A ‘serene’ Mandarin teacher for Israel’s next envoy to China

In February, Home Front Defense Minister Matan Vilnai gave up his Knesset seat to become Israel’s new ambassador in China. But since the incumbent ambassador doesn’t seem to want to vacate the post just yet, as Haaretz reported on Tuesday, Vilnai might be stuck in Jerusalem until August.

In the meantime, the 67-year-old is keeping busy learning Mandarin.

“He can already say basic things,” says Shalva Jin, the minister’s teacher.

Shortly after the cabinet confirmed Vilnai’s appointment to Beijing in February, he and his wife started learning Mandarin twice a week. “In the first lesson, I taught them how to say ‘hello and ‘how are you’ and things like that, and then we started looking at the basics of the language structure,” Jin recalled.

Vilnai, who started at nil, is still at the level where he focuses on elementary vocabulary, learning how to count and words such as “tired” and “work,” Jin, 28, said. “He didn’t ask me to teach him diplomatic terms. At the moment, we are focusing on the language of everyday life.”

The former deputy defense minister is currently focusing on learning how to have a basic conversation. Trying to teach him reading and writing would be too ambitious, said Jin, who works part time for the Berlitz language school in Tel Aviv, which teaches the Foreign Ministry’s diplomats.

‘He still has a few months before he leaves, but that won’t be enough. To learn how to read and write, he would have to sit many hours every day alone at home and study’

“He doesn’t really learn the [Chinese] characters. Someone who just wants to be able to talk and know the basics doesn’t need to get involved with that. It’s just too complicated.

“He still has a few months before he leaves, but that won’t be enough,” Jin added. “In order to learn how to read and write, he would have to sit many hours every day alone at home and study.”

Teaching a minister is not Jin’s first claim to fame. Born in China and always having felt Jewish, in 2004 she became the first Kaifeng Jew to be fully recognized as Jewish by the Israel Rabbinate.

Jews first arrived in Kaifeng about a thousand years ago and have since assimilated into Chinese society while keeping some Jewish traditions.

Shavei Israel, a nonprofit promoting Israel’s relationship with the descendants of Jews – such as Spain’s Bnei Anussim, India’s Bnei Menashe or the hidden Jews of Poland – estimates that today there are between 500 and 1,000 identifiable descendants of Kaifeng Jews. “In recent years an awakening has been taking place among them, as increasing numbers of young Kaifeng Jews seek to reclaim their heritage,” according to the Jerusalem-based organization.

Jin’s father, who says his Chinese identification card lists his nationality as “Youtai,” or Jew, brought the family to Israel in 2000, when Jin was 16. Born Jin Wen-Jing, she changed her first name to Shalva, or “serenity,” a translation of Wen-Jing. She learned Hebrew; went to high school; and, four years after arriving here, stood before a religious court in Haifa under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate and formally converted to Judaism. Today, Jin lives in Jerusalem where in 2008 she graduated from the Hebrew University.

“I didn’t want to go through conversion because I’ve always thought of myself as Jewish,” she told Hadassah Magazine in 2005. “But according to the halakha, I had no choice. God chose the Jewish people to be his nation, and I wanted to be accepted as part of it.”