"His efforts have unearthed 85 gravestones from the 1870s to the 1950s. There's Solomon Kapel's marble slab, dredged from a stream, bearing the Hebrew epitaph a "great student of the Bible," who died in 1946 at 28 "of tragic events."
In a pavement, a book-shaped stone betrayed the Yiddish- etched grave marker of a Polish refugee author. The broken, 1958 white marble stone of Leeds-born optometrist Charles Percival Rakusen, a ladies' man and member of the family that started British matzo-bakers Rakusen Ltd., covered a sewage drain.
In the late 1940s, Shanghai had a Jewish population of about 25,000 and four Jewish cemeteries with 3,700 graves. Sephardim from Baghdad and Bombay had arrived in the 1840s, building business dynasties on opium, tea and property, including landmarks such as the Peace Hotel."
To read more about his quest and Shanghai's Jewish history, click here
In a new genealogy blog by Tom Kemp, I learned about a Shanghai Daily article about a master index to the Shanghai Library's massive genealogy collection, the largest in China. The index contains millions of names and will be published in a series of books later this year. There are plans to put the index online.
The original story in the Shanghai Daily is here, and says the resource includes some 50,000 family trees. The library's genealogy reading room opened in 1996 and holds more than 18,000 genealogical charts.
Perhaps there's now hope for the remnants of the Kaifeng Jewish community's seven clans to find their ancestors.
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