Like many of Hong Kong’s other historic cemeteries, the city’s Jewish burial ground is in Happy Valley – but not where you’d expect it to be. Instead of on the hillside overlooking the race course, alongside the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu and Parsi cemeteries, it’s in the upper part of the valley, tucked behind a Buddhist nunnery and overshadowed by the Jockey Club’s towering Shan Kwong Road clubhouse. It’s a discreet location that belies the historic importance of the community that maintains it.
“I was told once, ‘You can always tell about a Jewish community by the way they keep their cemetery,’” says Robert Dorftman, chairman of the Ohel Leah Synagogue Charity, which oversees the cemetery. “Hong Kong’s is very well kept.”
Among the 378 people buried in the cemetery are those whose surnames might sound familiar even to those with little knowledge of Hong Kong history: Sassoon, Kadoorie, Belilios. And there are many more whose presence testifies to the long and influential but often overlooked story of the Jewish community in Hong Kong. “Every gravestone tells a story,” says Dorfman.
Hidden in plain sight
To enter the cemetery, you must first pass through a heavy iron gate, then walk down an alleyway spanned by an enclosed bridge connecting the nunnery with an affiliated primary school next door. When you reach the cemetery itself, you’ll be greeted by an idyllic garden shaded by large trees, in the midst of which stands a quietly bubbling fountain. There is a small chapel and a room for tahara, or ritual cleansing, as well as a small building used by the cemetery’s long-serving groundskeeper, a Thai-Chinese woman named Sae Ho Amui. The densely-packed graves are arranged in five terraces cut out of the hilly terrain.
The very first burial here took place in 1857 when a man named Leon Bin Baruel was interred in an imposing granite sarcophagus. Little is known about Baruel, but the same can’t be said for the family that first bought the land from local farmers and donated it for use as a cemetery: the Sassoons. David Sassoon, the son of a wealthy family from Baghdad, moved to Bombay in 1832, joining a community of Baghdadi Jews that had been established there since the 18th century. Sassoon started a trading company that expanded alongside the British Empire as it spread across Asia.
The family opened their first office in China in Canton 1844, and soon expanded to Shanghai and Hong Kong, where they traded in opium among other goods. Along with expanding their business, they laid the groundwork for Jewish institutions in Hong Kong, including Ohel Leah, a synagogue built on Robinson Road in 1902, whose name honours the wife of Elias David Sassoon, David’s son and the first member of the family to settle in Hong Kong.
With the Sassoons and their family business firmly established in the upstart British colony, other Baghdadi Jews arrived to work for them. Among them were the brothers Ellis and Elly Kadoorie, who began working in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1880. After investing in Hong Kong’s first luxury hotel, the Hongkong Hotel, in 1890, the Kadoories eventually took over and expanded the hotel business, building the Peninsula in 1922; around that time they also began investing in China Light and Power (CLP), eventually gaining control over the Kowloon-based electricity company.
378 graves and as many stories
The stories of these two foundational families reflect only part of the complexity and diversity that has defined Jewish Hong Kong. Although small in number — no more than 5,000 people — the Jewish community has always been diverse. That is in part a reflection of the fact that Hong Kong has long been considered a welcoming place for Jews. “The native Chinese make no difference between a Jew and Christian. Both are foreigners in their eyes, but, if anything they are better affected towards the Jew, who they regard as Asiatic like themselves,” noted Emanuel Raphael Belilios, a Calcutta-born Venetian Jew who came to Hong Kong in 1862.
If Belilios’ name sounds familiar, it’s because, after making a fortune here, he donated large amounts of money to public education, and the Belilios Public School is named after him, along with a number of other local scholarships. There are plenty of other familiar names in the Jewish cemetery, too, including Harry Odell, the impresario who built the State Theatre. Born in Cairo to a family of Russian Jews, Odell moved to the United States before ending up in Hong Kong just before World War II. After being wounded in the Battle of Hong Kong and spending the war in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Odell launched himself into the entertainment business in post-war Hong Kong. Along with the State Theatre, he was instrumental in the construction of the theatre at City Hall, and he brought a succession of renowned musical acts to Hong Kong, including The Beatles and The Supremes.
“Harry Odell’s story is one of my favourites,” says Howard Elias, a board member of the Jewish Historical Society of Hong Kong who also works as the cemetery’s curator. Along with overseeing the cemetery’s maintenance, Elias does research into the people buried there, sharing his findings online and in tours. “Our stones don’t give too much information,” he says. “I found it sad that a person’s life should be limited to the day they were born and the day they died.”
A working cemetery
The Jewish cemetery’s bucolic atmosphere gives the impression of a lovely hidden garden, but “it’s a working cemetery,” notes Elias. The Ohel Leah charity — which also maintains the synagogue, Jewish Community Centre and Carmel School, a Jewish international school — pays for the gravestones to be cleaned and maintained every year.
And of course, there are the burials: about one per year, on average. If that seems like a small amount for a community of several thousand people, that’s because it is. “Not every Jew who dies in Hong Kong is buried here,” says Dorfman. Many Jewish residents leave the city on retirement, and even some who live out the rest of their days here request to have their bodies sent overseas for burial.
But the cemetery is nonetheless a reflection of the Jewish community’s evolution over the years. The oldest graves are those of Sephardim, who trace their roots to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, when the last Moorish stronghold fell to Christians. Another section was created with the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe towards the end of the 19th century. The separate sections for Sephardim and Ashkenazim reflect the fact that the two ethnic groups had few relations in the early colonial years of Hong Kong, partly because they had different religious rites, cultures and languages, and partly because of differences in class: the Sephardic community included the well-established Baghdadi Jewish families like the Sassoons and Kadoories, whereas the Ashkenazi were mostly working-class refugees fleeing discrimination and violence in Europe.
By the turn of the 20th century, the cemetery was full enough that it needed to expand. The Jewish community had a sympathetic ear in Matthew Nathan, Hong Kong’s first — and only — Jewish governor, who agreed to lease them an additional piece of land for 75 years. The lease was extended by another 150 years in 1981.
Cultural connections
Hong Kong has perhaps the only Jewish cemetery in the world that sits adjacent to a Buddhist nunnery, Tung Lin Kok Yuen; it was built in a flamboyant Chinese Revival style in 1935 with funding from Clara Cheung, Robert Ho Tung’s second wife. “We have a very good relationship with them,” says Elias. There are many fruit trees in the cemetery, but Jews are traditionally prohibited from consuming food produced in a burial ground, so the groundskeeper — a devout Buddhist — donates all the fruit to the nunnery, which gives the cemetery orchids in return.
It’s a neat symbol of the cultural exchanges that have always defined Hong Kong as a city. And there is no shortage of those in the cemetery itself. “There’s a story I like to tell on my tours,” says Elias. It’s about one Jewish man buried in the cemetery who had had an affair — and a child — with a local Chinese woman. Generations later, the Jewish side of the family, who now live in Israel, were aware of the affair, but they had no details about who their Hong Kong Chinese relative might have been. So Elias posted on local history website Gwulo asking if anyone knew anything. He ended up hearing from the daughter of the Jewish man and Chinese woman. “She said, ‘We’ve been trying to find this family for 50 years.’”
Elias ended up connecting the two families that had been intimately and yet remotely related for so many years. “It’s very powerful,” he says. “Being able to reunite people is a really extraordinary thing.” Because cemeteries, as it turns out, are places for the living as much as for the dead.