My fascination with the freezing Chinese city of Harbin began as I browsed the classical music magazine Gramophone and came across a two-page feature about the Schoenfeld International String Competition. This celebration of music was founded in 2013 in Hong Kong, settling permanently in Harbin the following year. What, then, compelled me to read on?
Quickly scanning the article, I noticed a reference to master classes being given at “Harbin’s historic Old Synagogue Hall.” This piqued my interest, so I backtracked and read more.
Harbin is known as China’s “Ice City” (temperatures hover around minus 30 Celsius for much of the year), situated in glacial northeast China on the Siberian border. The genesis of its integration with Western art and Jews began in 1898, with the initiation of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway, the chief engineer of which was Jewish-born Alexander Yugovich. Mikhail Gruliov, also a Jew, had selected Harbin as the junction of this line.
Russia’s crippling antisemitic laws had already driven many Jews to America, but when the argument was put forward that Jews could live restriction-free in China, suddenly thousands of Jews relocated from Russia to Harbin. A National Geographic article commented that “the capital for most of the private enterprises is furnished by Siberian Jews,” and they created Harbin’s first hotels, banks, pharmacies, and department stores.
The first synagogue was built in 1909, followed by a mikveh, ritual slaughterhouse, hospital, and schools. There was an influx of Jewish refugees following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and indeed there was much Zionist activity, with the population peaking at around 10,000 to 15,000 in the early 1930s.
However, the story ended badly. Decades of peace and growth were wiped out by the non-Jewish Russians, the Nazi-allied Japanese and, in 1949, the Chinese Maoists. The last Jewish family left town in 1962, and the official “Last Jew of Harbin” died in 1985.
But this wasn’t the end of the story. An Israeli in his 70s, Dan Ben-Canaan, who covered the Far East for Israeli news media, settled in Harbin in 2002. With an encyclopedic knowledge of archival Harbin, and as the self-styled “One Jew of Harbin,” he was the man the provincial government sought out when it resolved to spend $30 million reconstructing the city’s Old Synagogue, transforming the New Synagogue into a Jewish museum, and labeling formerly Jewish-owned buildings as landmarks.
Accordingly, Harbin now boasts a Jewish tourist industry with Jewish Heritage Sites in a city devoid of Jews – but then, that’s not a whole lot different from a number of European Jewish interest spots where there’s minimal Jewish occupation. In fact, since 2024 Harbin has been consistently ranked as one of the world’s hottest (though not climatically!) cities for tourism.
It was through the original Russian immigrants that the Harbin Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1908, which now accompanies the competition finalists and the closing gala. Harbin is also home to numerous traditional Chinese folk ensembles, while the multi-genre Harbin Summer Music Festival has run since 1961.
For all these reasons, in 2010 Harbin was designated the UNESCO “City of Music.” Two of the competition’s venues, the Harbin Concert Hall and the Harbin Grand Theatre, were opened in 2014 and 2025 respectively, the latter also housing the Harbin Conservatory of Music.
The Schoenfeld sisters who put Harbin on the musical map
IF HARBIN, as one of China’s largest cities, at the crossroads of international connections and with a Jewish legacy, wasn’t already on the map, then two sisters of Jewish heritage have now secured its place. Alice Schoenfeld was born in 1921 to a Polish violinist father and a Ukrainian mother in what was then Yugoslavia. Her sister, Eleonore, was born four years later.
In the early 1930s, the family moved to Berlin, where the gifted Alice was taught by the celebrated violin teacher Karl Klinger, making her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the tender age of 10. Klinger was only of vague Jewish extraction (he was deemed judisch versippt, “Jewish interrelated”) but had received threats from Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels to remove Jewish cellist Ernst Silberstein from his string quartet.
In order to protect his Jewish colleague, Klinger wrote to Hitler, managing to secure special permits from the Reich Chamber of Culture to enable Silberstein to continue playing.
As for Eleonore, she studied ballet and piano, moving to the cello at age 11. In 1944, Alice was listed on the Gottbegnadeten-Liste (the List of “God-Gifted Artists”). This enabled the Schoenfelds to remain in Berlin during Hitler’s regime, since occasional dispensations were made from the strict application of the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws. This saved those of, perhaps, more Aryan than Jewish blood, those of exceptional talent (both these exceptions saving the Schoenfelds), or those who had rendered service to the Fuhrer (such as Hitler’s Jewish physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch, who was given special protection and permitted to immigrate safely to the US).
Having experienced the hatred of the war, the sisters were determined to use the international language of music to advocate integrity, truth, and kindness, and they set about bringing together and nurturing musicians of all nationalities in the spirit of their art.
From war-torn Europe to America’s classical music elite
IN 1952, now wary of Cold War Russian hatred of their ethnicity, the family fled to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. The sisters performed together as the Schoenfeld Duo, recording for radio and television stations in Europe, the US, and Asia. In 1959, they were invited to teach at the prestigious Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (USC), in tandem with two world-renowned string players – violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.
Heifetz was a Lithuanian Jew. A child prodigy on the violin, at age 12 he performed the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto for the already famous Fritz Kreisler, prompting the amazed violin maestro to humbly comment: “We may as well break our fiddles across our knees.” By age 18, Heifetz had become the highest-paid violinist in the world. Having immigrated to the US to avoid the Russian Revolution, Heifetz performed in 1926 at Kibbutz Ein Harod in Mandate Palestine, the first of several visits to what later became the State of Israel.
On his third tour in 1953, performing music by Richard Strauss, who was considered a Nazi sympathizer and whose music, together with that of Wagner, had been unofficially banned in Israel, he was subjected to physical attacks and silent audiences, but he wasn’t deflected from his heartfelt view that “music is above these factors.”
On a lighter note, under the alias Jim Hoyl, Heifetz penned a hit song for crooner Bing Crosby (whose version of “White Christmas,” one of the best-selling singles of all time, was written by Irving Berlin, originally Israel Beilin, from a Russian shtetl).
Heifetz was also way ahead of his time as a champion of what we would now call ecological issues. He was instrumental in establishing 911 as the US emergency services telephone number and also crusaded for clean air, protesting the smog at the university by joining his students in wearing gas masks and, all those years ago, converting his Renault passenger car into an electric vehicle.
Piatigorsky, born in the Ukraine to a Jewish family, had constructed his own cello out of wooden sticks before receiving, on his seventh birthday, his first “real” cello. At 18, playing in a trio in a Russian café to earn money for food, he was spotted by conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, who promptly hired him as the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic, then the greatest orchestra in the world.
In 1937, Piatigorsky married Jacqueline de Rothschild of the millionaire Jewish French banking family. Then, a familiar story for those intellectuals, scientists, and musicians lucky and prescient enough to “read the runes” and get out, the family left France following the Nazi occupation, settling in New York State. Moving in 1949 to California in an effort to improve his son’s health, he fell in with Heifetz and the Schoenfeld sisters at the University of Southern California, with which he remained associated until he died in 1976.
Zina Schiff, a renowned violinist and friend of mine, has recorded many well-received discs of music by Jewish composers and has dazzled audiences worldwide with her unique blend of virtuosity, musical integrity, and communicative power. She was Heifetz’s protégé at the University of Southern California and often had her private lessons with him in his home.
She tells me that she treasures a photograph of Heifetz and Piatigorsky together, the two of them looking so happy, which she keeps in her violin case. She also recalls the lively presence of the Schoenfeld sisters in Los Angeles, performing regularly and often judging at the Young Musician Foundation auditions.
Cultural bridges: How music connected China and the West
FOLLOWING A warming of relations between the US and the East, the sisters’ trailblazing passion for cultural exchange led to the Thornton faculty becoming the first Western university to establish a relationship with China and take on Chinese students.
The Schoenfelds were among the first internationally recognized musicians to visit China in the 1980s, when formal diplomatic relations were established between China and the US, as a result of which more than 100 Chinese students received music scholarships.
Jewish maestros such as Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin were also involved in this rapprochement. Michael Tilson Thomas, musical director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, who celebrated his parents’ connection with the American Yiddish theater in his fascinating musical The Thomashefskys, has also stimulated Chinese musical culture his long-term artistic collaboration with virtuosic Chinese pianist Yuja Wang.
Resulting from this sea-drift of Eastern affinity, the Schoenfeld International String Competition, a relative newcomer to the competition circuit, was founded in 2013 to honor Alice, who continued to be involved with it until her death in 2019, and Eleonore, who had died in 2008.
The competition is biennial, and Gramophone references its “generous prizes, bestowed by a wide-ranging jury featuring major performers and young-artist-focused industry professionals.” It’s clearly a competition to be reckoned with and a major windfall for any competitor looking to make a splash in the classical music world.
Neither sister ever married. A 2012 article in the LA Times stated that “suitors were out of luck.” Alice determined early that her musical commitments wouldn’t mix with a husband or children, while Eleonore actually got engaged before retracting, feeling that it wouldn’t be fair to herself, her sister, or her intended husband.
In 2012, Alice donated $10 million to the University of Southern California, of which $3 million was earmarked to renovate film facilities for the university’s first symphony hall, now the Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld Symphonic Hall; and $7 million to create the Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld Endowed Scholarship Fund, which covers tuition fees for string students. “Everything I do,” she has said, “is out of love for my sister.”
Until her retirement at the age of 95, Alice continued to teach 10 master students weekly at the Thornton School, including the now renowned Anne Akiko Meyers. Meyers is a double Grammy Award winner and champion of today’s leading composers, christened by the violin magazine The Strad as “the wonder woman of commissioning.”
Haute couture played a prominent role in Alice’s tutelage, advising Meyers to “wear white for Mozart, to show purity, blue for Mendelssohn, red for fiery Lalo, and fishnet stockings for Sarasate.”
Alice also mentored Harbin-born Suli Xue, now president of the Schoenfeld Society, whose career has spanned solo, chamber, and orchestral performances across North America, Europe, and Asia, and whose Chinese provenance Alice recognized with his integration of Chinese compositions and playing styles into his repertoire. In 2014, he brought the Schoenfeld International String Competition home to Harbin.
Many renowned cellists had been coached by Eleonore, among them Nataniel Rosen, born into a Jewish family, who in 1978 won the coveted International Tchaikovsky competition, the only American until 2019 to be awarded that accolade from a jury comprising mainly Soviet musicians.
My own claim to fame is that, traveling on the London Underground on a trip to the Houses of Parliament to see Keir Starmer negotiate Prime Minister’s Question Time, I noticed a young girl who had parked her cello on the seat next to her. Her cello case was adorned with “real-life” signatures, which included that of Raphael Wallfisch (whose cellist mother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, is one of the last known survivors of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz) and the signature of Nataniel Rosen.
Why the Schoenfeld legacy still matters today
A STATUE honoring the Schoenfeld sisters stands in front of Harbin Concert Hall, representing a cogent symbol of the power of music to unite disparate cultures and nationalities.
The late Edward Said was a Palestinian academic and professor of literature at Columbia University. He argued for a balance between the legitimacy and claims of a Jewish homeland and the historic claims of Arab nations. He was a joint founder in 1999, with conductor Daniel Barenboim, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, comprising young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians, from which developed their foundation to encourage education-through-music programs. He had prophetically observed: “The last and only decent resistance in the world is always the arts.”
His ethos, and that of the Schoenfeld sisters, to “connect the world with love and music,” has permeated by osmosis into the world’s musical culture. It is a maxim desperately needed in these hard times for the world generally, and the Jewish people in particular, with its hope for a peaceful and cooperative future for us all.