Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Holocaust Survivor Donates Wedding Dress to Shanghai Museum

A Holocaust survivor whose wedding photo hangs in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum donated her gown to the museum.

Betty Grebenschikoff, a Berliner who found refuge in Shanghai during the Holocaust, made the donation on Monday during her fifth visit to the Chinese city. Grebenschikoff, who now lives in the United States, had noticed the photo on her previous visit to Shanghai.

The dress was handmade by her husband’s mother, who worked in a Shanghai wedding dress store. Two of her daughters wore the gown at their weddings, according to the Shanghai Daily newspaper.

On Tuesday, Grebenschikoff visited the small home in which she, her parents and her sister lived between 1939 and 1948, when she married a Russian swimming instructor at the city’s Park Hotel.

Museum curator Chen Jian told the Shanghai Daily that the museum has collected information on some 15,000 Jews who found refuge in Shanghai during the war.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.