Music notebook filled with handwritten musical scores that apparently served cantors of the main synagogue of the Jewish community of Harbin. Harbin, China, [first half of the 20th century].
Staff-lined notebook, with handwritten musical scores. Lyrics to prayers written from left to right, Hebrew transliterated into Latin script. Titles in Hebrew script. Inked stamp of "Administration of the Main Synagogue Harbin" in Hebrew and Russian on pastedown and first page of music.
This notebook contains the lyrics and melodies for the Sabbath prayers, including the "Kabbalat Shabbat", "Shacharit" and "Mussaf" prayers. For each segment of each prayer, the first line and final verses – namely the words which the cantor customarily sings out loud – are written in.
The Jewish community of Harbin was the largest and most prominent of Chinese Jewish communities, and existed from the late 19th century till the 1960s. At its height it numbered some 25,000 members, most of them immigrants fleeing pogroms, persecutions, and wars in their native Russia and Eastern Europe. The city offered its jews a rich variety of cultural activities; there were Jewish newspapers, and "Talmud Torah" schools as well as art and music schools. Harbin’s first synagogue, known as "The Main Synagogue, " was founded in 1907, and did in fact serve as the city’s main house of Jewish worship. In the course of the 1930s and 1940s – in the wake of the Japanese conquest, the subsequent Soviet conquest, and finally, the rise of Communist China – the community dwindled, with most of the Jews either leaving or being forcefully evicted. The last of Harbin’s Jews finally left in the early 1960s.

[108] written pages, 20 cm. Good condition. Stains. Worming (mostly minor) to page edges. Open tear to corner of one leaf. Binding somewhat damaged.