Category: Hongkong

Refugee children sometimes ventured outside the hotel to explore Hong Kong. One former refugee remembers trips on the Star Ferry, tasting ice cream for the first time, and visiting the Repulse Bay beach, courtesy of his mother’s friend. After the privations of war and the bombings wrought on Shanghai, Hong Kong was like a paradise […]

Hong Kong was liberated from the Japanese in August 1945. In the post-war years, the colony once again became a site of transit – this time for Jewish refugees leaving Shanghai to find new homes in Australia and Israel (est. 1948). Lawrence Kadoorie helped refugees emigrate to new countries by providing temporary accommodation in his […]

Only a handful of Jewish refugees were permitted to remain in Hong Kong after June 1940 – mainly doctors and engineers. Eighteen months later, the Japanese invaded the colony in December 1941. Several Jewish refugees died during the Japanese invasion including Herbert Samuel, a German Jew and statistician at CLP who fought to defend the […]

On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland. In Britain and across its empire, Austrian and German male citizens were arrested and interned as ‘enemy aliens’. In Hong Kong, Austrian and German men were interned at La Salle College, a school for boys situated in Kowloon. While conditions […]

Erna Friedlander and her husband Martin Friedlander came to Hong Kong in April 1939, having previously escaped Germany for Italy. Soon after his arrival in the colony, Martin became involved with the Jewish Refugee Society (JRS) where he met Monia Talan, the JRS’ secretary, who hired him at American Lloyd Shipping. Erna was a talented […]

Before the outbreak of war in Europe, Jewish refugees tended to live in the affordable yet middle-class district of Kowloon Tong. They worked as merchants, teachers, doctors, engineers, musicians, butchers and artists, and their children also attended local schools. Evidence suggests that a loosely defined ‘community’ took shape among Jewish refugees in Hong Kong. Newspaper […]

Approximately 120 Jewish refugees settled in Hong Kong before the war, where immigration control was stricter than Shanghai, thanks to the employment opportunities provided by Hong Kong’s Jews. These employers-turned-philanthropists included the industrialist Lawrence Kadoorie, a director of China Light & Power (CLP – the electricity company for Kowloon and the New Territories); Aaron Landau, […]

Though Shanghai was the main pull for large-scale refugee traffic in Asia, approximately 1,200 European Jewish refugees also fled to Manila in the Philippines, another haven in Southeast Asia. Some refugees may have travelled to the Philippines through Hong Kong either by ship or airplane as a Pan American Airways flight connected the two port […]

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, small numbers of Jews started to escape Germany for Shanghai. In 1938, the year of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, this exodus rapidly escalated. That year, Hong Kong became a major port of transit for hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism for the sanctuary of Shanghai – […]

Jews were some of the earliest settlers to come to Hong Kong after the island was ceded to the British in the 1840s. So-called ‘Baghdadi Jews’ came to Hong Kong from Iraq and India to take advantage of the trade opportunities pioneered by the Sassoons. By the turn of the century, there were around 165 […]