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By Brian Blum. Shavei Israel Profile :Aviona Hakarmi-Weinberg is sitting on a wide couch wearing a brown hooded sweatshirt, her dirty blond hair falling casually to her shoulders. She comes to our interview prepared with all the latest technology: an iPad with FaceTime video conferencing software installed and a high speed wireless connection. Her perfect English is delivered in a rapid fire staccato; full of excitement and passion for the job she’s been tasked with.

 

Shavei Israel

Indeed, if it weren’t for the wall hangings with Chinese characters appearing behind her, you’d never know that Weinberg was not in Silicon Valley or maybe an English-speaking neighborhood of Jerusalem, but rather was thousands of miles away in Kaifeng, China, where she has recently taken up the position of Shavei Israel emissary to the Jewish community there.

Weinberg is spending four months in China, teaching classes in Judaism and Hebrew and, in general, bringing some much needed yiddishkeit to the eager recipients in Kaifeng’s small but vibrant community.

Weinberg, 23, grew up in Jerusalem’s Old City; her family made aliyah from the U.S. before she was born, so she speaks both English and Hebrew like a native. Weinberg has always loved languages, from the written – she learned Latin in eighth grade – to the musical: she plays both guitar and saxophone. But something about Chinese spoke to her and so, in the tenth grade, she found a tutor, a Chinese Jewish woman living in Jerusalem. “From that point on, I was hooked,” Weinberg says.

After she completed her National Service following high school, Weinberg decided a crash course in Chinese was in order. She booked a flight to China and spent three months living with an elderly Chinese couple and studying the language intensively.

Even still, Chinese was mainly a hobby for this ambitious young woman. Her real goal: to become a doctor. She had performed her National Service at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem while at the same time studying to take the psychometric exams (the Israeli equivalent of the U.S. SAT’s) that she needed to apply to medical school.

Unfortunately, “my scores were too low to get in,” she concedes. When she returned from China, she took the psychometric exams a second time. Again, her scores weren’t high enough. And so she returned to China, this time traveling the vast country with a friend for several months.

Determined not to give up on her dream of working someday as a physician, she took the psychometrics a third and final time. Her scores were significantly higher, but she was still turned down from medical school. Finally discouraged, she enrolled in Hebrew University to study business and Asian Studies. And then the remarkable happened: she received an unexpected acceptance letter from a medical school in the U.S.

She now had a few months until the spring semester, when school would start, so she began an internship at the Israel-Asia Center in Jerusalem. But when the time came to leave for the States, Weinberg was in for an even bigger surprise: she realized the reason it had been so hard to get into medical school was that she didn’t really want to be a doctor after all. She wanted a career where she could work in Israel and China, using her by now well-polished language skills.

She politely declined the med school offer and took off for a third trip to – you guessed it – China. That visit was an all-around wonderful experience, she says – except for the eating. Weinberg keeps kosher and her Chinese host family “had no concept of kashrut,” she explains. “Westerners, even if they have no experience with Jews, they sort of understand. But the Chinese have never heard of such a thing. They’ll say: ‘but it’s not a pig’, and I’ll say: ‘but it’s still meat!’”

Mealtime was particularly complicated: at home, the Chinese don’t eat with their own individual plates. They put everything in the center of the table and reach over to take food with their chopsticks. “It wouldn’t have been polite for me to sit with my own plate and food at the table and not join in. So I couldn’t eat with them at all,” Weinberg says. She wound up cooking a lot of vegetables, rice, lentils, quinoa, and tehina in pots she brought with her from Israel.

The mealtime dilemma didn’t stop her from improving her Chinese even more, though, which was at this point, she says, on “a very high level.”

Weinberg returned to Israel and went back to her Hebrew University program full force, all doubts erased. Her dream 2.0: to graduate and get a job with an Israeli cleantech company that needs a Chinese-speaking representative for work in the Far East, allowing her to live in Israel but spend a significant amount of time in China too.

Once again, fate came knocking, this time in the form of Shavei Israel, which was looking for a Chinese-speaking Israeli to spend a semester in Kaifeng with the community. The job description practically had Weinberg’s name written on it in hanzi – the iconic Chinese characters used for writing.

 

Now in Kaifeng about a month, Weinberg marvels at how different this “small” Chinese city of 5 million people is from Beijing where she lived during her previous trip. “Kaifeng like going back to America of the 1950s,” she supposes (although she was born far later, in 1990). “There is a great innocence. There’s nothing fake about it. Beijing and Shanghai have become so westernized. But Kaifeng still has that old time Chinese feeling: the way the buildings and the streets look.” She stops to consider for a moment. “I’m sure in another five years, this will be gone too.”

The Chinese people sometimes remind Weinberg of Israelis. “The way they’ll start arguing with you. Or the way an older woman will scream at you if your baby isn’t dressed warmly enough. A woman here once screamed at me, saying ‘you’re going to catch cold,’ even though I’m sure she knew that I probably didn’t understand. And then I answered her in Chinese and she was shocked!”

Another comparison: The Chinese and Israeli people are both gruff on the outside but soft once you get to know them, Weinberg says. It’s not entirely the same: the Chinese are always very respectful, while Israelis can be famously blunt. “In China, a teacher is a teacher, an elder is an elder and you respect your parents and your teachers no matter what,” Weinberg explains. Israelis are far more casual.

Weinberg is living for her semester in China in Shavei Israel’s new Kaifeng Jewish Center, adjacent to the city’s fabled “Study of Torah Street.” (We wrote about the Center here.) The two-story apartment includes a large room for prayers and classes, a kitchen and dining room, a separate room for online distance learning given over the computer via Skype, and guest quarters, which is where Weinberg sleeps.

Weinberg teaches regular classes on Judaism, and with her guitar in tow, also shares Israeli and Jewish songs. She recalls trying to explain the verse “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right arm forget its skill.” Weinberg explains that the Kaifeng Jews “just couldn’t get that. The Chinese have a hard time with things that are too abstract. They were all cracking up. They just didn’t understand how that could be symbolic.”

More practical concerns seem to go over more easily. Weinberg has taught classes in making challah for Shabbat and hamentaschen for Purim (see pictures below), and took a field trip to the nearby Yellow River to make kosher several new pots, pans and utensils by immersing them in the water. In the pictures below, you can see Yaakov Wang at the river. Wang is one of the 7 Chinese Jewish men whom Shavei Israel has helped come to Israel to start a new life in the Holy Land. Wang was visiting Kaifeng, along with several of his compatriots, for the first time in five years.

Weinberg describes the Kaifeng community as “smart and passionate. They really want to learn.” What more could a trilingual Chinese, English and Hebrew speaking future business leader ask for? And what more could Shavei Israel ask for in its newest emissary to the Jews of Kaifeng?

If you’d like to help support our ongoing programs in Kaifeng, and to ensure that emissaries such as Aviona Hakarmi-Weinberg can continue to serve in China, please visit the Support Us page on our website.

Shavei Israel