My story begins in the early 1900s in Manchuria, a Chinese province on the Yellow Sea, bounded on the north and east by Siberia and Mongolia. On the border where Manchuria meets its neighboring countries was a small village, also called Manchuria, populated by 30,000 Chinese and Mongolian peasants.

It was in this remote, isolated haven that my parents and a few Russian Jewish families sought refuge from the brutal Czar Nikolai. There they established an island of Yiddishkeit amid a surging foreign sea, where winter temperatures often plunged to 40 below zero.

The remoteness worked to our advantage: the ruling authorities could not be bothered with insignificant outlying towns, allowing us to lead the lives we chose without governmental interference. We built a shul, a school and a mikvah, established a chevrah kadisha burial society, and had a kosher butcher and grocery.

My father, a fur merchant, now had ready access to the vast fur markets of Mongolia. At the time, Russia and China were jointly constructing the Great East Chinese Railway — from Siberia all the way to Dairen, a port city on the coast near Japan. Situated at the intersection of the two railway lines, Manchuria had a distinct commercial advantage.

This strategic location also provided an endless tide of WWI refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution en route to America, Palestine, who flowed through our village. We opened our doors and hearts to the homeless. Our house was a way station for overnight guests, close and distant relatives, some of whom became, for varying periods, members of our family.

Our anxiousness to help the war refugees was a reflection of Mama’s compassion, accommodating large numbers for extended periods thanks to the spaciousness of our house. Our family homestead was comprised of a large residence, and a sizeable farm, where we raised vegetable crops, dairy cows and poultry. The poor Chinese farmers eagerly accepted employment in our home in exchange for food or modest wages.

Papa’s frequent business trips abroad enabled us to furnish our home in a grand style. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors imported from Belgium, carpets, draperies and chandeliers graced our parlor. How these fragile items survived their journey intact, I will never know. Nor will I know how Papa achieved the near-miraculous engineering feat of providing our house with indoor plumbing!

A massive table stood in our dining room and it was from this spot that Papa would “hold court” each morning. As Predsedatel (official representative) of the kehillah and a member of the town council, school and shul committees, Papa was appointed deputy mayor of Manchuria (the mayor was Chinese) and thus he bore a tremendous sense of responsibility towards the villagers who sought his counsel on subjects ranging from legal matters to family problems. Only halachic decisions were outside his purview: That was Rav Zhuravel's domain. From early morning they lined up in our front hall: Jews, Russian gentiles, even the Chinese peasants, awaiting their turn at the table.

While Papa ruled over the dining room, Mama reigned supreme in the kitchen, in the center of which stood a massive, wood-burning brick oven. Mama loved to bake and of course she had to manage the household help. This was not a simple chore as the size of our “extended family” made it necessary for food preparation on the scale of a small factory.

In the summer and fall when produce was plentiful, enormous vats and jars were filled with fruit preserves and pickled vegetable and stored in the cellar, along with vast quantities of potatoes, onions, and carrots, which we buried in the earthen floor, in preparation for the long winter ahead.

We had a separate cellar exclusively for Pesach utensils. Pesachdik vegetables went directly from the soil of the fields into the soil of the Pesach cellar. A subterranean cold-storage room, dug deep in the permafrost and packed with cakes of ice, was our summer refrigerator for dairy products: Home-made cheese, cream, butter and milk. At the onset of winter, the shochet (ritual slaughterer) would make a “house call” to prepare chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks for the entire winter. The poultry would be cleaned and kosherized and stored in the outdoor meat shed, where nature took over. The shed became one huge walk-in meat freezer.

Purim was joyously celebrated in our distant little community. The day after Purim, our Pesach “factory” went into full operation. The school basement, sealed during the rest of the year, was equipped with an oven and devoted solely to matzah-baking. The shmurah matzah baked by the townsfolk were loaded onto a special Pesach wagon, used exclusively for matzah-delivery.

Back at home, the Pesach kitchen was a hive of activity. Jewish workers decanted home-made wine from huge glass bottles into smaller ones, while the Chinese scrubbed and polished every inch of the house. We hung white hand-embroidered Pesach draperies and laid white Pesach rugs, made from the white cotton sacking in which the Pesach matzah meal was delivered.

Whether it was for Yom Tov or Shabbos, winter or summer, the quantities of food prepared exceeded the needs of even our “extended family.” When all the cooking was done, our Chinese boyka (Russian parlance for “errand boy”) nicknamed Ivan, would don his white tunic and, laden with baskets of culinary delights, deliver food to needy families. Mama gave with an open hand.

Several factors contributed to the beauty of Shabbos and Yom Tov in Manchuria. The most important was the pure joy of being able to observe the mitzvos without fear. We celebrated the Festivals with great enthusiasm, compensating for the years of religious persecution by the Russians. Another factor was my family’s intense bond with tradition and heritage. We did not change our “Old Country” ways to suit the environment but rather our environment adapted to us and our customs. The Chinese not only became accustomed to our holidays, but even played an active role in their observance.

For example, after a long Yom Kippur fast, the Chinese would line up their horse-drawn carriages outside our shul to offer the weary Jews a ride. Before Pesach, the Chinese carpenter, clad in a glistening white tunic and with his tool kit over his shoulder, would walk through the streets crying, “Pesach, Pesach” — it was his job to plane down our kitchen work tables, removing the layers of chametz and exposing a new surface (which we covered in any case). On Shavuos eve, Chinese farmers went door to door with wagon loads of newly-cut grass with which we carpeted the house.

The laundry and linens alone represented a mountainous job. The washerwoman came to our home twice a week. She would spend the entire day, from dawn to dusk, scrubbing and hanging all the clothes and linens on the washlines. But in a sub-zero climate the wash quickly froze. At the end of the day, she would stack the stiff, ice-laden laundry in baskets and bring it into the house. The fragrance of freshly-laundered, frozen linens melting by the fireside still lingers in my memory and brings tears of nostalgia to my eyes.

The frozen laundry was a signal to the children that Chanukah was approaching. By December, winter held Manchuria in its icy grip; we were literally snowbound. Night fell at 3:00 p.m. and by 4:00 we were all warmly ensconced around the samovar, with hot drinks and latkes. Papa would carefully hollow out eight potatoes and fill the hollows with olive oil from Palestine, placing a wick in each. Though we could easily acquire a finer menorah, maintaining old family traditions was more important. Reciting the blessings Papa proudly displayed his primitive creation on the window sill to “publicize the miracle.” Family and guests all joined in the singing that follows the candle lighting ceremony; the children played dreidel with hand carved wooden tops; Papa told us stories in Yiddish 'til the wee hours; and we all believed this contented life would last forever.

Our dreams were shattered when Japan invaded Manchuria in the 1930s, and we had our first taste of oppression. Our kehillah was forced to move on. My family resettled in Harbin, a large Chinese metropolis, two days' journey by train from Manchuria. The Jewish community of Harbin enjoyed freedom and security with Jewish social and religious services, shuls and yeshivos, an old-age home, a Jewish hospital, a Jewish cemetery, and a “soup kitchen” open to the needy public at large and whose sign proudly proclaimed Die Yiddishe Biliger Umziste Kuch (The Jewish Free Kitchen). Many Chinese also benefited from this service.

But Jewish Harbin was not destined to last. Though unscathed by the ravages of World War II, the Jews of Harbin saw the handwriting on the wall when Mao began his Long March. In 1950, along with 40 other young couples, my husband and I made our way to Israel to settle down and raise a family of our own.

A happy footnote to this story is the fact that the Chinese graciously allowed the Jewish communities to resell their properties to the local inhabitants and to transfer the funds out of China. It was with their share of these funds that the Association of Immigrants from China in Israel built a beautiful shul in “Shikun Shanghai” near Tel Aviv.