In late May, crowds filled the ornate white-and-blue tiled Ghriba synagogue in Hara Sghira, the smaller of two Jewish enclaves in Djerba, as part of the annual pilgrimage that has long attracted outsiders to the island.
Smith came up with the idea of using five-pointed stars, which appear in several dark-blue domes inside the synagogue.
"These kids can't go to a park, so let's build a park inside where they can go," he remembered telling his colleague Russell F. Robinson, chief executive of the fund, a century-old Zionist organization that collects coins in blue metal boxes in synagogues and Jewish centers.
The rows of blue plastic chairs in the synagogue are now mostly empty.
The synagogue, with a blue Star of David over its gate, is in the heart of the Muslim district of this capital -- once called Rangoon -- on a bustling one-way lane jammed with open-fronted shops selling paint, fishing nets, textiles and household goods.
The robber, unnerved, spotted Rabbi Werzberger warming up his blue 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme before driving to a synagogue.
"My patients become my rescuers," he told me out of the blue one day on the way to the synagogue.
Shalom Synagogue (No. 38C) hides behind sky blue metal doors with a knocker in the shape of a bunch of grapes.
Finds there include a workshop that produced royal purple and blue dye from murex snails and a fifth-century synagogue, the first archaeological evidence of Jewish life in Christian Lycia.
To help turn the open seat blue, Harry Reid handpicked Jacky Rosen, a software developer and president of a synagogue in Henderson, Nev.
