The Center for Jewish Studies Shanghai (CJSS, 上海犹太研究中心) was established in 1988. It is a department of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Under the leadership of Dean Pan Guang CJSS has become the most influential research institute in China studying Judaism and Israeli affairs.
The Center focuses its research on the history of the "Shanghai Jews" (the Holocaust refugees during World War II), the remnants of Jewish communities in China (the largest of which are in Tianjin, Harbin and Kaifeng) and political studies on the Near East. Amongst the publications of the Center are The Jews of China, The Jewish Civilization, The Revitalization of the Jewish People and Jews in China: Legends, History and New Perspectives.
The Center has organized several national as well as international academic conferences along with so-called Rickshaw Reunions (reunions of Holocaust refugees who survived the Holocaust in Shanghai). The Center has been visited by prominent guests, amongst them Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Olmert, Gerhard Schröder, Ariel Sharon, Hillary Clinton and then Austrian President Thomas Klestil.
Since 2006 the CJSS receives each year an Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servant from the Austrian Service Abroad.
Famous quotes containing the words center of, center, jewish, studies and/or shanghai:
“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“These studies which stimulate the young, divert the old, are an ornament in prosperity and a refuge and comfort in adversity; they delight us at home, are no impediment in public life, keep us company at night, in our travels, and whenever we retire to the country.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”
—Jules Furthman (1888–1960)