Published: 16 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
CHINA RECENTLY CELEBRATED the 92nd anniversary of the founding of its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with events at Chinese embassies around the globe — along with a newly-released video seen as a warning to protesters demonstrating against the Beijing-backed government in Hong Kong.
It was a less-than-subtle flexing of muscle by a military that boasts over 2 million servicemen today. That’s a far cry from the mere 20,000 troops it started with back in 1927.
Dig a little deeper into the history of the controversial military that has come to be ranked as the third most powerful in the world, though, and you will find the more passive story of a Jewish doctor who helped resuscitate the Communist-controlled New Fourth Army during the 1937-1945 war with Japan, and its struggle against the country’s ruling Kuomintang nationalists.
The mention of Dr Jacob Rosenfeld won’t ring much of a bell among Jews in Israel or the Diaspora. Rosenfeld’s final resting place, a small plot with a modest gravestone in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, isn’t often visited, and it probably wouldn’t occur to anyone that the man buried there was once the quite-influential health minister of the PLA’s 1947 provisional government.
FULL STORY How a Jewish doctor helped form backbone of revolutionary China’s medical system (Times of Israel)
Photo: Dr Jacob Rosenfeld, centre, with Liu Shaoqi, left, then-political commissar of the New Fourth Army, and Chen Yi, right, then acting commander of the New Fourth Army, in 1941 (Austrian Institute for Research on China and Southeast Asia)
