First Day Pesach Sermon 2021
Elie Weisel, Shoah Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winning human rights activist said at Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to the Holocaust: “Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness”.
Last night at our Sederim we ensured that your coming generation and ourselves become part of the eternal chain of witnesses to the oppression of our people in the past, so that we can take action today and make a difference to the future. We train ourselves through Seder to resist the tyranny of the Pharaohs of our day and to act to free the Israelites of today whom they enslave, ensuring for all oppressed peoples that there will be a ‘next year in Jerusalem.”
Legend has it that Jews first came to China soon after the destruction of the Temple in the first century of the Common Era. The first documentary evidence of our people in China though is from the eighth century – a letter from a trader of Persian origin written in Hebrew characters on Chinese paper. Stone tablets telling the story of what became the Jewish community of Kaifeng, a city of 5 million today, midway between Beijing and Shanghai, date from 1489 saying that there was a Synagogue in the city from the 12th Century onwards. Their Torah scroll from the 17th Century is also now in the British Museum. The Jewish community there was never large and nowadays around 1000 people in Kaifeng claim their descent from this Jewish community but are no longer practising Jews. Of course, the Chinese Kosher restaurant in Hendon is named for this community.
A much larger Jewish community began to build around Harbin and other Chinese port cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 19th and early 20th Century as refugees from oppression in Russia and also those simply looking to act as traders made their homes there, with originally Iraqi families such as the Sasoons building Synagogues and community centres. By 1940 there are thought to have been nearly 40,000 Jews in China, including by then a large community of refugees from Nazism in Shanghai. Almost all Jews left China in the post-war years since the foundation of the State of Israel and of course the Communist regime of Chairman Mao from 1949. Today there are a few thousand Jews in Beijing and Shanghai, mostly expats attracted by the opportunities of modern China. The community in Hong Kong is also of a few thousand and well served by Jewish institutions of the various denominations.
When we celebrate Pesach we are encouraged every year to support Jews around the world who are oppressed for being Jewish. During the years of the Soviet Union, when Judaism was brutally supressed, many of us will have remembered the name of a refusenik, someone not allowed to leave the Soviet Union because of their Jewish nationality, as it was known there. In China currently there is no Jewish suppression. The Jewish communities there are able to thrive, although there are reports that the Kaifeng community has been having difficulties since 2015, with road signs showing where the Synagogue is having been removed, some archaeological traces of the Jewish community covered over and a sinister state monitoring station set up next door to it. I would hope that there is no doubt that, were the Jewish community of China to feel in danger from the state or other political actors we at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue would be witnesses. We would care deeply about the people there, we would be writing letters, protesting outside the Chinese Embassy, remembering the Chinese Jews at our Sedarim, pressurising the British Government to take action, boycotting Chinese products and more. Thank goodness, this is not the situation.
So what are to make of the situation of the Uyghur Muslims in China today? There are about as many Uyghurs in the world as there are Jews – about 13 million, almost all in the Chinese western province of Xingjian. They are a distinct ethnic group marked by their language, culture, food, dress and customs and since the 10th Century by their adoption of Islam as their faith.
The Chinese state began its suppression of the Uyghurs in 2014. There had been some terrorist attacks on the state form Uighur separatists. The state decided to oppress and control the whole people. More than 25 religious sites, mosques and schools have been destroyed since that time. There is evidence showing that more than 1 million Uyghurs are now in concentration camps being indoctrinated to exchange their customs and beliefs for fealty to the Chinese state and its communist party.
These concentration camps include forced labour making clothes probably for Western markets as well as local. One chilling incident discovered a consignment of 13 tonnes of Uighur hair destined for American wig and hair extension makers probably harvested from the Uyghur inmates of these concentration camps. It had got as far as allegations of genocide as Uyghur women are forcibly sterilised and aborted. So much so, that parliament debated though rejected an amendment to the Trade Bill in February forbidding trade with genocidal regimes, with China the target. Hence the British politicians, including Ian Duncan Smith, who we heard on Thursday are now banned from China.
Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, has spoken out strongly likening the need for Jews to be witnesses to Uyghur oppression to our role in the ending of Apartheid and Soviet Jewish oppression. Rabbi Mirvis wrote in December (Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/15/chief-rabbi-silent-plight-uighurs-atrocity-china ) that just as both seemed impossible to overturn and then came to an end with the aid of international condemnation, so we Jews, who know the heart of a stranger should be in involved witnesses in action against Uyghur oppression by the Chinese State.
Reform Judaism has joined his call with its campaign together with the Jewish Human rights campaign organisation Renee Cassin ‘Make this Seder Different’ (See video of campaign: https://youtu.be/jRwlsh7wfTQ). Phil Dave, member of our Synagogue, has made a deeply moving podcast for the Jewish News to bring us to the heart of the situation with lawyers, Uyghur activists and journalists who have seen the oppression first hand: https://audioboom.com/posts/7797768-campaign-for-the-uyghurs-what-next Links to all of these campaigns will be in this sermon when posted online later this week.
Elie Weisel said this when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986:
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the centre of the universe.”
So what will we do here at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue? On Wednesday 31st March at 20:00 on Zoom we have a unique opportunity to be witnesses, to understand the Uyghur situation and to ask questions of Rahima Mahmut, President of the UK section of the World Uyhgur Congress. Rahima was the Uyghur woman who first reached out Rabbi Mirvis and moved him to realise that what her people are experiencing is extraordinarily and uncomfortably close to what Jews experienced in 1930’s Nazi Germany. I will be hosting Rahima for this EHRS event, which will help us to make our own minds up, to learn for ourselves and to speak together with Rahima. Details are in Our Week Ahead or just contact the EHRS office for them.
Many Jews who have been moved by this story are incorporating it into their Sedarim. They are adding to their Seder plate a symbol of a piece of cotton to remember Uygur forced Labour and yellow raisins, an aspect of Uyghur cuisine. We will have both on our Seder plate at tonight’s Communal Seder. Come and join me and Rahima Mahmut and be witnesses on Wednesday.
I am going to end with a poem from Jane Vulgar, from the Ark Synagogue in Northwood. She heard the reality of Uyghur oppression and was moved. Will you be?
There is a thread that binds us,
One to another,
Yellow as the Star of David
When Holocaust beckoned.
Those who lived remember,
We who wear our stars of David
On the thin chains of history.
Yellow the sweet raisins,
Wine, Apple, almonds, honey:
Our charoset mortar for sundried brick,
built with the torn hands of slavery.
There is a thread that binds us Jews,
We who fled across a Sea of Reeds
To freedom, with those still shackled
By fear and prejudice: with the Uyghurs
In lands that deny their existence.
A thin yellow thread of cotton;
a few yellow raisins on a Pesach Plate:
Like a handclap for exhausted nurses
On their way to the Food Bank,
It is not enough, a gesture-
But gestures matter.
They presage change,
When enough people remember
To care.
