Jewish Heritage in Shanghai: A Guide to the Refugee Quarter and Its History

In February 1939, a 17-year-old named Sigmund Tobias boarded a ship in Hamburg with his parents and 800 other Jewish passengers and sailed for Shanghai. No entry visa required. No quotas. No government approval necessary. Shanghai — or more precisely, the International Settlement's absence of immigration controls — was one of the few places on earth in the late 1930s that would admit European Jews without documentation.

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Between 1933 and 1941, approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai: Austrian, German, Polish, and Czech families fleeing first the Nuremberg Laws, then Kristallnacht, then the full machinery of the Holocaust. After Japan occupied Shanghai in December 1941 and placed the city's Jewish residents under the jurisdiction of its "Designated Area" policy in 1943, about 18,000 of these refugees lived packed into a one-square-mile zone in the Hongkou District. Most survived. When the war ended in 1945, Sigmund Tobias emigrated to the United States, where he became a professor of psychology. Shanghai had given him eight years of difficult but living time.

This history — specific, documented, verifiable, and unlike any other wartime refugee story — is accessible through a half-day private walking tour of Hongkou District. It is one of the most rewarding and least-touristed things you can do in Shanghai.

The Historical Context: Why Shanghai?

In the 1930s, Shanghai was governed by an unusual patchwork of jurisdictions. The International Settlement (administered jointly by British and American interests) and the French Concession had no visa or immigration requirements — any person who arrived at the port could stay. This was an accident of colonial history rather than a humanitarian policy, but the accident saved lives.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Western countries were closing their doors — the United States had a quota system that meant most European Jews would wait years for a visa — Shanghai became a destination of last resort for those with enough resources to buy a ship ticket. The journey from Hamburg or Trieste typically took three to five weeks and cost several hundred Reichsmarks.

The community that formed in Hongkou was small, dense, multilingual, and resourceful. Refugees opened cafés, bakeries, and law offices on Ward Road and Chusan Road. They published two German-language newspapers, ran a Yiddish theater, and maintained a yeshiva that had relocated from Mir, Poland (the Mir Yeshiva, whose rabbinical students arrived via Japan in 1941). Their neighborhood coexisted with the existing Sephardic Jewish community that had been in Shanghai since the mid-19th century, the Russian Jews who had arrived after the 1917 Revolution, and the Chinese residents of Hongkou — a collision of cultures in a square mile of lanes and tenements that lasted eight years.

The Ohel Moishe Synagogue

The Ohel Moishe Synagogue at 62 Changyang Road was built in 1927 by the Russian Jewish community — the Ashkenazi refugees who arrived from Siberia and Manchuria after the Russian Revolution. It is a three-story red brick building with arched windows and a small courtyard, built in the Russian-Byzantine style that characterizes Eastern European synagogue architecture of that era.

Since 2007, the building has operated as the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The permanent collection includes approximately 1,000 photographs, personal documents, and artifacts from the wartime community, organized around the stories of individual families. One room is dedicated to the testimonials of survivors from 20 countries who returned to record their memories between 2000 and 2020. Another room maps the businesses, schools, and institutions that operated within the Designated Area between 1943 and 1945.

Entry costs ¥50 per person (approximately $7 USD). The museum is closed on Fridays and Saturdays — the Sabbath hours are observed, which is unusual for a museum in mainland China and reflects the community's continuing presence in the site's management.

Allow 60 to 90 minutes inside. The photographs and documents are dense and require time. A private guide who has studied the collection can contextualize specific families and objects in ways that a self-guided audio tour cannot.

The Designated Area Walking Route

The Designated Area — the one-square-mile zone in which Shanghai's Jewish refugees were required to live after February 1943 — was bounded roughly by Tongshan Road, Gongping Road, Dalian Road, and Huoshan Road. Most of the original buildings still stand. The streets are now a working-class Shanghai neighborhood, entirely Chinese in its current population, with no tourist infrastructure and no English signage outside the museum.

Walking the streets with a guide who knows the history, you can identify the former locations of specific buildings: the Ward Road camp (now a hospital), the Chusan Road commercial strip (the original facades survive on part of the block), the Huoshan Park where residents gathered in the evenings (still a park, still in use, with a memorial plaque in Chinese and English added in 2010). The scale of the area — walkable in 25 minutes at a normal pace — makes the density of 18,000 people comprehensible in a way that a museum exhibit cannot.

One building in particular is worth noting: at 59 Zhoushan Road, a three-story 1930s apartment block still standing largely as built. Documentation from the museum archives shows it housed 30 families in 1943, each in a single room. The building is currently occupied and is not a public site, but from the street the architecture is unchanged.

The Sephardic Jewish Legacy: The Sassoon and Hardoon Families

The wartime refugee community exists alongside an older and wealthier Shanghai Jewish history that pre-dates it by a century. The Sephardic Jewish families who arrived in Shanghai in the 1840s — primarily from Baghdad, following the Sassoon family's opium and cotton trading operations — built much of the city's colonial commercial infrastructure.

Victor Sassoon — great-grandson of David Sassoon, who had established the family's India-based trading empire — built the Cathay Hotel on the Bund in 1929, still operating today as the Fairmont Peace Hotel. His private apartments on the top floor (still visible in the hotel's upper structure) overlooked a city in which his family had invested for 80 years. The Sassoon villa in the Former French Concession, known as Sassoon Villa, is now part of a hotel compound on Dongping Road — the building and garden are intact.

Silas Hardoon, another Sephardic businessman and at one point the wealthiest man in Shanghai, built the Aili Gardens (爱俪园) estate in the French Concession — a 200-mu (13-hectare) compound incorporating a Buddhist temple, a classical Chinese garden, and a Western mansion, all for his wife, a Chinese Buddhist convert named Luo Jialing. The estate was demolished in the 1950s; the Shanghai Exhibition Centre now occupies the site. The history is documented in Chiara Colombi's academic study of Hardoon's estate, published by the Royal Asiatic Society.

Planning a Private Jewish Heritage Tour in Shanghai

A focused half-day visit covers: Ohel Moishe Synagogue and Museum (90 minutes), the Designated Area walking route with a guide (45 minutes), and optionally a visit to the Huoshan Park memorial and the Yahuadi Road block where the largest tenements stood (20 minutes). Total time on site is approximately 3 hours.

For a full-day Jewish heritage tour, ChinaTourly can combine the Hongkou Designated Area with the Bund (where the Sassoon-commissioned buildings stand), the Sassoon Villa on Dongping Road, and lunch at a café in the French Concession near the former location of the YMHA building — a 1930s community center used by both the refugee community and the Sephardic establishment.

Our guides who conduct this tour have studied the museum's archival material and are familiar with the survivor testimony collection. The tour is appropriate for Jewish visitors seeking a connection to this specific history, as well as non-Jewish visitors interested in Second World War history, Shanghai's colonial period, and how one city's geography and politics shaped thousands of individual lives.

This tour is most commonly added to a longer Shanghai private itinerary as a morning or afternoon element. It pairs well with an afternoon in the French Concession, where the contrast between the colonial European quarter and the wartime refugee quarter — five kilometers apart in distance, a world apart in living conditions — becomes legible in a way it doesn't when visited separately.

For a deeper look, see our guide to how Shanghai compares to Beijing for cultural travelers.

For independent travellers planning their own time in the city, browse our private Shanghai journeys — each itinerary is built around a specialist guide and off-group-route access.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Ohel Moishe Synagogue still an active synagogue?

No. The synagogue was converted to a museum in 2007 and no longer holds regular religious services. The building itself is intact and the original sanctuary is preserved, but the site functions as a memorial and educational institution. The Jewish Community of Shanghai — a small contemporary community of expatriate business professionals — has its own separate facilities elsewhere in the city.

How long should I budget for the museum?

60 to 90 minutes is the minimum to see the permanent collection thoroughly. If you read the survivor testimonials and the archival documents, allow 2 hours. The museum is not large in square footage but the density of documentation rewards slow engagement. Going with a private guide who can contextualize specific exhibits reduces the time required while increasing what you take away.

Is this tour appropriate for children?

The museum is appropriate for teenagers who have some context for Second World War history. For children under 12, the historical density and the photograph archive (which includes documentation of difficult conditions) may require parental judgment. The walking route through the Designated Area is appropriate for all ages as a neighborhood walk; the historical weight requires some prior knowledge to appreciate.

Can I combine this with the Bund on the same day?

Yes. Hongkou is 20 minutes by car from the Bund. A common schedule: Bund walk at 7:30 AM, drive to Ohel Moishe Synagogue by 9:30 AM, walking tour of the Designated Area until 1:00 PM, lunch near Hongkou, afternoon in the French Concession. Your guide handles all transport between sites. See our 3-day Shanghai itinerary guide for how this fits into a full visit.

References

• Kranzler, David. Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945. Yeshiva University Press, 1976. The primary scholarly study of the refugee community.
• Wasserstein, Bernard. Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
• Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum official archive: shanghaijews.org.cn. Survivor testimony collection and permanent exhibition documentation.
• Colombi, Chiara. "The Aili Garden and the Hardoon Estate." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 28, 2018.

About ChinaTourly

ChinaTourly designs private, tailor-made journeys through China for English-speaking travelers worldwide. Our Shanghai guides hold specialist knowledge in specific areas — including the city's 20th-century international history, its colonial architecture, and its culinary traditions. We arrange every element of your visit, from transport and tickets to restaurant reservations and mobile payment setup. A private Shanghai Jewish heritage tour can be designed as a standalone half-day, or incorporated into a longer private Shanghai itinerary. Send us an inquiry and we'll respond within 24 hours.

For further authoritative reference, see the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.