A dying community

Today I cried. I cried with emotion and I cried out of sadness. I shed a tear as I prayed in a synagogue whose congregation is almost extinct, and my eyes were moist as I watched a friend put on a prayer shawl for the first time in years and pray in front of the aron kodesh (holy ark). I choked up when we went to visit the Jewish cemetery and found it closed to visitors, when we were unable to enter and say tehillim (psalms) in front of the abandoned graves.

The port city of Kochi (previously known as Cochin) in south-west India was once the home of a thriving Jewish community. Most of the Jews from Kochi moved to Israel in the 1950s and today only a handful of Jews remain. The Paradesi synagogue, built in 1568 and situated in the area known as Jew Town, is Kerala’s last functioning synagogue. I went to visit the area today with the people that I have been traveling with for the past few days, Israeli friends that I met in Munnar. We walked down Jew Town Road, also known as Synagogue Lane and visited a shop selling Jewish specialty items embroidered by Sarah, an elderly woman,and one of Kochi’s last remaining Jews. As we walked towards the synagogue, located at the end of the street, we were greeted with shouts of “shalom” from the shopkeepers who heard us speaking Hebrew, and even a few attempts at Hebrew sentences. At the synagogue we met the shamash (caretaker), an Indian man whose family has been looking after the synagogue for generations.

The visit to the synagogue was bittersweet. The shule itself is beautiful, but arriving there as tourists, and not being able to use the shule as it was originally intended, was difficult. We requested access to the aron kodesh to look for a tallit and tefillin (Jphylacteries) and were yelled at by the tour guides who were there with their groups. Only after speaking to the shamash and the ticket seller, another one of the Kochi's remaining seven Jews, did we find out that there were no tefillin left in the shule, as there was no longer a rabbi there (the Chabad rabbi was deported a year or two ago). The shamash opened the aron hakodesh for us, and to the fascination of the tourists, and the enjoyment of a group of American Jews, my friend was able to wrap himself up in a tallit and daven, for the first time in many years.

None of us are observant Jews, yet the sight of a community in its death throes was painful to see. The Jews of Kochi weren’t expelled from India, nor did they leave because of anti-semitism. They left to establish a better Jewish life for themselves in Israel, fulfilling the ancient hopes and dreams of returning to Israel, the Jewish homeland. Yet, even though their mass immigration was positive, and the dwindling numbers of Kochi Jews are reflected in the large communities that exist today in Israel, seeing a synagogue become merely a tourist curiosity, and visiting a graveyard that all too soon will not have any more visitors, was not an easy experience.