Jakob Rosenfeld - Biography

Jakob Rosenfeld (1903-1952), more commonly known as General Luo, served as the Minister of Health in the 1947 Provisional Communist Military Government of China under Mao Zedong.

Rosenfeld, a Jew born in Lemberg, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Lviv, Ukraine), was raised in Wöllersdorf near Wiener Neustadt. He graduated in medicine with a specialization in urology from Vienna University. After the Anschluss, Rosenfeld was deported to Dachau concentration camp and later to Buchenwald. In 1939 he was released and had to leave the country within two weeks. Since China did not require Jews to apply for a visa, he fled to the Shanghai ghetto.

From 1941 he served the Chinese Communist force as a field doctor for the New Fourth Army, the Eighth Route Army and the Northeast People's Liberation Army during the outbreak of Second Sino-Japanese war and Chinese civil war. He chose to remain in China after the fall of the Nazi regime and participated in the People's Liberation Army's march on Beijing before returning in 1949 to Europe to search for relatives, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

He reunited with his sister in Austria in 1949. In 1950, after unsuccessfully attempting to return to China, he emigrated to Israel and was reunited with his brother. He died two years later after suffering heart failure.

China has erected a statue in his honour, a hospital in Lunan County, Shandong was named after him, and in 2006 a large exhibit was mounted in Beijing's National Museum of China in tribute to him. The museum exhibit in his honor was inaugurated by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

See also

• Jews in China