(Jewish Group) As Nancy Pelosi visits, everything to know about the Jews of Taiwan

Taiwan, a small island off the southwest coast of China that has self-declared sovereignty, has long been a source of contention between the U.S. and China — tension that has taken the global stage in recent days in advance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unannounced visit to Taiwan on Tuesday morning.

Pelosi’s trip marks the first diplomatic visit to the region by a high-ranking U.S. official in over 25 years. And while she’s there, she may encounter one of the country’s surprising minority populations: its small — but growing — Jewish community of approximately 700 to 800 people.

After Taiwan’s first resident rabbi, Ephraim Einhorn, passed away on Sept. 14, 2021, at 103, the London-born Leon Fenster took over as lead chazzan of the Taiwan Jewish Community, one of two centers of Taiwanese Jewish life, the other being the Chabad Taipei founded in 2011. Einhorn, who moved from Austria to the United Kingdom at 14 years old and lost his parents to the Nazis in the Holocaust, earned his doctorate and rabbinic ordination from a now-defunct London yeshiva.

Einhorn arrived in Taipei in 1975 as a financial advisor to a Kuwaiti trade delegation, and began officiating bar mitzvah ceremonies and leading high holiday services in the region. While he was the first rabbi known to live in Taiwan, the Jewish community there, according to Fenster, first began to grow in the 1950s when Jewish expats stationed at a local military base, most of them American, joined with the tiny non-military Jewish community in the city of Taipei.

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