Kolkata, India – Generations of Muslim families have been taking care of the maintenance of three synagogues in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, which was once home to a thriving Jewish community. The city’s Jewish population has dwindled over the decades to just about 20 as compared to 3,000 at its peak before the…
She came to Cochin in 1976 to film a story about the Jews of Kerala. She was a “tiny lady with gentle eyes, but also with a piercing gaze.” Dr. Johanna Spector was a well-known ethnomusicologist at the time. She was one of the first people to start studying Jewish Malayalam songs, which were unknown…
Coming upon a pastel pink synagogue with hot pink trim is only one of the surprises travelers will uncover on Burkat Global’s 3,000 Years of Jewish India tour. In Southern India you’ll walk in the footsteps of the Jews who arrived as spice traders 3,000 years ago and those who settled there.2,000 years ago after…
Tuesday, March 4, 2014. 12:00 PM This study of Bene Israel (Marathi Jewish) devotional music from the 19th to the 21st centuries looks at how Bene Israel and other groups communicate with each other. It also suggests new ways to think about cultural translation in musical contexts. The first part of the presentation focuses on…
In the background of a popular Israeli folk song Hava nagila (Let us rejoice), a group of Jewish men and women do the Hora dance somewhere in Gujarat, thousands of miles away from the land of their ancestors. One moment of this traditional dance is frozen in time as Hora Dancing, much like the movement…
In the display case was a brightly painted and gilded Torah ark, familiar yet exotic beyond anything that I could imagine existing in a Jewish artifact. Nearby was an unadorned metal hanging oil menorah, plain and worn. To me, the two illustrated the breadth of Jewish life in southern India. They are part of an…
Dr. Narendra Dabholkar was a doughty activist against superstition and black magic. A gentle man but fiercely rational, he would travel throughout India exposing frauds, fakers, and tricksters. But he so enraged people who made a living out of superstition that he was shot dead at the age of 67, just a few weeks ago….
KARACHI: Not many people know that a number of Karachi’s landmark buildings were designed by a Jewish architect Moses Somake (1875-1947). While he was born in Lahore, he lived most of his life in Karachi before migrating to England a few months before the Partition of India. Reading a paper at Karachi conference here on…
SIMSBURY, Conn. (RNS) After burying her mother, Sharon Rosen found herself dealing with a problem: deli platter deliveries. A deluge of them, all ordered by her friends and neighbors as part of the Jewish tradition of providing food for the bereaved during the seven-day mourning period known as the “shiva.” “We had to find a…
SDEROT, Israel – A Kassam rocket had just landed across the street, but it couldn’t wipe the smile off David Lhundgim’s face as he entered his apartment in this embattled town near the Gaza border. Born in the rural provinces of northeast India, Lhundgim had lived in Sderot since he moved to Israel in…