At China’s Largest Export Fair, Chabad Provides Oasis

Women count on La-Tweez products to pluck arches to perfection, but at Guangzhou’s mega-China Import and Export Canton Fair, it was La Tweez’s CEO Eran Israel who raised his eyebrows as he saw hundreds drawn to Chabad’s services there.

If you’re holding a Made in China item (and these days who’s not?) chances are the deal that brought it from Asia to your local big box store or boutique was negotiated at the Canton Fair. Held twice a year since the 1950s, the China Import and Export Fair spans 37 exhibition halls filled with over 55,000 booths and attracts 200,000 buyers from more than 200 countries. Hangar-sized spaces are devoted to pillows, PVC pellets, parquet floors and anything else on a consumer’s wish-list. Row after row of halogen lit exhibition alleys unfold like a mall on steroids. It is dizzying, exhausting. Anyone wearing heels to the Canton regrets it.

Among the madness an oasis beckons. Chabad of Guangzhou hosts daily services every weekday of the Fair. Hundreds of Jews show up, dignifying a pass-through between halls four and five in Exhibition Building A with prayer.

Before and after services, a babel of languages – Portuguese, Russian, Panamanian-accented Spanish, Yiddish – compete with Hebrew and English. Many minyan-goers fish their kippahs from their pockets or take one proffered to them Chabad of Guangzhou’s representative. Attending a minyan in the middle of the workday back home, say a good number of the businessmen, is not a priority; at Canton, the 1 p.m. break for prayer is programmed into their Blackberries. Before the frenzy begins each morning of the fair, Chabad of Guangzhou opens the day at its four-story headquarters, located 20 minutes away from the halls, with three morning prayer services and, later, closes with four back-to-back evening prayer sessions.

“You see every kind of Jew here. All kinds of Chassidim – Bobov, Satmar – all the Litvaks, Israelis, religious, not religious, everyone comes together,” Mr. Israel told Lubavitch.com. “Outside of Israel, everyone seeks a place to find their Jewish family, they look for their brothers and sisters.”

Chabad provides a sense of family year round. There’s a restaurant on the bottom floor of Chabad’s center that serves business people each week, offering breakfast, dinner and boxed lunches for the deal maker on the go. On Shabbat the crowd swells to 200, and during the fair the overflow crowd reaches up to the 400 mark. Deals sealed at the fair are shipped out from nearby ports, which Mr. Israel speculates drives the numbers at the prayer services.

“When your livelihood is loaded in container on a ship sailing from China, it makes you want to pray.”

For buyers, a quick three-week trip to China twice a year is sufficient. Manufacturers required on-site at their Guangzhou factories set up homes, bring their families, and drive the growth of Guangzhou’s year-round Jewish community, which is about to achieve a significant milestone.

A few weeks after the Chabad representatives catch their breath from the breathless rush of the fair, they will be celebrating a first for the region. Chabad of Guangzhou will be opening up a men’s and women’s mikvah. The architect’s rendering presents the classic Jewish ritual bath filtered through the aesthetics of nature with a marble mosaic of a green, woodsy backdrop complementing clean lines and soft light fixtures. More than a dozen women will use the mikvah regularly.

Chabad offers a weekly Torah study session to 80 community members. There are fewer women in Guangzhou, yet the local Chabad weekly learning class draws a regular group of 20, and the handful of Jewish children living in Guangzhou have their own Jewish nursery school. Hundreds are drawn to Chabad’s holiday events.

A twelve-hour flight from Israel, and a longer one from the U.S., Guangzhou’s remote location virtually assures that Chabad’s focus will remain on helping the business traveler stay Jewishly rooted while pursuing a living. This means their job definition far exceeds that of the pulpit rabbi. They’ve been called into help wheeler dealers who injure themselves in Guangzhou make their way through a hospitalization in China or recuperate from the aftereffects of drinking tap water.

Chabad representatives in Guangzhou “give themselves completely to everyone,” said Daniela Herz, who traveled from Israel to her first Canton Fair this year. “You have no idea – there is nothing like Chabad when you are away from home.