Jakob Rosenfeld

Jakob Rosenfeld (January 11, 1903 – April 22, 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.[1]

Rosenfeld (center) with Liu Shaoqi on the left, and Chen Yi on the right.

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.

He worked as a urologist with his own private clinic in Vienna and was a member of Social Democratic Party of Austria. The party was banned in the coup of 1933.[2]

After the Anschluss, Rosenfeld was deported to Dachau concentration camp and was there for a year.[2] and later to Buchenwald. In 1939, he was released and returned to Vienna. He and his brother immediately requested visas from the Chinese legation and travelled to Shanghai. Once in Shanghai he opened a successful practice in urology, gynecology and obstetrics.[2]

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.

Due to the severe shortage of doctors he founded the Huazhong Medical School, which trained the medical teams for the New Fourth Army.[2]

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 November 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 younger brother Joseph. He died two years later after suffering heart failure.

China has erected a statue in his honour, a hospital called Rosenfield Hospital in Junan County , Shandong 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.[2]

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.

A bronze memorial (from 1993) at the entrance of Unfallkrankenhaus (UKH) hospital in Graz, Austria depicts Rosenfeld.[3]

He is buried in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Since the China–Israel relations were reestablished in 1992 a Chinese delegation has visited his grave yearly.[2]