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Scattered in cauliflower patches, or sunken, mud-covered, in riverbanks, or sometimes used as washing slabs by villagers around the city, are the gravestones of old Jewish settlers of Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, the gravestones were uprooted, smashed and scattered throughout the region. The cemeteries have long been paved over, with no recognition of the bodies buried underneath. The stones that remain are like historical islands, isolated and disconnected from their past.

For Israeli photo-journalist and documentary maker Dvir Bar-Gal, a first encounter with a headstone in a Shanghai antique store has become a decade-long quest to discover their origins. And what started as a journalistic project quickly turned into a personal mission. “I got more connected emotionally,” he says. “There’s a lot of energy involved every time we flip over the stones and read the mud-covered inscriptions.”

Bar-Gal’s quest, now called the Shanghai Jewish Memorial Project, has seen him journey to numerous rural villages around Shanghai. There, he’d find old tombstones in fields, along rivers, or used as construction blocks for pathways and walls. His plan is to discover and restore as many stones he can and then display them, as a shrine to this nearly lost aspect of Shanghai’s Jewish history.

Jews have a long history in Shanghai, including refugees from World War II. Bar-Gal estimates that, at one point, there may have been 3,700 Jews buried in Shanghai. But, he couldn’t find any trace of their gravestones or cemeteries, other than the sporadic pieces he was discovering by chance.

As he unearths the heavy blocks from fields and riverbeds, Bar-Gal interviews locals and slowly puts together the pieces of the Shanghai Jewish history puzzle.

Over the past decade, Bar-Gal has found nearly 85 gravestones, contacted families of the deceased abroad, and even asked architects to come up with designs for a permanent home.

One of those gravestones belonged to American Lily Klebanoff Blake’s grandmother. Several years ago, she joined Bar-Gal in Shanghai and traveled to the rural area where he had retrieved the stone from the riverbed. She also met the Chinese farmer who helped him recover her grandmother’s marker.

“It was still covered in mud but I felt compelled to show my respect for my grandmother by washing the mud off the gravestone,” she says. “Touching the gravestone, I felt an uncanny connection to my grandmother, who died when I was four years old.”

Obstacles to preservation

Like Bar-Gal, Blake wants to see the gravestone rest in Shanghai as a memorial to the many Jewish families who lived here. But the process of securing a permanent home in Shanghai has stalled. For now, the gravestones remain in a storage space, a Buddhist cemetery, and Bar-Gal’s own Moganshan Lu gallery.

Bar-Gal still gets excited when he hears of a new stone. He went several years without finding one until this March. A neighbor advised him of some gravestones in the western suburbs of Qingpu, and Bar-Gal rushed out to unearth two new ones.

Days like that give him inspiration to continue, despite the frustrations of the memorial effort and a still-unfunded documentary. In between his gravestone hunts Bar-Gal is a tour guide, photographer and is working on a book about the history of Jews in Shanghai.

“If I didn’t see hope, I wouldn’t continue,” he says. “One of the things I learned in China is that you need to be patient.”

Despite arriving in Shanghai nine years ago as a journalist for an Israeli TV station, his energy now is very much taken up by the memorial work. And it is an effort worth his persistence, says Yanhua Zhang, the director of research for WHITR-AP, a non-profit organisation that works with heritage conservation. A permanent home for the tombstones can help descendants like Blake trace their family history. It would also be valuable in raising awareness of the former Jewish ghetto and its lasting impact on today’s Shanghai, Zhang says.

Blake isn’t giving up on the project, either. She wants her grandmother’s gravestone to remain in Shanghai with those of other Jewish residents who once called the city home.

“A memorial of the Jewish gravestones will serve as a testimony to the Shanghai Jewish community and the tolerance they were always shown by the Chinese,” she says.