JTA — A YouTuber, a theater consultant and an accordionist walk into a kosher Chinese restaurant.

It’s not the setup to a Borscht Belt joke — it’s half of the party that grabbed a table recently at Buddha Bodai in New York City’s Chinatown for a lively debate over dim sum and tea.

The men were part of Mazel Tofu, a collective of Jewish Mandarin speakers that formed two years ago through an only-in-New York tale of serendipity and Jewish geography.

A Chabad Purim party in 2024 brought together three men with mutual friends and the vague knowledge that the other shared their affinity for Chinese: Jacob Scheer, a media relations associate at Chabad; Ben Weinstein, a teacher at SAR High School, an Orthodox day school; and Mr. Shlumpadink, the stage name of an accordion player who performs folk songs in Yiddish, Chinese and Japanese. Soon, they were speaking in Chinese.

After encountering each other at a Shabbat dinner together a few weeks later, Weinstein and Mr. Shlumpadink decided to form a WhatsApp group for Chinese-speaking Jews. Soon, they were scheduling their first outing.

“I was surprised that it snowballed this quickly,” said Mr. Shlumpadink, whose name is derived from the Yiddish word for “unkempt” and who does not use his real name in association with his act. “The feeling I got when we finally got all these people together was this moment of validation for a lot of us, when it’s like, ‘Yeah, we knew this was a thing.’ We all knew it, and now we actually have a group, this little institution, to justify it.”

Two years later, the WhatsApp group has 53 members, all brought in through mutual friends or word of mouth. (Almost all are men, which group members say they hope to see change.)

There are only two criteria to be added to the chat. You have to be Jewish, and you have to speak Chinese. It’s a relatively unusual combination: Despite a long history of Jewish settlement that includes a historic, now-assimilated community in the city of Kaifeng formed during the Song Dynasty (960-1127 CE) and an influx of European Jewish refugees to Shanghai before World War II, there are relatively few Jews in China today.

But Jews regularly study and work abroad in Chinese-speaking environments. Weinstein, for........

© The Times of Israel