JEWS FROM CHINA PROGRAM!

"Jews From China: Personal Stories and Reminiscences"

A panel presentation featuring representatives of the Sephardic, Russian, and Holocaust refugee communities that lived in Shanghai and other Chinese cities before and during World War II.

DATE: August 14, 2011
TIME: 1:30 p.m.
PLACE: KOH Library and Cultural Center
COST: $5 suggested donation

Panelists:

Rabbi Ted Alexander, who descends from a long line of German rabbis, emigrated with his parents in 1939 to Shanghai, where he was ordained in 1946. He is rabbi emeritus of Congregation B'nai Emunah in San Francisco and a beloved teacher and spiritual leader in the Bay Area. In Shanghai he met and married Gertrude, a Vienna native who had first escaped to England on the kindertransport before joining her parents in China. Rabbi Ted and their daughter comprised the first US father-daughter rabbinate team.

Inna Mink was born in Harbin but moved to Shanghai with her Russian-Jewish parents when she was two years old. She came to the United States after World War II after marrying in Shanghai. Inna worked as the West Coast representative for a nationwide sportswear company while raising a family in the Bay Area. She appeared in "Exit Shanghai," a documentary directed by German film maker, Ulrike Ottinger, that traces the stories of Shanghai Jews through interviews, historic footage, and photos.

Matook Nissim, a retired banker, comes from a prominent Sephardic clan with Baghdadi roots that settled in Shanghai via India two generations before his birth. As British citizens, he and his family were interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. After the war, he worked in his family's business and served as an officer of the Jewish community before emigrating from China--first to Hong Kong. He settled in the US in 1952 after participating in the "Magic Carpet" operation that airlifted Yemenite Jews to Israel.

Linda Frank, panel moderator, chaired "Jews in Modern China," a 2010 exhibit at the Presidio of San Francisco, through her role as a board member of the American Jewish Committee San Francisco Region. Recently retired from a financial services career, Linda has published her first novel, After the Auction, about a woman pursuing a Seder plate looted from her family by the Nazis. She is working on her second novel, set mainly in China, and on a nonfiction work involving China, women, and Jews.

For more information, please contact Taliah Berger at (916) 541-3720