Zionist Organization of America

Until recently, the city of Surabaya, on the Indonesian island of Java, had one synagogue. But now it has none, and nobody’s quite sure why.

Surabaya’s tiny Jewish population descends from Iraqi Jews, who in 1939 erected the Dutch-style Beth Shalom Synagogue. Though the building was a designated heritage site, in 2009, extremist Muslim demonstrators managed to seal it off to protest Israeli activity in the Gaza strip.