Beacon of hope

Every day, shortly before 9am and amid the roar of morning traders, bicycle bells, honk-ing taxis and yelping dogs in Downtown Yangon's busy 26th Street, Moses Samuels unlocks a gate. In doing so, he opens up a historic haven in the heart of the Myanmese city, just a few blocks north of the Yangon River, and maintains a tradition that has come perilously close to disappearing.

Samuels - whose Burmese name is U Than Lwin - is one of the few remaining members of a once-vibrant Jewish community living in Myanmar. Like his father, and his father's father before him, Samuels maintains a stalwart stewardship of the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue - the last surviving synagogue in the country. Daily, from 9am to midday, he sits in a rattan chair, facing out to the street, patiently waiting for visitors to welcome. His attire - a traditional Burmese longyi (sarong), a crisp white Savile Row-style shirt and a kippah (skullcap) - is testament to the varied geographical and historical factors that have shaped his community.

Samuels has kept this daily routine for the past 35 years, even during the darkest days of military rule, when visitors were few and far between and it was rare that the synagogue could muster a minyan, the minimum of 10 male worshippers required for a service. Of late, however, due to an influx of tourists - and foreign business investors and prospectors - an almost constant trail of curious visitors trundles through the door.

Built between 1893 and 1896, Musmeah Yeshua (which in Hebrew means "to bring forth salvation") is tucked away behind white walls, almost entirely hidden from the street. The entrance is flanked by open-fronted stores, presided over by betel-chewing Chinese gold dealers and Urdu-speaking traders clasping prayer beads. A menorah sits atop the cast-iron gate, the building only partially visible beyond the wall. One could easily stroll past oblivious, fooled by an unassuming exterior that belies the rich heritage within.

Enter, however, and you discover a vaulting, high-ceilinged chamber with a central bimah platform (as per the Sephardic tradition). Magnificent memorial lamps hang overhead and two Torah scrolls remain of the 126 once held here, brought from Baghdad more than a century ago.

As Ruth Fredman Cernea notes, in her meticulously researched history of the Jewish community in this mostly Buddhist country, Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma, "The synagogue stands as testimony to the proud community that constructed it."

Fleeing persecution in Iraq and Iran, Jews first came to the port city of Rangoon - as Yangon was then known - in the late 19th century, recognising the trading opportunities offered under British rule in this bustling colonial outpost. And the community swiftly rose to prominence. For example, it was a Jewish businessman who established the city's first bioscope theatre, in the 1880s.