That’s funny – you don’t look Chinese…

Sweltering in the thirty-plus degree humidity of a Singapore “spring”, one can only marvel at how much this place resembles a 21st Century version of England – apart from the weather. Three-pin electric plugs, cars driving on the left, English street names and the ubiquitous English language – one starts to wonder what so many Chinese-looking people are doing here. But your Singaporeans are a fiercely independent lot – any attempt to use one of my few phrases of Mandarin “Ni-shi chingua ren?” (“Are you Chinese?”) is met by an instant riposte “Bu-shi; wo shi Singapor-ren!” (“ No, I’m a Singaporean”.)

And indeed they are a people apart. The cafés are bustling, full of an ethnic mixture of Taiwanese, Malays, Vietnamese, and Chinese – even Europeans. The air of high-rise prosperity is everywhere – hard to see traces of an economic crisis here.

But this ethnic mix is not reflected in the synagogues – at least not in the orthodox Magen Avoth Synagogue that I visited on Shabbat. Situated in – where else? – Waterloo Street, it’s a manageable walk from the Marina Bay–Chinatown area where I stayed. The community is organized by two rabbis– Lubavitcher , of course; Rabbis Rivni and Abergel are assisted by a cohort of Yeshiva Bochers, but the services are decidedly Sephardi. The Torah reading is à la Sephardi – from upright scrolls in a metallic cylinder – and does not get under way until an auction has been conducted to award the Aliyot, which procedure some may find distasteful. But this determinedly Sephardi minhag seemed very strange to my eyes, as the congregation was decidedly Ashkenazi. In fact, it brought to mind a variation on the old hoary joke: Western Jew visiting a synagogue in China is barred from entering by a Chinese-Jewish warden who tells him “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.” In fact, the congregation in Magen Avoth was so homogeneously European that I would expect a Chinese-looking visitor to be treated with curiosity.

Alas, even in this cosmopolitan environment the synagogue has to be guarded; although, despite its proximity to Israel-hating Malaysia, as well as Indonesia, Singapore maintains good relations with the Jewish state. Indeed Singapore’s military was created by Israel and modeled after the IDF, and cultural and economic ties are strong. Recently, a whole page of Singapore’s newspaper of record, the Straits Times, was devoted to a sympathetic article by Gordon Thomas (author of Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad) on the recent assassination of the Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Mahbouh; not something you are likely to find in an English paper. It is said that Singapore’s affinity with Israel is because it too is surrounded by potentially hostile states. Let us hope that for both countries this hostility will diminish and its prosperity increase.