The first Jewish settlers in Singapore arrived in the 1820’s, after the local sultan allocated Britain space for the construction of a port in his territory in 1824. By the end of that same year, the Jews had already built a for-ty-seat synagogue and purchased land for a Jewish cemetery, and the tiny community began to prosper. Some of its members became involved in local politics. By 1856, four Jews were serving on the Board of Municipal Commissioners (along with 8 Arabs, 9 Armenians, and 79 Europeans). The majority of the Jewish community’s members were of Iraqi, Iranian, and even Afghan origin, and they controlled some fifty percent of the colony’s real estate and trade. At the time ownership of half of Singapore’s lands was in the hands of a very wealthy Jewish family headed by Sir Menashe Meyer, which had settled in the colony in the early nineteenth century. In 1878, an ornate synagogue called Magen Avot (Shield of the Fathers) was founded, and that synagogue functions to this very day. According to the 1931 local census, some 832 Jews lived on the island at that time. The community was known for its highly efficient communal structure and the strong bonds of solidarity among its members, in addition to the thorough Jewish edu-cation given to its children. It also had ties with and raised funds for the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem.
In the late 1930’s, stories of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany reached Singapore, brought by several German Jewish refugees who had managed to reach the colony, but the tales seemed to the local community to be of another world, although it did raise funds to help those refugees
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who found haven in Shanghai. The Jewish community of Singapore, like the non-Jewish one, believed the British propaganda that the island was impregnable, easily defensible, and impossible to capture. Their confi-dence was shattered when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and two days later Japanese planes sunk two British dreadnaughts, The Prince of Wales and Repulse. The victories over these warships, the pride of the British navy, shocked Singapore, whose population now felt unprotected and exposed to Japanese onslaught. When Japanese forces landed in Malaya in the second week of December 1941, panic began to spread.
As Malaya fell to the Japanese a very small number of Malayan Jews, estimated at some thirty souls from Penang and Kuala Lumpur, were evac-uated by the British authorities to Singapore, which appeared to be a safer haven. However, as the Japanese troops marched unopposed southward toward Singapore, fear spread among the European settlers there. Like many others, Jews sought ways to escape the island as fast as possible. Those with means and British passports either escaped by sea to Burma and from there to India or boarded the few ships that still sailed directly to nearby safe ports, chiefly Calcutta and Bombay. Some even headed to Australia. By mid-1942 some 250 Singaporean Jews had settled in Bombay, where they were aided by the local government and Jewish community.
Several Jews attempted to volunteer for the British army defending the island, but were turned down because of a law that banned the recruitment of local Asians to the British army. A few did manage to volunteer for the local auxiliary forces, among them David Marshal (born Mishal in 1908), a successful lawyer and a leading figure in the Jewish community who even participated in local politics.
During the ten weeks between the beginning of the fighting in Malaya in December 1941 and the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942, some thousand Jews—two thirds of the community—escaped the island.
Much of their property was destroyed by Japanese bombardments. Some deposited their money and valuables in the hands of their local neighbors before escaping. Those who remained now had to live under the new occu-pation regulations dictated by the Japanese military authorities. The atti-tude of the Japanese to members of the local population was determined according to nationality, country of origin, and whether the individual was a civilian or a soldier. While the Japanese placed some 135,000 British, Australian, New Zealander, Indian and local soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps, two days after the fall of Singapore 1,279 Europeans belonging to enemy nations were put in detention camps. The fate of the local Chinese
minority was worse: it is estimated that during the four years of their rule the Japanese murdered some 5,000 to 25,000 Chinese residents of Singapore.
The Jewish community now dwindled to between 600-700 souls. The Japanese policy toward its members was similar to that toward the gen-eral population. However, on March 15, 1942, a month after the fall of the island, its remaining Jews were ordered to present themselves at police headquarters where they were instructed to wear on their arms a band on which was written in Japanese the word “Yudaya.” The few German Jews present were exempt because they were considered nationals of a friendly country, but the other Jews, including the wealthy, had to wear the band.
Apart from that, they were allowed to carry on with their lives unmolested and were able to observe their religious rites and practices. By the end of the first year of the Japanese occupation of Singapore, the local Jewish commu-nity was virtually unharmed, partly due to the sympathetic attitude of their local non-Jewish neighbors. The only true indications of trouble were the few cases of Japanese occupiers stealing Jewish property, claiming that rich Jews in America would send their brethren financial aid.
All this changed on April 5, 1943, when Japanese soldiers arrested a hundred Jewish men, giving them less than twenty minutes to collect their belongings. They were interned in the infamous Changi Camp near Singapore (today the site of the international airport). The treatment they received there was no different than that meted out to the other 3,500 detainees in Changi. It seems that they enjoyed certain privileges, as they were allocated a special place in the camp and allowed to practice their religion, but like others imprisoned there, they suffered from lack of food, diseases, the terrible heat and humidity, and the absence of anything to keep them busy. Their main effort went simply to surviving the ordeal.
It is not clear why the Japanese decided at that point to arrest a sixth of the members of the Singapore Jewish community and imprison them.
Nor is the basis of the list of names from which they were operating clear.
It it known that at the time of the arrest, a German ship was anchored in the port and German officers on board it wanted the Japanese to take cer-tain measures against the Jews. Nonetheless, it is hard to believe that the Japanese authorities acted simply on the basis of such a request. It can be assumed that by making the arrests they wanted to appease the Germans, given the fact that this took place at the same time as the Jewish ghetto of Hongkew was set up in Shanghai. It should also be recalled that the broad policy outlines toward the Jews were determined in Tokyo, but their imple-mentation was left to local military commanders, who acted as they saw fit
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Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years
taking into account the changing conditions and the progress of the war—
and their own personal idiosyncrasies.
As the fortunes of war turned against Japan, so did the attitude of Singapore’s Japanese rulers turn against the local Jews. On October 10, 1943, forty of the hundred Jews arrested in April were removed from Changi and sent to a special camp of the Kempeitai, the Japanese special police units, where they were tortured and accused of passing intelligence to enemy forces. The other Jewish prisoners who remained in Changi were moved on May 1, 1944, to a camp that had once been the headquarters of the Royal Air Force in Singapore. The conditions there were no better than those prevail-ing in Changi, and the prisoners were kept busy maintainprevail-ing the camp and building additional quarters for other prisoners. On March 22, 1945, five months before Japan surrendered, the remaining Jews of Singapore, consist-ing of 222 men, 200 women, and 50 children, were all placed in this camp.
The men and women were separated; the children under ten stayed with their mothers, and those over ten stayed with their fathers. In this camp they huddled together with over 3,000 other prisoners, mainly British and Australian. In the four years of Japanese occupation some fifty Jews died, most of them from old age, illness or Japanese bombardment at the begin-ning of the war. Eight disappeared and presumably were tortured to death.
But most of the community survived the war and returned home after Japan surrendered. Although much of their property had been stolen and local squatters had taken over their homes, they were able to rehabilitate their lives with the assistance of the British authorities. Soon those who had spent the war years in India also retuned, and the community arose from the ashes.
David Marshal had been one of the Jewish men interned in a prisoner- of-war camp. In April 1942 he was sent to Japan as a forced laborer and assigned to work in mines in the northern Japanese home island of Hokkaido, where he survived the war. After returning home he became once again involved in local politics, and in 1955 was appointed as the first chief minister of the colony on the eve of its gaining independence. He held that post for less than two years and was later appointed Singapore’s ambassador to France and other European nations. He retired in 1993 and died two years later.