Rabbi tries to use conference to help man in Chinese jail

By Vanessa Renderman
Features Editor

Photo Courtesy of Rabbi Gedalyah Engel Jin Xu (pictured center) is working to get her father (pictured right) medication that is vital to treat the Hepatitis B from which he suffers.

Xu Wenli is sitting in a jail cell halfway across the world in need of hepatitis B medication that he might never get while his daughter, Jin Xu, is trying to save his life.

Wenli has been in and out of jail in China because of his involvement with the Democracy Wall Movement, a movement to give Chinese people freedom.

Closer to home, Rabbi Gedalyah Engel, coordinator of the Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, is trying to use the conference as an impetus to send medicine to Wenli.

"We feel that the human rights issue is very important," Engel said. "All (Wenli's family) wants to do is see that he gets his medication — he has hepatitis B," he said.

Jin Xu's artwork courtesy of Rabbi Gedalyah Engel As part of a resolution made at the Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, local community members are trying to help Jin Xu, a Boston University art student, get hepatitis B medication to her father, who is imprisoned in China. Xu, whose most recent art exhibit is shown pictured above, is working on her master of fine arts degree at the university.

Engel heard about Wenli's situation a few years ago and invited Xu to that year's Holocaust Remembrance Conference.

Since then, the two have remained in contact and at the 1999 conference, a resolution was passed — asking for human rights in the People's Republic of China — for influence from the United States to ensure that human rights are awarded and for hepatitis B medication for Wenli.

Wenli spent 12 years in prison — from 1981 through 1993 — for printing a newsletter supporting and encouraging freedom of speech. He was sent back to jail in December 1998 to serve a 13-year sentence because of his leadership involvement with the China Democracy Party.

Ignoring Wenli's cause or dismissing it as unimportant because he is continents away is the reason Engel feels so strongly about the cause.

"That's what went wrong in the Holocaust (ignoring human rights)," he said. "It's wrong to think you can have democracy for yourself and not the other guy."

Meanwhile, Xu is an art student at Boston University, thousands of miles away from her ailing father. She has to go to an American university because the Chinese government, she said, would not let her go to college in China because of her dad.

Art is what keeps her going. Xu said her father encouraged her to learn Chinese brush painting when she was 10 years old. During that time, he was still in prison.

But Engel said it's hard for Xu to concentrate on her art fully when she's spending so much time being anxious about and trying to help her father.

"Her heart isn't in anything … she's worried about her father," Engel said.

As Xu draws attention to her father's ordeal through pleas via The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media, Engel is doing everything he can to get Wenli medication.

Through the Holocaust Remembrance Conference, Engel has seen another young woman deal with a similarly precarious situation, and the end result was death.

Hafsat Abiola, who made her third visit to Purdue at the 1999 Holocaust Remembrance Conference, talked about her mother's assassination —which was the result of political activism — and of her father's imprisonment.

He died while imprisoned in Nigeria, shortly before he was supposed to take office as the president of Nigeria. The cause of her father's death was suspicious, and Engel fears that if Wenli doesn't get his medication, he might die under similar circumstances.

In commentary letters to several national American newspapers, Xu has told her story and her father's story.

"It is hard for me to go to sleep every day and think my father is suffering in jail," she wrote to The Washington Post in April 1999.

She wrote of how police watched and followed her father. There were guards stationed outside every window and every door of their house. Her father, she said, had to give advance notice of when he was leaving the house. And when he did, police followed him everywhere he went.

Xu told of police raids. They confiscated fax machines, computers, journals and all kinds of documents.

"I earned the money to buy those computers (that were confiscated) by washing dishes and waiting tables," she said.

Xu said her father used the teeth he lost in prison and thread from his socks to make his wife a necklace. His bed sheet, she said, was used to make his wife a nightgown, and packaging from a sausage box was used to make a lantern for Xu for Chinese New Year.

As Wenli sits in jail, Xu is vocally criticizing the Chinese government and is using her art, which is on display this month at Boston University, to tell the story of her father's plight.

Engel said members of the conference thought it would be best to fight for Wenli, in particular, because it's easier to deal with one specific case of human rights violation instead of trying to tackle the whole issue.

So far, Engel has been in contact with the Boston branch of the AFL-CIO and the president of Boston University to see what they can do to help get Wenli his medication.

An official from Boston University said the president of the university publicly expressed support of Wenli last year, but no efforts have been made in getting him his medication.

Another issue involved with the story is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Wenli should have been protected under that agreement because he was arrested two months after the agreement was signed. But he wasn't.

That agreement — as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that was signed in 1997 — has not been ratified.

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Rabbi tries to use conference to help man in Chinese jail

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