Asmara, Eritera - The old wooden benches in Asmara's only synagogue have long been vacant, but Samy Cohen still remembers where every person sat.
"My father Menahem Cohen was sitting here, and here, another uncle, the brother of my mother," he says, pointing to the empty seats, his footsteps echoing in the candlelit building.
When 60-year-old Cohen was growing up in the 1950s in this small Horn of Africa nation, Asmara boasted a vibrant resident Jewish community of about 500 people.
Today, he is the last Jew native to Eritrea left here.
Most came as traders from across Europe and the Middle East, who then emigrated from Yemen at the turn of the last century, hoping to cash in on the opportunity offered by Italy's colonisation of this nation bordering the Red Sea.
"In almost all periods there is a fair amount of migration of Jewish communities to places where there are opportunities," said Menahem Kanafi, Israel's ambassador to Eritrea.
"In lots of cases, Jews in Arab countries saw a possibility of living here, not under oppressive conditions, and of making a life for themselves."
But the community -- unrelated to the much older native Jewish population in neighbouring Ethiopia, where thousands still remain despite mass relocations to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s -- has faded away.
Though many Eritrean Jews left for Israel when it gained independence in 1948, a 30-year independence war against arch-foe Ethiopia beginning in the 1960s and the decline of the economy pushed even more of the community to leave for greener pastures in Europe or Israel.
Cohen now rarely manages to gather the 10 people required to perform many Jewish ceremonies, and must care for the 100-year old synagogue alone. The last bar mitzvahs and weddings were celebrated there in the 1970s.
"There are business people who come and go, and the staff at the Israeli embassy, but a continuing Jewish community here is not really a hope for the future," Kanafi added.
Officially, Eritrea's 4.2 million population is equally divided between Christians and Muslims, and Jews were always a small minority here.
Although human rights groups now regularly accuse the government of persecution of minority religious groups, Eritrean Jews say their community has always lived in harmony with the local population and its government.
Residents now living around the synagogue in houses once occupied by the Jewish community, close to both the city's main mosque as well as several churches, stress that Eritreans of different beliefs have long lived peacefully side-by-side -- as compared to Ethiopia where Jews say politics fanned anti-Semitiism in a country with a proud Christian Orthodox tradition and where Jews had long been a target of missionaries.
"There is no problem between the religions in Asmara," said one old man, dressed in a neat white skull cap and drinking coffee on a shady side street beside the synagogue.
"As people, we Eritreans tolerate each other, be they Muslim like me, Christian or Jewish."
Cohen has nothing but happy memories of growing up in Asmara, busy with weddings, bar mitzvahs and other ceremonies.
"That was a very enthusiastic life and many children, many parties, all of us going to the Italian schools in the morning, all together in one car," Cohen said.
"All the people would come here, and during holy days, it was sometimes even hard to find a place to sit," he added.
The old schoolhouse beside the synagogue, once the hub of a busy Jewish community, is now a small museum full of old photographs.
"There are so many memories here for me," Cohen said. "Now it is very different, but I remember the good times with my friends here of the past."
Walking slowly among the graves covered in purple flowers in the Jewish cemetery on a hilltop overlooking the city, Cohen's affection for Eritrea is clear, but he finds his reason for staying harder to put into words.
"I am tied to this place, it is not simple to explain," Cohen added, whose wife and daughters left for Italy in 1998 when fighting broke out with Ethiopia in a bloody two-year border war.
"But we should be always optimists: if there are not enough to pray here, then we can pray in other places -- Tel Aviv, London or Rome -- where other members of the Asmara community live now."