Jews of Calcutta are a vanishing breed
By SHELDON KIRSHNER
http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=5381
Then David Nahoum, 80, was a boy, the polished Burmese teak benches in Magen David, the Calcutta synagogue he and his family regularly attended, were always full on Saturdays and High Holy Days. “They had to use folding chairs to accommodate the overflow of worshippers,” recalled Nahoum, the proprietor of a popular bakery in the heart of Calcutta.
But nowadays, Magen David – a striking late-19th century red-brick building graced by arched stain-glassed windows, green shutters, beige stone trim, creamy walls, 14 stolid columns and a black and white marble floor lit by three chandeliers and cooled by hanging fans – is a museum rather than an active congregation.
“We can’t even raise a minyan,” lamented Nahoum, an ailing bachelor whose grandfather, a baker, immigrated to Calcutta from Baghdad in 1870 to join thousands of other Iraqi Jews who had already established themselves in India. “I could see 20 years ago that the community would dwindle. Every festival you came to there were fewer people.”
At its height in the 1940s, when an infusion of Sephardi Jews from Rangoon, Burma, who were fleeing the Japanese occupation swelled the city’s population, the Jewish community in Calcutta – the capital of British India until 1911 and an important centre of commerce before and after that – was home to some 6,000 Jews out of a total of about 30,000 Jews in India.
The vast majority of Calcutta’s Jewish inhabitants – 99 per cent, Nahoum reckoned – were, like himself, Baghdadi Jews, who together with the Bene Israel and the Cochin Jews, historically comprised Indian Jewry. Collectively known as the Baghdadis, they were the last distinctive group of Jews to come to India as immigrants.
Although many of them were Iraqi, like Nahoum’s grandfather, the ranks of the Baghdadis were also filled with a smattering of Syrian, Iranian and Yemenite Jews. Enticed to India – the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas colonial possessions – in the first decades of the 19th century by religious persecution and commercial imperatives, the Baghdadi Jews lived in such thriving cities as Bombay (Mumbai), Surat and Calcutta. They owned textile and jute factories and traded in silk, coffee, ivory, diamonds, spices, indigo and opium. By the early 20th century, upwards of 10,000 Baghdadis resided in India, primarily in Bombay and Calcutta.
Until his death in 1864 at his summer home in Pune, a town just south of Mumbai, David Sassoon, the scion of bankers from Baghdad, was their undisputed communal leader. A wealthy merchant and philanthropist, he and affluent Jewish families such as the Cohens and the Ezras contributed funds for the construction of institutions ranging from synagogues to schools.
With the advent of India’s independence in 1947 and Israel’s statehood less than a year later, the Baghdadi Jews began to leave India en masse. It was not a surprising development, given their identification with British culture and their fear of the Indian independence movement. In Nahoum’s estimation, about 40 per cent went to Israel, 20 per cent – including his brother – immigrated to Britain, a further 20 per cent settled in Australia and the rest ended up in Los Angeles, Calif.
Nahoum, who took over the family business 18 years ago after a career as an engineer in a locomotive plant, remained in Calcutta if for no other reason than he was perfectly content in this bustling metropolis, where glaring disparities in wealth never fail to shock visitors from overseas. “I have a comfortable life here,” said Nahoum, who uses a cane to walk. “I like Calcutta. It’s my city. I have no hangups here.”
Nahoum is a member of a fast-dwindling minority, the smallest in India. In all of Calcutta – a vital and raucous city of 14 million that resounds to the incessant honking of car horns and whose air quality is questionable at best – Jews are truly a vanishing breed. To the best of his knowledge, there are only about 30 Jews left in Calcutta today, and most of them are old.
To say that the community has shrunk dramatically would surely be an understatement.
Jo Cohen, a 58-year-old secretary whose husband deals in fencing materials, is by her own admission one of its youngest members. “There are no Jewish children here,” said Cohen, who was born in Calcutta, the child of a mother from Cochin and a father from France who arrived in India in the 1930s to manage sugar plantations.
The bleak demographics speak volumes. Cohen told me that the last Jewish wedding and bar mitzvah in Calcutta took place about 25 and 30 years ago, respectively.
Her three children no longer live in Calcutta, having gone to the United States and Israel. Cohen, who described herself as an Indian by nationality and a Jew by religion, claimed that employment opportunities in India are simply too limited to prevent young Jews from emigrating.
“It’s not a question of discrimination, but an ethnic Indian will gain preference in a job. There is a subtle tendency to employ, shall we say, your own kind rather than an outsider. There is little future for non-Indians.”
Nahoum did not quite agree with her viewpoint. “This country has not discriminated against minorities. We all prospered here.”
The current dearth of Jews in Calcutta is reflected in its silent synagogues, some of which have been closed for years, and in its Jewish Girls’ School, which, though still in operation, has not has a Jewish pupil for at least a decade.
Magen David, whose protective high walls overlook a jumble of sidewalk vendors dispensing cheap bangles, beads and trinkets, is enclosed in a dusty courtyard dotted with palm trees and bamboo bushes.
It has seen better days.
The first floor sanctuary gives off a musty air of decay. Scrunched-up carpets in the second-floor women’s gallery are torn and dirty. Portraits of Magen David’s benefactors, one of which is of the late Elias Joseph David Ezra, look worn. Plaques alongside the steps leading into the shul pay homage to Sonny Solomon – an Royal Air Force pilot killed in action on Sept. 11, 1944 – and to one of its last rabbis, E.M.D. Cohen, who retired in 1927.
The Indian government has agreed to declare Magen David a national monument, Nahoum said. In the meantime, the building is maintained by rental income from Jewish properties in the neighbourhood and an existing trust fund.
Magen David, which has never been the object of an anti-Semitic incident, is cared for by four deferential Muslim men of various ages clad in dazzling white uniforms and Nehru caps. In the heat of the day, they generously offered me a cold bottle of pop.
Beth El, a nearby synagogue of approximately the same size in a predominantly Muslim part of town, already has the status of a protected monument. Neveh Shalom, a much smaller shul that has been shuttered for more than a decade and is situated in a busy market, appears neglected and abandoned. On a bulletin board inside, I found a frayed Hebrew-English calendar from 1987.
The Jewish Girls’ School, which opened in 1881, ceased being Jewish, for all practical purposes, in the 1960s, Sraboni Chowdhury, its principal, said.
But there are echoes of its Jewish past. Scholastic honour rolls and photographs commemorating benefactors such as Aaron Curlender and a long-serving principal named Ramah Luddy crowd the walls of the auditorium.
Nahoum, a realist, realizes that the days of the Calcutta Jewish community are numbered. Asked how long he thinks it will last, he said wearily, “God only knows.”