(JTA) — KOCHI, India — Today, a stroll along this seaside city’s “Jew street” will reveal lively Kasmiri businesses offering Persian antiques, pashmina shawls, and traditional Islamic handicrafts – a sharp contrast to 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 University of Jerusalem’s Seymour Fox School of Education and an expert on India’s Jewish communities.
In a metropolis of 677,000 people, barely a handful of elderly Jews remain in what was once a flourishing community of about 3,000 people in the 1950s. According to Weil, there is no longer any community in Kochi.