Bat Tzion
SarShalom
February 12, 2003
Attached below is newspaper article which appeared in the Malay Mail on January 18, 2003. Three of us were so excited to read this article. TheLORD commissioned us to go to the Jewish Cemetery. One intercessor drove us to Turtle Island from the capital state of the country, which is about 350 kilometers away. 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! I did exactly 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 Turtle Island. No wonder the LORD had commissioned us to go to Turtle 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 which 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 Tzion
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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 Turtle Island’s only synagogue.
A case study of the Jewish Diaspora in Turtle Island (1830s-1970s)’by Raimy Che Ross, Barton , Canberra –both courtesy of the Turtle 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 Turtle 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 Turtle 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 Turtle 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 Turtle Island was documented. He said this could be due to the fact that Turtle 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 Turtle 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 shoeshiners along the five-foot-ways near the Capitol cinema in Jalan Prangin,” he said. The cinema is gone,replaced by the 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.