Jakob Rosenfeld

Jakob Rosenfeld (; January 11, 1903 – April 22, 1952), known in China as General Luo or Luo Shengte, was a Holocaust survivor and urologist who fled to Shanghai, China due to the repression he faced in Austria, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany. While in China, he served all around the country as a surgeon and Minister of Health in the Provisional Communist Military Government of China under Mao Zedong during the Japanese invasion of China and the Chinese Civil War. He received a rank equivalent to that of a general.

Early life Rosenfeld was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Lviv, Ukraine) in 1903. He was raised in Wöllersdorf near Wiener Neustadt, where the family lived since 1910. His father, Michael Rosenfeld, worked as an Austro-Hungarian military officer, and then as a hatmaker. His mother, Regina Rosenfeld , came from an Orthodox Jewish family. Jakob's parents spoke Polish, German, and Hebrew.

Albeit a Jewish family, the Rosenfelds were not strictly religious and had to cease following kosher dietary rules during the hardship of World War I, without returning to them afterward. Jakob Rosenfeld did receive some Jewish religious study early on.

Life and career From 1930, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. The Social Democratic Party of Austria was banned in the coup of 1933. Rosenfeld was a member, and was arrested in February 1934. After his release from jail, he left the Vienna General Hospital and operated his own urology clinic in Vienna instead.

After the Anschluss in 1938, Rosenfeld was deported to Dachau concentration camp in May. While in Buchenwald, he suffered severe injuries from beatings. The Nazis seized Rosenfeld's home in Vienna at this time. His parents both died in the camps at this time, though he did not learn this until years later. In June 1939, he was released on the condition he leave the country in fourteen days. He then returned to Vienna. After release from the camp, Rosenfeld and his brother immediately requested visas from the Chinese legation and travelled to Shanghai, where he arrived in August, receiving visas from Ho Feng-shan. Once in Shanghai he opened a successful practice in urology, gynecology and obstetrics, in the Shanghai French Concession sector of the city. He became a general in the Chinese army.

China erected a statue in his honour, at a hospital called Rosenfeld Hospital in Junan County, Shandong which was named after him. Shandong is the area he worked as a field doctor. In Junan County there is also an exhibition hall called the Deeds of International Fighter Rosenfeld.

A bronze memorial (from 1993) at the entrance of Unfallkrankenhaus (UKH) hospital in Graz, Austria depicts Rosenfeld. A park in Vienna was named after him in 2006, and the same year an exhibit about him designed by Gerd Kaminski was placed in the Jewish Museum Vienna.

He is buried in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Since China–Israel relations were reestablished in 1992, a Chinese delegation has visited his grave annually.