"There are exactly 20 of us left in the whole country," he said this week, "and I'm the youngest."

Samuels, who is 25, took a subway to Madison Square Garden Thursday for the annual Yeshiva University commencement exercises - and as diverse as his 2,000 or so fellow graduates were, it is safe to say that Samuels belonged in a class by himself.

For one thing, he is the first Jewish student in school history from his country, which is known as Myanmar to its military rulers and as Burma to much of the rest of the world.

For another, his application to attend Yeshiva, an Orthodox citadel in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, was smuggled out of Myanmar by a tourist from New York.

There's one other thing. At home, Samuels uses another name. Under a military rule that forbids the use of "non-Burmese" names, he is Aung Soe Lwin.

"It doesn't mean anything special," he said. "It's just something I picked more or less at random."

What makes Sammy run, he said, is a desire to become an international businessman and eventually to take his place as a leader of the small, shrinking Jewish community at home.

He has taken the first giant step on both goals - his degree is in international business and, with a 3.89 grade point average, he was valedictorian of the James Striar School of General Jewish Studies, where he studied the Torah and Talmud. (Undergraduates at Yeshiva are required to complete a dual curriculum of Jewish and general studies).

Samuels is not ready to return home just yet. He intends to attend graduate school at Yeshiva, which will keep him in New York for another two years, and he hopes to gain some on-the-job experience in international business.

"I'll go home one day," said Samuels, who left Myanmar about six years ago. He spent 18 months on a collective farm in Israel, where he learned Hebrew, before enrolling at Yeshiva. "I am needed there."

'There" is Yangon, the capital that until 1989 was known as Rangoon. Once it was home to about 3,000 Jews, but most fled when Japan invaded the country during World War II. Today, Samuels said, there are exactly eight Jews left in the capital, which has a population of 4 million.

"There's my father," he said, "my mother, my two sisters, three old people who are not relatives - and me." The rest of the community is scattered around the country.

There is another reason to go home. His father, Moses Samuels, is the caretaker of Musmeah Yeshua ("Salvation of Joshua"), the only synagogue in Myanmar. Before his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were Jewish community leaders. One day, Samuels said, he expects to carry on the tradition.

His father also runs a travel agency called Myanmar Shalom, which specializes in Jewish tourism, and it was through a tourist that Samuels made the Yeshiva connection.

"If it wasn't for tourists, I wouldn't be here," Samuels said. "It was a visitor to the synagogue who told me about Yeshiva University and offered to carry my application back to New York and deliver it personally. That's how I got here."

There is a Burmese community in New York, mostly in the Jackson Heights and Elmhurst sections of Queens, but Samuels has not gotten involved with it. Instead, every summer, he flies home to visit and catch up on events there.

Earlier this year, he celebrated Passover at home for the first time in three years. One of his duties, as the youngest person present, was to find a piece of matzoh hidden before the Seder and exchange it for a prize. "That's something kids usually do," he said. "But there aren't any kids, so ... "

The necessary kosher foodstuffs are contributed by the Israeli Embassy. Its staff, plus any visitors, are invited to the Seder and religious services, held in the synagogue. His father presided at the ceremonial meal, something else Samuels expects to do one day.

"As long as my family is there," he said, "there will be a Jewish community."

Originally published on May 27, 2006