taipei, taiwan | As Typhoon Sepat bore down on Taiwan with flashing thunderstorms, eight rain-soaked men gathered in a little storefront shul in downtown Taipei to welcome the Sabbath.
Despite the wind howling outside, and the fact that he didn’t quite have a minyan, 89-year-old Rabbi Ephraim Einhorn held services on this August Friday just as he has nearly every Friday and Saturday since 1975.
When the hour-long Shabbat eve service was over, Einhorn recited Kiddush, invited his fellow worshipers to enjoy freshly baked challah dipped in honey and asked who they were and from where they came.
It’s a ritual Don Shapiro has witnessed more times than he can remember.
“Usually he wants your name, where you were born and what your occupation is,” says Shapiro, a native of Rochester, N.Y., who has lived and worked in Taiwan for 38 years. “Everybody has to give a small bio, and if you forget something, he’ll remind you.”
Such intimacy is possible only because there are so few Jews remaining in Taiwan, officially known here as the Republic of China.
In recent years, as Jews increasingly flock to communist China to take advantage of booming business opportunities there — Chabad-Lubavitch alone now runs seven synagogues in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen — the Jewish presence in democratic, staunchly pro-Western Taiwan is disappearing.
Today, no more than 150 Jews live among the 23 million inhabitants of Taiwan. That compares to between 5,000 and 10,000 Jews in mainland China, not including another 5,000 in Hong Kong, the former British colony that reverted to Chinese control in 1997.
“When I first came here, we had 80 to 100 people coming every Shabbat,” says Einhorn, who was born in Vienna and once headed the information department at the World Jewish Congress. “Most of them were of Syrian descent, so we used the Farhi [Sephardi] siddurim. Now we use Ashkenazi prayer books. I never know how many people will show up from one week to the next.”
Before Einhorn, the only Jewish services in Taiwan were at the U.S. military chapel. Then the U.S. military left, and until a few years ago services were held at the five-star Hotel Landis.
These days, Einhorn uses a tiny street-level office in the hotel’s annex as a synagogue. Smaller than an average American living room, it’s crammed with a holy ark, bookshelves, a dozen black chairs and a dining-room table piled high with siddurim and newspaper clippings.
“I am the rabbi, the shamash and the treasurer. And I pay all the bills. Somebody’s got to do it.”
The businessman-turned-rabbi routinely passes out eight different business cards: He’s the chairman of Pickwick Co. Ltd., director of Republicans Abroad Taiwan, senior vice president of the World Trade Center Warsaw, representative of the Polish Chamber of Commerce, and honorary citizen of Nebraska and Montana. Einhorn also calls himself “the father of relations between Taiwan and six governments: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary and the Bahamas.”
Einhorn, who says he has worked in every Arab country, first came to Taiwan as head of a Kuwaiti business delegation in 1975.
“Einhorn is the glue that holds the Jewish community together,” says William Ting, 38, a Taiwan-born corporate lawyer who grew up in Pasadena, Calif., and converted to Judaism a year ago under Einhorn’s supervision. “I met him at the European Chamber of Commerce four years ago, but I never discovered the rabbi side of him until a year later.”
Aside from Einhorn’s Shabbat services, Jewish life in Taiwan is virtually nonexistent. However, the island has a Holocaust museum at a church in Tainan, about 90 minutes south of Taipei via train, and there’s a Jewish exhibit that Einhorn organized at the Buddhist-run Museum of World Religions in suburban Taipei.
The only kosher food in this land of pork dumplings and fried oxtails is at Jason’s Supermarket in the trendy food court of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building, and at the Landis Hotel, whose chefs are familiar with the laws of kashrut.
The few local Jews here hope that increasing trade with Israel, combined with successful negotiations to open direct air service between Taiwan and mainland China, could save Taiwan’s Jewish community from outright extinction.