“The Chazon Ish was a young man of 39-40 and had not yet attained global recognition. ”
Rabbi Aharon Moshe Kiselev was a huge talmid chacham who had studied in Volozhin. He moved to Harbin, China, in the area then known as Manchuria, in 1913 to be the Chief Rabbi there. (Harbin had a large Jewish community; among the Jews there were the parents of future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.) He would later be recognized as the Chief Rabbi of the Far East. On one issue he paskened that all Jews in China, Hong Kong, and Japan observe Shabbat on Friday night and Saturday, according to the conventional location of the International Date Line.
Later he would learn that the Chazon Ish had paskened differently. Rabbi Kiselev had never heard of the Chazon Ish! Upon being informed that the Chazon Ish really was a Gedol, he reconsidered his psak — and after reconsidering it, concluded that he himself had been right all along!
The end of Rabbi Kisilev’s life must not have been happy. While under Chinese warlord rule, Jews were well treated, the Japanese who took over Manchuria were allied with Russian anti-Semitic fascists who dominated much of Harbin and persecuted Jews. The Japanese also conducted medical experiments there similar to those of the Nazis, but the victims were Chinese. Most Jews left during the Japanese occupation, many to Japan or to other cities in China, and many to Israel. (Rabbi Kisilev was a religious Zionist and many of the less religious Jews were Revisionists.) The Soviet Union occupied the city in August 1945 and handed it over to the Chinese Communists the following April; before the Russian communist mass murderers passed on control to the Chinese mass murderers they rounded up Jews for their gulags. Rabbi Kisilev died in Harbin in September 1949 at the age of 82, just a few weeks before the “Peoples Republic of China” was proclaimed. 🙁 The last Jew in Harbin died in 1985.
Incredibly two synagogues still stand in Harbin and there is one Jew who lives in the city. One of the synagogues is a museum and the other is a concert hall.