The most substantive documentary treatment of Cochin’s Jewish community available to watch today is a 2016 PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly report, “Jews of Cochin, India,” produced and reported by Fred de Sam Lazaro. The seven-minute segment follows the community’s decline since Israel’s founding in 1948, when most Cochin Jews made aliyah, and centers on the handful of remaining members and the synagogue caretakers preparing to hand off the keys of a nearly 500-year-old congregation.
Watch: Jews of Cochin, India (PBS, 2016)
The full segment streams on PBS’s own site: watch “Jews of Cochin, India” on PBS.org. It documents the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi’s Jew Town, interviews the last Jewish residents of the neighborhood, and follows the practical question of who will care for the synagogue once no Jewish caretaker remains.
Synagogueinte Naatil (2011)
An earlier Malayalam-language documentary, Synagogueinte Naatil (“Land of the Synagogue”), was made in 2011 by filmmaker Sarath Kottikkal as an academic project focused specifically on the Cochin Jewish community of Mattancherry, Kerala. It is publicly viewable on YouTube: Synagogueinte Naatil – A Documentary about the Jews in Cochin.
Documenting a Disappearing Community
Both films capture the Cochin Jewish community in its final years of continuous presence in India. Documentary makers working with this community face a particular challenge: the community in Kerala has dwindled to a handful of elderly individuals, and the buildings and artifacts of its heritage are now maintained primarily as historical monuments rather than living institutions. Filmmakers arrive, in most cases, to record not a thriving community but the traces of one – the beautiful, largely empty synagogues, the quiet Jewish cemetery, and the few remaining elderly residents whose memories connect the present to a community that has mostly relocated to Israel.
Oral history projects, digital archives, and museum exhibitions have supplemented these films, recording interviews with elderly community members in India, Israel, and the diaspora, and making historical photographs, documents, and recordings accessible to researchers and community members around the world.
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One response to “The Jews of Cochin, India (Documentary)”
Am fascinated to know more about the jews of india if they are still in india till today.