Among the more unusual chapters in the international history of the Bais Yaakov movement is the founding of a Bais Yaakov school in Shanghai, China. Shanghai had a small Jewish community since the nineteenth century, supported by such wealthy Iraqi-Jewish families as the Sassoons and the Kadoories, but this community swelled in the early 1940s with the arrival of many thousands of Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe—Shanghai was among the few places that did not require a visa for entry.