Bene Israel surnames work like a folded-up map. Most family trees are drawn on paper, but the Bene Israel community of India carries a version of theirs in its surnames. Names like Nagaonkar, Penkar, and Kehimkar are not random labels. Each one encodes the exact Konkan village a family came from, generations before anyone thought to write the story down.
The Konkan Coast: A Narrow Strip of Villages
The Konkan is a narrow coastal plain running along the Arabian Sea in western India, south of Mumbai, mostly within what is now Raigad district. For roughly 1,700 years, according to community tradition, the Bene Israel lived scattered across dozens of small villages along this coast, largely isolated from other Jewish communities in the world. They had no synagogues, no Torah scrolls, and no rabbis for most of that period, yet they kept the Shema, observed the Sabbath, and practiced circumcision. Local Marathi speakers called them Shanivar Teli, meaning Saturday oil-pressers, a reference to both their traditional occupation of pressing oil and their refusal to work on the Sabbath. It was this village-by-village pattern of settlement, not a single town or city, that later produced one of the more unusual naming systems in Jewish history.
The Shipwreck Tradition and Navgaon
Community tradition holds that the ancestors of the Bene Israel were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast near the village of Navgaon (also spelled Nagaon), roughly 48 kilometers south of Mumbai, after fleeing persecution in Judea around the second century BCE. Fourteen survivors are said to have washed ashore there, seven men and seven women, and their descendants gradually spread out to settle in other nearby villages while treating Navgaon as the community’s founding place. That founding village left its own mark on the surname map. Families who trace their roots specifically to Navgaon carry the surname Nagaonkar, using a naming convention that would eventually apply to dozens of other Konkan villages as well.
Reading the Map: The “-kar” Suffix
The key to decoding Bene Israel surnames is the Marathi suffix “-kar,” which simply means “from.” Surname usage was not widely practiced in India until the British colonial administration made it necessary for official records, and as Bene Israel families began moving toward Bombay for administrative and military work in the mid-1800s, they needed a consistent way to identify themselves. They did what many communities do: they named themselves after home. The result is a set of surnames that, read together, form a rough gazetteer of the Konkan coast. A partial list includes Ashtamkar (from the village of Ashtam), Diveakar (from Dive), Kolabkar (from Colaba), Mazgaonkar (from Mazgaon), Nagaonkar (from Nagaon), Palkar (from Pali), Penkar (from Pen), Pugaonkar (from Pugaon), and Rohekar (from Roha). Anyone familiar with the geography of Raigad district can trace a Bene Israel family’s ancestral village simply by hearing their surname.
A Historian Named After His Village
One of these toponymic surnames belongs to a specific, documented figure rather than an anonymous family line. Haeem Samuel Kehimkar, whose surname marks his family’s origin in the village of Kehim, was a 19th-century Bene Israel teacher and community historian. In 1897 he completed a manuscript titled “History of the Bene Israel of India,” one of the earliest systematic accounts of the community’s origins, customs, and dispersal across the Konkan villages. The book was published posthumously and remains a primary source that later historians and genealogists still cite today. Kehimkar’s own name is, in a sense, proof of the naming system he wrote about: a scholar from Kehim, carrying Kehim with him in every signature.
Beyond Geography: Occupation and Description
Not every “-kar” surname points to a village. Some describe what a family did for work. Awaskar is linked to goose keeping, Doodkar to selling milk, and Killekar to soldiering. Others are descriptive, built from Marathi or Hebrew-Aramaic roots referring to a personality trait or physical characteristic rather than a place: Kasukar has been associated with an irritable temperament, Malekar with fullness, and Talegaonkar with cleverness. A separate category of Bene Israel surnames skips geography and occupation altogether, drawing instead on the Hebrew Bible. Names like Ezekiel, Solomon, David, Samson, Daniel, and Elias became common, particularly among upper-middle-class Bene Israel families serving the British administration in the 20th century, functioning as a marker of social mobility distinct from the older village-based names.
When the Map Crossed an Ocean
British rule brought a second layer of change. Bene Israel men who served in the British armed forces and administration often anglicized their village-based surnames to make them easier for British colleagues to pronounce and record. Ashtamkar became Aston. Bastekar became Best. Walwatkar became Walter. The Konkan villages were still there in the family history, but the surnames themselves were quietly translated into an English register. A further migration reshaped the map again in the 20th century, this time toward Israel. The great majority of Bene Israel families made aliyah after 1948, and today the largest concentrations live in Israeli cities including Beersheva, Dimona, Yerucham, Kiryat Gat, Sderot, Lod, and Ramle. A family named Penkar or Rohekar living in Beersheva today still carries, in its surname, the name of a specific Konkan village most of its members have never seen. For a closer look at how that resettlement unfolded city by city, see our companion piece on mapping where Indian Jews settled in Israel.
Bene Israel Surnames as a Living Map
What makes this system of Bene Israel surnames remarkable is how legible it remains. More than a century after Haeem Samuel Kehimkar wrote his history, and decades after most of the community relocated to Israel, a surname like Nagaonkar, Penkar, or Kolabkar still functions exactly as it did in the Konkan villages: as a small, spoken map, pointing back to a specific patch of coastline where a family’s story in India began. Readers interested in the villages themselves, rather than the names they produced, can find more detail in our article on Bene Israel heritage tourism in Nagaon and Alibaug. Source: MyHeritage Wiki, “Bene Israel Surnames”.