Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue () is the last remaining Jewish house of worship in Downtown Yangon and Burma's only synagogue. The synagogue stands between Indian paint shops and Muslim traders on a small street near the city centre. A plaque at the entrance of the building states that the present stone building, which was built between 1893 – 1896, replaced an earlier, smaller wooden structure that was erected in 1854. It is one of 188 sites on the Yangon City Development Council’s list of Heritage Buildings. It serves the few remaining Jews of the country, mostly descendants of Baghdadi Jews from Iraq. History The first synagogue was built in the 1850s for the increasing numbers of Baghdadi Jews from the Middle East, and Bene Israel and Cochini Jews from India arriving during British rule in Burma. It was a wooden building in 1854. The plot of land was granted by the British Colonial Government. The current building was completed in 1896. The neighborhood is now primarily Muslim. The community once had 126 Sifrei Torah at Musmeah Yeshua. The Jewish cemetery is about six miles away and was established in the 19th century; it has some 700 graves. A second synagogue, Beth El, was opened in 1932, reflecting the growth in population. The Jewish community worked as merchants and traders, and also with the British colonial government. In 1940, before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Jewish community in Rangoon reached its peak of 2,500 persons. Many Jews fled to India due to the Japanese occupation, as they were considered suspect as allies of the British. Beth El closed after the war due to the decline in population. Following Burma’s independence in 1948, the new government granted approval for an extension of the synagogue. More Burmese Jews left after the Burmese army seized power in 1962, as the government nationalised most businesses in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the 21st century, there were fewer than 50 Jews in Myanmar. 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. (The license was needed due to current US economic sanctions of Myanmar because of its human rights