Jonathan Weber's great-grandfather, Joseph Weber, was one of the nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees who fled Europe from the Nazi-occupied areas in the 1930s and 1940s. At the age of 17, Joseph fled Austria with his parents and sister and settled in Shanghai. Here, he spent a difficult and unforgettable youth and formed a happy family. After the War, the Weber family moved to Bolivia and settled in the United States in 1952.

Around 1990, Joseph wrote a memoir for his children, in which more than one-third of the content detailed his experiences in Shanghai, those rare warm moments during his years of exile. Jonathan was moved by this emotion. He was the first person in his family to come to Shanghai to "trace his roots". In the summer of 2019, he met his future wife Annie from Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, when he was a college student. When they learned that Ningbo is close to Shanghai the family wanted to know if there’s anything in Shanghai related to the Jewish refugees. In early 2020, Jonathan stumbled upon the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum online and found the place preserving his family’s history here.