Myanmar’s Jews on Verge of Being One of Lost Tribes

Moses Samuels refuses to migrate to Israel. He has a legacy to tend to.

The caretaker of Myanmar’s only synagogue, Samuels is the standard bearer for the country’s rapidly shrinking Jewish community, now just 20 souls and in danger of disappearing in another generation.

In this predominantly Buddhist country, Samuels, 50, is as much an icon of Judaism as the 105-year-old Musmeah Yeshua synagogue, one of Yangon’s most distinctive buildings with its blue Star of David and brown window shutters.

“If I leave, who will look after this place?” asks Samuels, who inherited the voluntary caretaker’s job from his father.

“This is our heritage. It is more important to me than Israel. Nobody can force me to emigrate,” he says while walking a visitor through the synagogue.

The two-story, whitewashed synagogue was built between 1893 and 1896 in typical British colonial architecture, replacing an earlier wooden structure erected in 1846.

Its interior offers a vivid contrast between the old and the new. On the walls hang Israeli tourism posters and an oil painting of the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City looking down on colonial-era teak benches with woven wicker seats.

Two 100-year-old copies of the Torah, Judaism’s holy book, are encased in Oriental silver cylinders. Quartz clocks with Star of David faces--on sale for $6 to $10--cram the shelves in an antechamber that serves as Samuels’ office.

The Jews of Myanmar, which was formerly known as Burma, are descendants of 19th century migrants from Iraq, Europe and India who came either with the British colonial army or as teak, rice and cotton traders.

Before World War II, more than 2,500 Jews lived in Myanmar, most of them with roots in Baghdad, Iraq, which once had a thriving Jewish community among its predominantly Muslim population.

By 1969 the number of Jews here had dwindled to 500, and now only eight families remain. The rest moved to the United States, Australia, India and Israel in search of better lives or drawn by their faith to the Promised Land.

Jews have fared well in military-ruled Myanmar, says Amir Shaviv of the New York-based American Joint Distribution Committee, a nonpolitical Jewish relief group.

Myanmar’s junta is widely criticized for its human rights record against political opponents such as democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her followers. But it is generally acknowledged that the government permits freedom of worship to all faiths.

The politics of Myanmar has “not affected the status of the Jewish community at all. They don’t suffer as Jews,” says Shaviv, whose group has been helping Jews here for 50 years.

The real threat to the Jewish community comes from a circle of self-destruction. Emigration has made it harder for young members to find spouses, leading to more migration and marriages outside the community.

“Demographically speaking, it seems that the community faces extinction,” Shaviv says. “However, in our experiences many communities that were labeled extinct have come to life when circumstances changed rapidly.”

For example, he says, political change in Myanmar could spur business, bringing foreign businessmen including Jews who could reestablish a community just as others did two centuries ago.

But until then, the future looks gloomy.

Among Myanmar’s 20 Jews, only five are unmarried: Samuels’ 20-year-old son and 22- and 25-year-old daughters, and a 38-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman. None has any immediate plans to marry.

Sammy Samuels, the youngest of Myanmar’s Jews who recently returned after spending a year in Israel at a kibbutz, plans to go to college in the United States to study computer software.

“But if I marry, I would want her to move to Myanmar. Otherwise I won’t marry,” he says.

With such a small community, Friday prayers are subdued affairs, attended by four or five people. Always in attendance are Samuels and his son. The synagogue hasn’t had a rabbi since 1968, so Sammy leads the prayers, being the only person who can read Hebrew.

During “high holidays” the synagogue comes alive, transforming into an interfaith assembly of Jews and well-wishers who include non-Jewish spouses and Samuels’ neighbors and friends in the predominantly ethnic Indian neighborhood where he lives.

On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Samuels organizes a feast, serving typical Jewish food such as falafel, pita bread and roast chicken. His Indian friends, who are Muslims and Hindus, bring Indian savories such as samosa pastry and rasgulla sweets.

The synagogue is in downtown Yangon near the end of a narrow one-way street lined on both sides with hardware stores owned mostly by ethnic Indians.

Two shops selling paint and fishing net abut the synagogue’s gray steel gate, which is capped by a tiled facade embedded with a seven-armed Jewish candelabra in mosaic.

Samuels says money for the old synagogue’s upkeep is always a problem. He depends mostly on donations and help from the Joint Distribution Committee.

Samuels, who has Iraqi, Iranian and British heritage, often ends up using money from his family’s party-furniture rental business.

“My father made me promise that I would never allow the synagogue to close down as long as I live. I can’t let him down,” Samuels says.