starved to death,” Shapiro recalled.

Mao Tse-tung’s communist guerrillas, who had wide support among China’s poor farmers, offered an alternative. “They were the only ones who were fighting for the people,” Shapiro said.

Although he never joined the Communist Party, Shapiro has remained loyal to the party’s ideals of collective ownership, respect for the community and emphasis on family.

Shapiro’s role as Jewish scholar and keeper of tradition was thrust upon him by other Jews, he explained.

“I have no religious feelings whatsoever,” he said, although he had a bar mitzvah and retains a fondness for Jewish foods _ he has devised a method to create simulated bagels by baking a Chinese steamed bun in a doughnut shape.

After Jewish visitors repeatedly asked him about rumors of an ancient settlement of Jews in China, Shapiro decided to investigate, eventually writing a book about his findings.

Western and Chinese documents describe Jewish settlements in China as early as the 7th century.

The most significant settlement, in Kaifeng, appears to have lasted from 1163 until the mid-19th century.

But over time, the Chinese Jews assimilated to the point where they retained virtually no Jewish practices and essentially disappeared.

Fleeing the Nazis, several thousand European Jews went to China in the 1930s and 1940s, but most left after the war ended.

Only a handful remained in China until the recent economic reforms, which brought a new wave of foreigners seeking business opportunities.

Roberta Lipson, 42, rode the edge of that wave.

In 1981, she and her partner, Elyse Beth Silverberg, started a marketing and sales company in Beijing to help U.S. construction and medical equipment firms sell products in the convoluted Chinese market.

Seeking to build some kind of religious community, the two sought out Shapiro and other Jews to celebrate the High Holy Days together.

In 1994, Lipson and Silverberg helped start a weekly informal Sabbath gathering.

“You don’t have an infrastructure, so you make whatever kind of religious life you want,” said Lipson, now married with three young boys. “The whole thing is very home-grown.”

At a recent meeting, 16 adults and two children, including natives of Russia, Australia and France, gathered in the banquet room of Beijing’s Capital Club for the evening service and dinner.

“I hope you don’t mind bad singing,” warned one, as Zohar Ben Dor led the group in a dozen songs in Hebrew, English and Yiddish.

Ben Dor, an Orthodox Jew from Israel, then opened discussion of the week’s Torah passage: a long section from the Book of Numbers in which Moses learns he will not enter the Promised Land.

The lesson was too much for Ben Dor’s 20-month-old daughter, Tamar, who had been toddling around the room during the singing.

“Mama,” she yelled, running across the room.

Ben Dor simply picked the baby up in mid-sentence and kept talking.

Such informality might make a rabbi cringe, but in Beijing’s Jewish community of about 200 people, a family atmosphere is more important than the rules of the synagogue.

“In France, men and women would not even sit together,” said Olivier Assayag, a management trainee at the Beijing office of Alcatel, a French switch maker.

“Here it’s less technical, but the feeling of the Shabbat is stronger,”he said.”The goal is to be together.”

Many attendees are not regular worshipers at home, but the isolation of a foreigner’s life overseas draws them to the rituals.

Meredith Young, a 62-year-old English professor at the City University of New York, for example, has hardly stepped into a synagogue except for her wedding ceremony.

Spending her sabbatical working for a Chinese newspaper this past academic year, Young and her husband stumbled upon the prayer group while looking for a menorah at Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights. Somehow, she bonded with the eclectic group.

“It’s all right if I come and don’t know the words to the songs,” said Young. “When my aunt died, I got up and spoke about her. Everybody listened and embraced me afterwards. I know that these people are here for me.”

MJP END GOEL