By 1993, he was living his dream: he was married and ordained. But reality had added one small, unexpected change to the dream's script: he wasn't living in New Jersey, but in Bangkok, Thailand.

Monsoon season found the young rabbi peeling off his shoes and socks to wade through deep water to his new Thai home. On Shabbos in the scorching summer, when Bangkok's humidity feels like the wet hug of a steam bath, he would arrive at shul so drenched he needed to change clothes entirely — from Borsalino to socks.

Rabbi Kantor discovered that when he rode to work through Bangkok's gargantuan traffic snarls, he had toadjust his glasses more than once. On his left and on his right, he was passed by tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws), motorcycles with as many as five passengers perched on top, and an occasional elephant complete with taillights and license plate.

For the youngsters at the Chabad House kindergarten, it's another fun-filled day at school. At top right is Chani Kuperman, the teacher; standing next to her is Nechama Dina Kantor.

If the highways offered unusual sights, the sidewalks were hardly more familiar. Monks in flowing saffron robes would wander past the rabbi, begging him to put food into the bowls they carried. Shoppers filed in and out of stores selling idols, a business Rabbi Kantor had thought disappeared eons ago. Heavy traffic in narcotics (Bangkok has a world-class illicit drug market), an unabashed red light district, and innumerable religious cults presented the young rabbi with a moral and spiritual climate he hadn't pictured in his worst nightmares.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this kind of physical jungle," Rabbi Kantor, now 29, says. And yet, in this heart of darkness, he and his wife also discovered exquisite beauty.

Bangkok is renowned for many charms, including the exotic flowers that carpet it in a blaze of color. The city is also the world capital for ruby and sapphire trading, thanks to Thailand's rich mines.

Illicit drugs flow in Banglamphu, as does every type of non-kosher food imaginable, available in cheap restaurants that lure the Israelis with menus in Hebrew.

Yet the beauty that caught the imagination of Rabbi Kantor and his wife, Nechama Dina, was of a different order. For somehow, despite a setting of tremendous spiritual chaos and depravity, Jews by the hundreds in Bangkok have been discovering their own Jewish souls.

"Sometimes you see the most incredible miracles, and they're happening through you," Nechama Dina, 26, says. "You feel very humbled by it."

The Kantors had been invited by Bangkok's tiny Jewish population to become Chief Rabbi and Rebbetzin of Thailand, and to lead the city's two shuls: Beth Elisheva, built in the 1960's in a residential area, and Even Chen (Precious Stone), a Sephardic shul downtown that serves the gem merchants who visit Bangkok from around the world. Rabbi Kantor ministers the Beth Elisheva congregation Friday night and then walks four miles Shabbos morning to lead the Even Chen congregation.

The young couple also undertook the task of being spiritual mentors to the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young Israeli tourists who each year backpack through the city. Most of these men and women are fresh out of the army, anxious to experience all of Bangkok's libertine adventures.

The Kantors were surprised to find that Bangkok's Jews were open both to them and to Judaism, sometimes to an astonishing degree. Nechama Dina recalls that during an early foray downtown to buy disposable diapers for their newborn daughter, Chaya Mushka, she and her husband were standing on a street corner when an elderly Jew pulled up alongside them on a motorcycle, clambered off, and stared at them.

Rabbi Wilhelm and guests celebrate Purim.

"Where are you from?" he yelled. "Which cult are you from?"

"We're Jews," Mrs. Kantor said. "From New York!"

"What? I can't believe it!" he screamed.

The man hadn't seen anyone who looked like a Jew in years, he said. Seventy years old, sick with cancer, he spent most of his time in the hospital. He had come to the Far East with the American army and remained in Bangkok. His parents had wanted him to be the "perfect American," and as a result gave him no Jewish grounding whatsoever: no bar mitzvah, no Hebrew school, nothing remotely related to Yiddishkeit.

"We asked him if he wanted his bar mitzvah," Nechama Dina says.

"What! I can have my bar mitzvah now?" he yelled to them.

Rabbi Kantor had tefillin with him, and put them on the man. "He said Shema," Nechama Dina recalls, "and he said it so loud, and he was laughing and crying at the same time."

Though they tried to reach him at a later date, they have never heard from him again.

Perhaps the most striking scenes of Jews reuniting with their Judaism happen among the many young irreligious Israelis who crowd into the notorious Banglamphu area, Bangkok's very heart of spiritual darkness. In 1994, the Kantors opened the Ohr Menachem Chabad House in that section.

The spiritual impurity of the area is intense, gem dealer Sara Karmely says. Karmely, who hails from New York, makes frequent trips to Bangkok with her husband, who is also a gem merchant. "There are families there who sell their daughters at age 10. Prostitution is rampant. Everyone worships idols. They put food and drink in front of these statues and bow to them and take it very seriously. On the other hand, there are these Israelis who come looking for meaning in life, for answers."

Rabbi Kantor helps two young men put on tefillin.

Illicit drugs flow in Banglamphu, as does every type of non-kosher food imaginable, available in cheap restaurants that lure the Israelis with menus in Hebrew. The exotic, colorful cult temples are also a snare.

"When I see them, I just want to sob," Karmely says. "Eyes with no life in them. Jewish girls with rings in their noses, half-dressed, sometimes barefoot. Faces that look so old, so lost."

In the midst of all this is the Chabad House, a narrow five-floor structure, wedged into a neighborhood dominated by massage parlors. On Shabbos, meals are free. On weekdays, food in the restaurant on the first floor is heavily subsidized: four dollars for schnitzel, French fries, pita, salad, and a drink. Jewish music plays in the background.

Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm and his wife Nechamie, an Israeli couple whom Rabbi Kantor brought to Bangkok in 1995 to run the Chabad House, make friends with the young Israelis. The Wilhelms ask them to help complete the minyan in the shul above the restaurant. The couple teaches about tefillin, a mitzvah many of these Israelis astonishingly have not heard of before.

The demand for Chabad House's services — from classes to drug counseling to simple warmth — is constant. On Shabbos, more than 100 backpackers fill the shul to standing-room-only capacity. At meals, the crowd is so large it spills out into the street. During the week, an average 100 Israelis patronize the restaurant daily.

Sara Karmely, who has watched the Chabad House grow over the years, finds the Israelis more receptive to Torah than ever before. "I really believe that in their heart of hearts, these kids are looking for something. True, they go after the wrong thing at first, but their inner instinct is that they want real spirituality. They have a hunger and a thirst for Hashem's word."

"They're doing these ridiculous things in front of a piece of stone and are not embarrassed, and me, I'm a Jew and I'm afraid to wear a yarmulke and worship G-d?"

One Israeli boy, Ron, is a case in point. One Friday afternoon, after Sara lit Shabbos candles in the Even Chen Synagogue, she uncovered her eyes to see him staring at her. Like many of the Israelis, his head was shaved, and he wore shorts and sandals, in imitation of the Buddhist monks.

"Please pray for me as well," he asked her.

Broke, with no money to buy a ticket back to Israel, Ron had gone to the Israeli Consulate that morning for help. The Consulate directed him to the synagogue. The director agreed to give him money for a ticket home, but in return, he asked Ron to help make the minyan that evening.

When he entered the shul that Friday night, something in him "just woke up," Ron told Sara. By Shabbos morning, he was glowing. When he walked up to the bimah to accept an aliyah, he was so obviously proud that people cried seeing him.

On Sunday, the shul members taught Ron how to put on tefillin. He began studying Rambam. "He couldn't believe that 850 years ago we Jews knew such things and had such wisdom," Sara says. When he left Bangkok, he was headed home — to yeshiva, he told her.

If Ron is an example of a Jew who has come closer to Judaism through an encounter with holiness, still other Jews in Thailand are nudged back to Judaism by the spiritual impurity of Bangkok.

Moshe, a Jew of Moroccan descent, was shopping in one of the malls on Shabbos when he saw some distinguished Thai citizens bowing to an idol. The sight struck him like a bullet between the eyes. He thought to himself: "They're doing these ridiculous things in front of a piece of stone and are not embarrassed, and me, I'm a Jew and I'm afraid to wear a yarmulke and worship G-d?"

He resolved on the spot to keep the Torah and its mitzvos. Today he learns incessantly and gives scholarly discourses in shul on Shabbos.

Bangkok's year-round residents have also been catching the Jewish spirit, the Kantors note. Recently Thailand saw its first kosher wedding, complete with separate dancing on the gorgeous Pattaya beach, south of Bangkok. The mikvah, which the Lubavitcher Rebbe, zt'l, asked a local businessman to build a dozen years ago (at a time when many doubted it would ever be used), is being utilized by more and more women, some of whom adopted the mitzvah after hearing about its spiritual significance just once.

The value of every mitzvah is stressed by the Kantors. On the eve of the Kantors' first Sukkos in Thailand, they realized they had no aravos, the willow branches that are one of four species of plants needed to perform a central ritual of the holiday. A man from the community who had brought in some sets of esrogim (citron), hadasim (myrtle), and lulavim (palm branch) hadn't brought any aravos, because they don't last well.

The demand for Chabad House's services — from classes to drug counseling to simple warmth — is constant. On Shabbos, backpackers fill the shul to standing-room-only capacity.

After Rabbi Kantor searched frantically but unsuccessfully for a local aravah tree, the president of the community, Avraham Kashani, offered to pay all expenses to fly in aravos from Hong Kong, a three-hour plane trip away. An hour before the onset of the holiday, a bewildered Chinese non-Jew landed in the Bangkok airport, carrying what he considered to be a strange plant. Hired by Kashani to bring the aravos to the community as soon as possible, the Chinese worker miraculously made it in time, despite the fact that Bangkok was experiencing gridlock traffic due to a special public appearance by the King of Thailand that day.

When Rabbi Kantor saw the aravos, he almost cried in frustration. They were dry and miserably cracked. That night he thumbed through several books of Jewish law before he was convinced that two of the desiccated bunch were kosher for use. On Sukkos morning, the entire community, one by one, pronounced the blessings over the set, which would not have been possible without the two aravos.

"It turned out the whole thing cost about $1,800," Rabbi Kantor said. "The aravah, without taste or smell, symbolizes the simple Jew. We had to expend so much energy and cost to have aravos; otherwise there would be no mitzvah and no brachah for any of us. This should point out to us the energy we must be willing to invest for even the simplest Jew."

Moshe Katsav, Israel's Tourism Minister (center), prepares to sign the Chabad House guest book as Jewish community leader Avraham Kashani (right) and Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm look on.

Since that first Sukkos, Rabbi Kantor had been searching for a local aravah tree. All his attempts to plant the species failed. A few months ago, when the rabbi took a break in his eighteen-hour-day of teaching, program planning, and fund-raising to take his wife and children to the park, he stopped and stared.

"I looked at the pond and I couldn't believe it," he said. "Yes, there they were, two beautiful willow trees. I met the gardener and he said, no problem, he would give me aravos for my religious ceremony when the time comes."

Even though the community has grown rapidly in recent decades, after Jewish gem dealers discovered Thailand's ruby and sapphire assets, it is still tiny by most standards. An estimated 200 to 300 families, composed of Ashkenazim and Sephardim from around the world, compose the community. In recent years, this number has been swelled by an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young Jews from Israel seeking adventure in Bangkok, a popular and cheap backpacking destination for them after they finish their military service.

In his role as Chief (and only) Rabbi of Bangkok, Rabbi Kantor succeeded a string of rabbis and American army chaplains, none of whom stayed long at the job, because of its many difficulties. When the Kantors arrived, there were no Jewish schools, and keeping kosher was extremely difficult.

Today, in addition to arranging for the kosher slaughter of 500 to 700 chickens a month and supervising the kosher production of a dozen other food products — both for the community and for export, as the ~'s representative in Thailand — Rabbi Kantor teaches a daily Gemara (Daf Yomi) lesson before morning services, and runs a monthly barbecue and lecture for young couples. His projects include a Seder for 700 men and women on Passover. Nechama Dina, the mother of four, heads a Sunday school and a nursery school, teaches Judaism to adult women, and has inspired about a dozen women to use the community's mikvah.

Shulamis Yehudis Gutfreund is a former staff writer for the Miami Herald, and was the founding editor of the Jewish Women's Journal. She lives in Boston, MA.