Danny Ben-Moshe, a Melbourne-based documentary filmmaker, received a newspaper clipping from his Indian research assistant in 2006. It was an obituary for a famous Indian actress who had made her career playing the vamp in Bollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s, which was spotted by the girl’s father, who knew Ben-Moshe was Jewish. Ben-Moshe…
Kochi: On Tuesday, a large piece of an ancient, non-operational black Jewish synagogue in Kochi fell due to heavy rain. It was previously known as ‘Karutha Palli’ (Synagogue of Black Jews) or Kadavumbagam Synagogue, and it serviced the Malabari Jews. It is located at Marakkadavu in Mattancherry, a little distance away from Mattancherry’s famous Paradesi…
(JTA) Take a stroll down Kochi, India’s “Jew street” today, and you’ll discover bustling Kasmiri businesses selling Persian antiquities, pashmina shawls, and traditional Islamic handicrafts, a far cry from the neighborhood’s heyday when every household was Jewish. “There are just two individuals left in Jew Town,” said Shalva Weil, a senior researcher at the Hebrew…
INDIA, KERALA – Not one, but two streets in Cochin, a prominent port city in southwest India, are named “Jew.” There’s Jew Street, which is lined with trinkets and is home to India’s oldest functioning synagogue, Paradesi, in the picturesque, touristy Mattancherry area, dubbed “Jew Town” by some. The second Jew Street is nine kilometers…
WASHINGTON, D.C., 10 MAY 2011 – The Asia Society Washington Center held a screening of the documentary Next Year in Bombay, which shed light on a little-known subcontinental subculture. The film tells the tale of the Bene Israel Jewish community, which arrived in India around 2000 years ago and presently has a population of around…
How long would you wait to make a dream come true? If the dream was to narrate a life tale, how long would it take? Sarath Kottikkal had to wait seven years for his turn. After seeing the premiere of his documentary Sarah Thaha Thoufeeq at Beit Hatfutsot, Israel’s Museum of the Jewish People in…
Danny Ben-Moshe, an Australian academic, is working on a documentary on the forgotten Indian Jews who established the world’s largest film business. Danny Ben-Moshe, hundreds of miles away in Melbourne, came across her obituary the same week. It prompted an 11-year investigation that resulted in a documentary about Hindi cinema’s once-heralded — and now-forgotten —…
Esther David, a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning artist, has released a new book that depicts Jewish life in India. She describes the culinary customs of this little society, whose 5,000 members live in isolated enclaves around the country. In India, the Jewish community makes up a tiny yet important fraction of the population. In India, there…
Flower Silliman would treat herself to Calcutta’s finest street dishes on the eighth day, when it was all over. Friends, relatives, and others from the city’s renowned Baghdadi Jewish community – which now numbers less than 20 – kept her company. “Kachoris, samosas, luchis… everything banned was cherished on this day,” the 86-year-old recalls, recalling…
Siona Benjamin tells me as she stands in her sunlit kitchen in Montclair, N.J., with the ingredients for coconut chicken curry — cans of coconut milk, fresh ginger, and around, silver tray lined with small bowls of ground spices — strewn out before her on the island. “Green peas served in golden turmeric rice were…