Extinction nigh for Jewish community

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 25

Extinction nigh for Jewish community

By

LAI KWOK KIN,

of Reuters

NZPA-Reuter Cochin, India Elias Koder, aged 78, is one of a handful of Jews left in the south-west Indian port of Cochin’s centuries-old Jewish community. He has no desire to go to Israel. . "I was born here and will die here where I am happy,*’ said the toothless merchant “We want to stay in India because we are too old to take on a different life. We have wealth and status here. In Israel we would be nobody.” Koder is one of 30 Jews still living in Cochin's Jew .Town; a row of old twostorey tenements that once formed the centre of a large and thriving Jewish community with roots dating back to the first century A.D. “But our community is growing old and dwindling very rapidly,” said Koder, who runs a family business with his brother Samuel, aged 80, Cochin’s patriarch. “The younger Jews are leaving India as there is no future for them here and they cannot find Jews to marry. In 15 years there will be none of us left”

Thousands of Jews used to trade in spice and timber along India’s western seaboard but the numbers dwindled rapidly after the state of Israel was established as a Jewish homeland in 1948. About 32,000 Indian Jews emigrated to the Zionist state, 2000 f: >m Cochin. Tens of thousands of Jews are said to have fled Roman persecution in Palestine about A.D. 70, many settling in the town of Cranganore, north of Cochin.

Historians, however, believe the Jews probably ' arrived in India much earlier. £ Indian Jewish tradition Sholds that when Thomas the Apostle reached Cranganore in A.D. 55, threeyears after he had arrived in India, he was welcomed by a Jewish girl playing a flute. Thomas is said to have baptised 40 Cranganore Jews into the Christian faith.

From the fifth century to the fifteenth, part of the area near Cranganore was virtually an independent principality with Jewish rulers.

But in 1524, Moors burnt synagogues and Jewish homes, accusing the Jews of tampering with the lucrative pepper trade.

The Jews fled to Cochin, whose Hindu ruler granted them a site where Jew Town was built in 1567, with a synagogue which still stands. Services are still held in the synagogue, the oldest Jewish temple in the Commonwealth, but sometimes not without difficulty.

“We are finding it more and more difficult to get the quorum of 10 men above 13 years required for a Jewish religious service. Some of the men are too old to walk to the synagogue,” said Sunny Cohen, aged 58.

Cochin has not had a resident rabbi in recent years and Cohen is one of four men who take turns leading services from the brass pulpit in the centre of the synagogue. His brother Jackie, aged 65, has served for the last 30 years as caretaker of the synagogue, which is Cochin’s main tourist attraction.

Dozens come daily to hear Jackie relate how a Jewish merchant brought the temple's blue and white floor tiles from the south China city of Canton in the seventeenth century and how in 1805 a Hindu maharajah presented a gold crown which now adorns one of four wooden containers where the Torah scriptures are kept With a note of sadness, he will also tell inquiring visitors that the synagogue will probably be converted into a historical monument by the end of the century. There are only three men below 30 in Cochin’s Jewish community. One of them, Keith Hallegua, aged 29, said he hoped to leave . soon to find a wife and start a new life, perhapsin Israel or Australia, v ?- Emigration has also cost the community the services . of the only butcher licensed* to‘ prepare meat in accordance with Judaism’s 3 dietary laws. He left for ’lsrael in the 19705.

“We are all starving for the taste of mutton and beef,” said Sunny Cohen.

“But we make do with chicken and duck which some of us are licensed to slaughter,” he said.