Taiwan’s longtime rabbi, whose life brimmed with international intrigue, dies at 103
Ephraim Einhorn, a rabbi and businessman who helmed Taiwan’s fledgling Jewish community after a career that included clandestine missions on behalf of oppressed Jews, died last week in Taipei, just hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur.
It came after an extended illness and weeks of intermittent hospitalizations. He had turned 103 three days earlier.
Einhorn was Taiwan’s first resident rabbi and, for 30 years, the only one to serve the community, which now includes an estimated 700 to 800 Jews. He was also a teacher, diplomat, businessman, scholar and father whose personality loomed large.
“He was sometimes impatient with people and could be intimidating. But at the same time you felt underneath that layer there was a great deal of kindness and empathy,” said Don Shapiro, a former president of the Taiwan Jewish Community group, who first met Einhorn in the early 1980s. “So he was a very complex individual. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else even closely like him.”
Einhorn’s life spanned a century of upheaval and renewal for the Jewish people. Born in Vienna in 1918, he attended several yeshivas across Europe before moving to the United Kingdom. (His parents, who remained in Austria, were murdered by the Nazis.) According to his retelling, he gained admission not by applying in the regular manner, but by impressing rabbis with his mature knowledge and fantastic memory of proverbs his rabbi father encouraged him to memorize when he was young.
After earning both rabbinic ordination and a doctorate in philosophy from a London yeshiva that is now defunct, Einhorn began working with the World Jewish Congress, first in England, and later in the United States, where he simultaneously led several congregations as a rabbi in the late 1940s through the 1950s.
His position with the World Jewish
Congress included “often-clandestine missions to countries in North Africa and the Middle East to try to help Jewish minority communities facing persecution,” according to AmCham Taipei, an American business group in Taiwan that honored Einhorn in 2016.
On one mission to Iraq in 1951, according to WJC archives, Einhorn posed as a Protestant minister to investigate a group of Iraqi Jews who had allegedly been tortured under the suspicion of being Zionists. Einhorn boasted about the mission to local papers in Detroit, where he was serving as a rabbi at the time, even though he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
He had a “passion for publicity,” a top WJC official, Maurice Perlzweig, said at the time. Einhorn remained involved in the organization in following years, but Perlzweig wrote to other officials that the organization would no longer support his frequent international travels, as there was “an infinite possibility of mischief if he were let loose.”
In 1975, Einhorn arrived in Taipei as a financial adviser on a Kuwaiti trade delegation. Already almost 60 years old, Einhorn had an impressive résumé. He spoke seven languages (though he never
learned Chinese), and upon meeting people, he handed new acquaintances a stack of roughly a dozen business cards: chairman of Republicans Abroad in Taiwan, vice president of the World Trade Center Warsaw, honorary representative of the Poland Chamber of Commerce, and on and on.
When he began officiating bar mitzvahs and holding holiday services, some within the Jewish community were justifiably skeptical; he didn’t tell people much about his past. Some wondered if he was working for Mossad or the CIA, according to people who were part of the community at the time.
“He wasn’t very popular in the old days and people were a bit suspect about people working with Arab countries,” said Fiona Chitayat, a former longtime community member. She added, “All I know is that he had unbelievable connections in Taiwan.”
Often, Einhorn used those connections to help people. He bailed fellow Jews out of jail, helped them resolve visa issues and once even helped arrange a special medical flight with the assistance of contacts he had met in his business and political ventures in
Taiwan and beyond its borders.
“He was very closely related to some formerly Eastern European countries, and he personally went out of his way to help our diplomats there,” said Leonard Chao, who had previously worked for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Einhorn helped Taiwan establish early connections with countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, among others, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
ALWAYS ONE to claim center stage, Einhorn opened his own congregation in 1979 at the President Hotel, and later the Ritz Hotel. After joining forces with the Taiwan Jewish Community around 2000, he chose to keep his congregation separate when Chabad Rabbi Shlomi Tabib arrived in 2011 and offered to work together.
Einhorn led Taiwan’s Jews in worship for more than four decades, even as the number attending services waned to fewer than the 10 required for many prayers for several years in the 2000s, and even as his health began to decline more recently.
“I am the rabbi, the shamash [sexton] and the treasurer. And I pay all the bills,” Einhorn told JTA in 2007. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
Taiwan Jewish Community events drew attendees from across the local community and even included an in-person Passover Seder this spring, one of the only sanctioned communal Seders in the world because COVID-19 was well controlled in Taiwan at the time. Einhorn was present.
Researcher Jonathan Goldstein described Einhorn as a community storyteller, calling him “the maggid of Taipei.” An interview from 2010 that religious scholar Paul Farrelly conducted with Einhorn shows his philosophy of openness, and passion for learning by teaching.
“To know what you don’t know is the beginning of wisdom… most wonderful thing in the world is to say, tell me, I want to learn,” Einhorn said. (JTA)