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German, Central and Eastern European Jews
The third wave of Jewish immigration into Shanghai, and incidentally the largest, was in the years following 1938, as a result of Nazi persecutions in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe. Since Shanghai was the only port that accepted people without visas, Jews who were not permitted to enter other countries came to Shanghai.
They travelled by water, on Italian liners via Africa. Since canal tolls had to be paid in pounds sterling, ship captains tended to take the long way by going around Africa, making the journey to Shanghai more than six weeks. Other refugees took the Siberian Railroad to Manchuria, then went from there to Japan. The Japanese consul at Vilna, apparently for humanitarian reasons, issued transit visas for those who possessed another, usually for some Latin American country. Or, for those who did not have any visa at all, the destination was to be Shanghai. As a result, a large number of Jews congregated at Kobe or Yokohama, waiting to travel to Shanghai by ship. Among this group were the faculty and student body of the Yeshiva from Poland. So, until the school moved to New York after 1945, the rabbis were trained in Shanghai.
When the Sino-Japanese conflict merged into the global war following Pearl Harbour in December 1941, resulting in Japanese occupation of the International Settlement, the Jews in Shanghai were treated according to their nationalities. The large refugee community, either with 'non-enemy alien' status or stateless, manned the factories and operated cottage industries in their homes. In 1943, when special privileges enjoyed by foreigners in China came to an end as the unequal treaties of the 19th century were formally abrogated, the Jewish population in Shanghai was estimated to number 25,000.
As the war ended in 1945 the Jewish refugees left to settle in the United States, Canada, Australia or, after its establishment, Israel. Long-term Jewish residents left as well after 1949. By 1956, only 543 Jews remained in China, 231 of them in Shanghai, 402 of these Jews were classified as Soviet citizens by the Chinese government, and were therefore unable to obtain the necessary papers in order to emigrate without cooperation between the Chinese authorities and the Soviet consulate. R.D. Abraham, leader of the Jewish community at that time, learned through a BBC broadcast that David Marshall, the noted Jewish lawyer from Singapore, was being invited to visit China. He quickly