Shvat 12, 1942 Shanghai "In honor of our friend...dear Torah lovers and rabbinical admirers ..." A thrilling letter from Shanghai in the midst of the terrible Holocaust, on behalf of the Union of Rabbis and Members of the Kollels in Exile in Shanghai, in which the rabbis express their gratitude for the support money in their most difficult time, signed by the geniuses Rabbi Mordechai Rogov Av Beit Din of Seini, and Rabbi Avraham Yisrael Kaplinsky, Av Beit Din of Sejny. Shanghai Shvat 12, 1942.
"We express our feelings of gratitude and heartfelt congratulations to them for the greatness of their efforts to help us, in which we see that G-d did not leave the people of Israel, and there are few Bnei Aliya in the Far East who know and feel the sorrow of Talmidey Chachamim. We received the help of two thousand D. and who can estimate the value of their enterprise in this because it is very difficult to describe in writing the terrible situation of the refugee rabbis, about twenty great rabbis of Israel and leaders of the nation with their families sick and weak with their children really hungry ... We ask from their honor to strengthen and add the monthly support for us and will never forget this grace and write in the Book of Remembrance which before G-d. and thanks to saving the lives of these families will be blessed with all blessings and successes ... While the whole world is now immersed in murder and at this time in the Far East there are benefactors busy saving lives, surely G-d will Remember that ... and thanks to this the water of the flood will be drawn over the earth. On behalf of the Union of Rabbis Mordechai Rogov, Av Beit Din of Sejny, Avraham Israel Kaplinsky, Av Beit Din of Sejny.
As in Europe, so in Shanghai the Jewish refugees lived in constant fear under the rule of collaborators with the Nazis, and the fear was that what was happening in occupied Europe would also happen in China under Japanese occupation. Their fear increased when the Japanese government decided to concentrate all the refugees who came to the city in the ghetto. Despite the Nazis' demand, the Japanese did not hand over the Jews, But the refugees suffered from abject poverty and constant hunger, and the support money sent to them in tortuous ways was what actually sustained the exiles at that time. Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, rabbi of Shanghai from 1926-1949, said that when more than 1,000 Jewish refugees from Poland arrived in Shanghai, more than half of them rabbis and yeshiva students, and under the influence of the Mir, Leibowitz and "Chachmei lublin" yeshivas, the face of the Jewish community in Shanghai changed completely. And all this could not have been done without the support funds that came from some countries in complete secrecy, which enabled the existence of both physical and spiritual life.
[1] Official stationery of the 'Union of Rabbis and Kollels of Exiles from Poland and Lithuania in Shanghai'. 28x22 cm. Filing holes. Good condition.
