Jewish Cemetery and the History of the Jews in Penang
Bat Zion
SarShalom Prophetic ministry to Israel <[email protected]>
February 12, 2003
Attached below is newspaper article which appeared in the Malay Mail on January
18, 2003. Two intercessors and myself were so excited to read this article. The
LORD commissioned me to go to the Jewish Cemetery and blow the shofar.
We decided to drive to Penang which is 350 kilometers away from Kuala Lumpur,
the capital of Malaysia where we were. Someone commented, why go to see the
dead? Of course, we do not go to see the dead, the LORD asked me to blow the shofar to the dry bones of Israel in the graveyard as a prophetic act to Israel!
(Eze 37:4) I did as I was told.
The LORD has been revealing to me & other intercessors for many months that the
Jews must return to Israel especially from the Arab nations.
I was really shocked to read that there were shoe-shiner Jews in Penang Island.
Tears just came out of the eyes of one intercessor when she read this article
that day.
There was a huge eagle flapping its wings flying really low in the sky (like the
height of the building) right in front of the car of a friend who was leading us
to the Jewish Cemetery! I have never seen a real eagle before in my life which
flies so low! As I called the sister in front of us who was leading the way, to
ask her was it an eagle? She roared into holy laughter, eagle! eagle! Then I
heard the LORD said,"The ministry of SarShalom is taking off!"
In Messiah’s service,
Bat Zion
www.geocities.com/sarshalompropheticjerusalem
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In the heart of Georgetown, in a lazy Jalan Zainal Abidin, a tall and long beige
brick wall, about three metres high,with just one entrance. On the huge and
heavy silver-painted iron gates were the words ‘JEWISH CEMETERY’.
After introducing myself, caretaker Nagaratnam Muniandy, affectionately known as
“Raju””gave me a big smile and invited me in, as if he had been waiting for me.
I tried not to be too awed by what lay in front of my eyes-weirdly-shaped
headstones of 120 graves on a well-maintained 38,087 sq ft plot of land.Jalan
Zainal Abidin is a link road between Jalan Burmah and Jalan Macalister.Locals
would recognize the road better by its former name, Jalan Jahudi or Yehudi
Road. Fenced off by sturdy walls, this cemetery has evaded scrutiny by the dint
of its obscure location. Anchored by an electrical sub-station at one end, and
surrounded by pre-war shophouses,the cemetery is secure. Only the whirr of four
air-conditioning units, bolted into the back walls of some shophouses behind the
cemetery, filled the quiet atmosphere of the cemetery during day-time. Legend
has it that the site was given to the local Jewish community by an Englishwoman
of Jewish extraction,who had acquired the land in the early 19th century, as a
token of thanks for her recovery from a dire illness.
She was later buried at the site in 1835.Since this point concurs with the
oldest gravestone found in the cemetery, the benefactress maybe tentatively
identified as Shoshan Levi, wife of Tzolach, who died on July 9, 1835. The walls
are broken approximately every two metres by capped pillars. There is only one
entrance to the site – the gates mentioned earlier. The graves bear the remains
of infants, children, teenagers and adults, local residents and foreign
visitors.
The oldest graves can be seen directly opposite the gates on a low stone base,
as one enters the site. The rest of the graves are set in no particular order
until the early 1930’s.
From then on, the graves were arranged in the last row nearest to the back wall
in a rough chronological order. The graves of Cohens are set (as Jewish tradition
dictates) aside from the rest,in the North-Eastern corner of the cemetery,
adjacent to Raja’s house.
The grass was cut a few days before my visit. Nearly all the Hebrew and English
inscriptions on all the headstones are still visible. Only a few old headstones
have sunk into the earth a little, hiding their inscriptions. The Pulau Pinang
Municipal Council checks on the cemetery regularly, to check on the cleanliness
. Among the many names on the headstones there, the most common were Mordecai,
Manasseh, Jacob, Barookh and Ephraim. Raju said the last Jew was buried at the
cemetery in 1978. The sysnagogue in Nagore Road was closed in late 1976. One of
the reasons of its closure was that the “minyan” , a custom which requires a
quorum of at least 10 males aged 12 and above at a religious ceremony, could not
be met. This , coupled with lack of religious knowledge among succeeding
generations,forced the shutdown of Penang Island’s only synagogue.
A case study of the Jewish Diaspora in Penang Island (1830s-1970s)’by Raimy Che
Ross, Barton , Canberra –both courtesy of the Penang Island Heritage Trust.
JEWS ARRIVED IN MALAYA AS EARLY AS THE 11TH CENTURY
While numerous local and visiting Jews in the region have been buried in the
cemetery since then, it is interesting to note that Jews first arrived on the
soil of one country in in Asia way back in the 11th century. According to
a business record left by Abraham, son of legendary Jewish leader Maimonides,
traders from Fustat (the old city of Cairo), had traveled as far away as the
Malayan peninsula where the powerful Indianized port-civilisations of Kedah and
Langkasuka were thriving.
Dealing in dyes, textiles, medications, perfumes, precious stones and metals,
the traders traversed important centres in South East Asia. South –East Asia
also received a large wave of Jewish immigration during the post-war communist
regime in China. Much of China’s Jewish community, comprising refugees from
Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Europe, and descendants of Jews who had been in China
since the 8th century, fled to Hong Kong and South-East Asia, particularly
Singapore.
The cemetery in Penang Island was used largely to bury visiting Europeans who
died in the area during the British Colonial period. According to Jenny Hazell,
an official with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Berks, England, the
Commission is undertaking the maintenance of the grave of Second Lieutenant
Louis Victor Cohen, who died on Oct 9, 1941, at age 23. The Commission’s
resident caretaker, Ong Thiam Lye, who is also caretaker of the Taiping War
Cemetery, visits the cemetery every six months to clean the grass around the
grave. Although firm evidence of a Jewish trading presence in the Malay
Peninsula may only be gleaned from records dating back to the early 19th century
on the riverbanks of the Bujang Valley and well onto the 18th Century in the
cosmopolitan bazaars of Malacca. The significant arrival of Jews more precisely,
Shepardic Baghdadi- Jews in Penang Island may be dated with some confidence to
the 1830s. Their migration to the island was instigated by the presecutions
meted out by the Governor of Baghdad, Daud Pasha (1817-1831).
His acts of cruelty and injustice prompted a mass exodus of Baghdadi Jews from
Persia to India, where they established themselves as rich merchants and senior
members of the community.
By 1833, some 2000 BeneIsrael , an appellation by which they are still known in
India, were living in Surat and Bombay. Prominent among them were the Sassoon
and Meyer families, children of whom eventually expanded their fortunes to the
growing entreports of Lion City Island and Penang Island, and whose success
brought other members of the community to these islands. Historian Prof Emeritus
Datuk Khoo Kay Kim said politics and economics, rather than any religious
upsurge caused this country's - born Jews to leave the country. He ruled out
anti-semetism , or children of Ishmael ill-feelings towards the Jews, as the
reason many of the latter migrated to other countries, especially Australia,
from the 1970s. Khoo said it was unfortunate that not much history of the Jews
in Penang Island was documented. He said this could be due to the fact that
Penang Island was “overshadowed”by Singapore, where the Jewish community
flourished and prospered until today.
The caretaker claimed that a female descendant of the Barookh family pays him
his salary. “It’s impossible to see them. I have never met my boss,”he said,
when asked if we could interview any of his employers. He believed that there
are a few other descendants of Penang Island - born Jews on the island. “Many of
them married non-Jewish locals, I think.” As far as he can remember, he had only witnessed five burials.
“I still remember some of the Jews worked as shoe-shiners along the
five-foot-ways near the Capitol cinema in Jalan Prangin,” he said. The cinema is
gone, replaced by Komtar & Prangin Mall. “They would do their business alongside
the Gurkhas who sold rings and gemstones. They were Jews who did other jobs, as
well as those who were rich business people living in mansions on the island.”
Once in a while, there will be Jews dropping by the cemetery. They come from all
over the world and many sign on the tattered red leather-bound register that
Raju still maintains.