[1] During and after the Second World War many Jews left the country, first under pressure from the Japanese occupation of Burma, and later because of repression under the newly independent nationalist Burmese government.

[2] But it was in the mid-19th century, during the British colonial period, that Jewish merchants from Iraq and India began establishing sizable communities in Rangoon and Mandalay.

Under British rule, the local Jewish community prospered as merchants developed small businesses, and traders worked in cotton and rice.

"[3] In the early part of the twentieth century, various minority groups began to work toward establishing some autonomy, including the Karen people, who were indigenous to the territory.

In the drive for independence, the Burmese majority worked to dispossess and defeat the minority groups and strictly limited their rights in the new government.

Since the late 20th century, some of the Mizo people, who are ethnically descended from Tibet and live in the north of Burma, on the Indian border, have identified as Jews.

Their settlers in Israel have embraced Orthodox Judaism (they had to convert to Orthodoxy to be considered citizens) and have been settled in the West Bank and Gush Katif.

[6] The local Jews use the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, but it rarely draws the required quorum of men for a full religious service.

Often, employees of the Israeli embassy help maintain regular services; Moses Samuels, a native-born descendant of Jewish immigrants from Iraq, took on his father's role as Trustee of the synagogue to keep it up, along with the cemetery.

[7] In 2007 the US-ASEAN Council for Business and Technology, the US-ASEAN Business Council's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, obtained a license from the United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to raise funds for a humanitarian project: the maintenance and restoration of the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in Yangon.

They credited anthropologist Ruth Cernea, who wrote a history of the Jewish community in Rangoon; Laura Hudson of the Council, and Stuart Spencer, a member of the synagogue's diaspora, as three leaders of this project.