Can You Believe It
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The Torah scrolls of the Chinese Jews
In 1605 a man named Ai Tian walked into the Jesuit mission in Beijing and introduced himself to Matteo Ricci as a worshipper of…
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The ghetto took its name from a foundry
In 1516 Venice ordered its Jews onto a small island in the Cannaregio district that held the city’s old copper foundry, the getto, where…
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The bochurim who traveled from Lithuania to Shanghai
When Japan entered the war, the Mirrer Yeshiva was in Kobe, having crossed the Soviet Union on visas issued by the Japanese consul in…
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The Jewish republic in Siberia with Yiddish on the train station
In 1934 Stalin’s government declared a Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Chinese border, five thousand miles from Moscow, and sent Jews to farm swamp…