Photo: Magen David Synagogue on Brabourne Road, Kolkata. Photo by Billjones94, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A photograph of an elderly caretaker holding a faded curtain from a synagogue ark says more about a vanishing community than pages of statistics ever could. That image, taken by photographer Ashok Sinha in Kolkata in 2014, became part of one of the most significant visual records of Indian Jewish life ever assembled: the Recalling Jewish Calcutta digital archive, created by scholar and activist Jael Silliman.
A Community Reduced to a Handful
Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community once numbered close to 4,000 people. Jewish traders from Iraq and the broader Middle East began arriving in the city in the late eighteenth century, drawn by the commercial opportunities of British India. Over generations they became merchants, industrialists, film stars, and civic leaders, building synagogues, schools, and grand buildings across the city.
By the 1970s only around 500 Jews remained in Kolkata. Waves of emigration to Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia had already reshaped the community by the middle of the twentieth century. By the time Silliman began her project in the early 2010s, fewer than 30 Jews remained in the city, most of them elderly.
Jael Silliman and the Making of an Archive
Silliman, an academic and Nehru Fulbright scholar who divides her time between Kolkata and the United States, recognized that the community’s living memory was disappearing along with its members. She returned to Calcutta with her mother, Flower, and began working alongside other remaining community members, including Elisha Twena, Jo and Mordy Cohen, Danny David, and Ian Zachariah, to help maintain the city’s three synagogues, its cemetery, and its schools.
She began collecting photographs, letters, and documents from the remaining families in Kolkata, piecing together a visual record before it disappeared. Silliman has described the process as painstaking work, saying the archive came together “picture by picture, photo by photo.” Many of the images had never been published or shared outside individual family albums. Some elderly community members could not use computers themselves, but their children and grandchildren scattered around the world helped scan and email old photographs back to her.
The year before launching the archive, Silliman self-published a novel, The Man With Many Hats, set in Jewish Calcutta. The following year, she launched the Recalling Jewish Calcutta project as an online archive, built in collaboration with the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, along with partners at Trinity College Dublin and NUI Maynooth in Ireland.
Piecing Together a Vanished World, Photo by Photo
The photographs collected for Recalling Jewish Calcutta trace roughly two centuries of change. Early images show Baghdadi families dressed in Arabic robes, reflecting the Judeo-Arab identity the first immigrants carried with them from Iraq. Later photographs of the same families show children in Western dress, charting the community’s gradual adoption of British colonial customs as they prospered in Calcutta’s mercantile economy.
One sequence of family photographs shows a man named Jonah Isaac seated with his grandchildren, who wear Arabic-style robes in an early image. A later photograph shows the same children, now older, standing in Western clothing beside their grandfather. Silliman has pointed to this kind of paired photograph as a visual record of an entire cultural transition compressed into a single family album.
The archive also documents the community’s substantial contributions to Calcutta life. Photographs and documents preserve the memory of figures such as Eddie Joseph, a Baghdadi Jew born Edwin Myers who became one of India’s first radio magicians, broadcasting more than 30 magic performances from Kolkata, Mumbai, and Lucknow beginning in 1933. Other images document Regina Guha, who in 1915 became the first woman in India to petition the courts for the right to practice law, and Tabitha Solomon, one of the country’s first female dentists.
Beyond formal portraits, the collection includes images of religious artifacts, handwritten recipes for dishes unique to Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews such as Calcutta Hamim and Fish Arook, and a video tour of the Magen David and Beth El synagogues set to Arabic music, which Silliman said moved elderly former residents scattered around the world to tears of recognition.
Ashok Sinha’s Camera: A 2014 Photo Essay
In August 2014, New York based photographer Ashok Sinha, who was born in Calcutta, spent time documenting the community’s remaining members and physical spaces for a photo essay later published by Time magazine in 2015. His images extended Silliman’s archival project into the present day, showing what remained of Jewish Calcutta rather than only what had existed in old family albums.
Sinha photographed Shalom Israel, the longtime caretaker of the Beth El Synagogue and the Jewish cemetery, wearing tefillin during weekday morning prayers. Shalom Israel left for Israel in December 2014, shortly after the photograph was taken, underscoring how quickly the community’s remaining figures were departing even as the archive was being assembled.
Other photographs document the more than 150 year old Jewish cemetery, where roughly 2,000 graves include both rounded, undecorated Baghdadi tombstones and more elaborate rectangular graves belonging to Ashkenazi, Russian, and Polish Jews buried there over the decades. Sinha also photographed the Muslim caretakers who have maintained Kolkata’s synagogues for generations, including Sk. Nassir, who at 75 still held a parokhet, the ornamental curtain that once hung before a synagogue ark, inside the largely empty Beth El Synagogue.
Perhaps the most striking images from the series show the interior of the Magen David Synagogue, completed in 1884 and considered the largest and most ornate synagogue in Asia. Its marble floors, chandeliers, and stained glass were shipped from Paris, and the building once hosted a Yom Kippur service for more than 3,000 British, American, and Indian troops stationed in Calcutta during the Second World War. Sinha’s photographs also captured the Jewish Girls’ School, where more than 80 percent of students come from Muslim families and none are Jewish today, a living illustration of how the physical institutions the community built now serve Kolkata’s wider population.
What the Photographs Preserve
Taken together, the two bodies of work, Silliman’s historical archive and Sinha’s contemporary photo essay, preserve something that written history alone cannot fully capture. They show the texture of daily religious practice, the specific faces of a community’s last generation, and the physical spaces, from cemetery headstones to synagogue chairs bearing donors’ names, that held Jewish life in Calcutta together for two centuries.
The photographs also record an unusual feature of Kolkata’s Jewish community: its relationship with its Muslim and Hindu neighbors. Multiple images document Muslim caretakers who have maintained synagogues and Jewish cemeteries for generations after congregants left, and Hindu employees who tended the eternal flame inside synagogue arks. These photographs stand as visual evidence of interfaith cooperation that sustained sacred Jewish spaces long after the community that built them had mostly departed.
To learn more about Jael Silliman’s broader work documenting India’s Jewish communities, see our related profile, Jael Silliman: Bringing India’s Jews to Light. Readers interested in how other Jewish heritage sites across India are being preserved and opened to visitors may also want to read about the Muziris Heritage Project in Kerala.
Why This Photo Archive Matters
The Recalling Jewish Calcutta project endures because Silliman has said that had she begun collecting these photographs twenty years earlier, the archive would have been far richer, since many families would not have parted with original prints at that time. She has also noted that starting the project only became possible once digital scanning and email allowed relatives abroad to send images without giving up their physical originals.
With fewer than 20 Jews estimated to remain in Kolkata by the time Sinha’s photographs were published, the window for capturing firsthand images and memories of the community has largely closed. What survives now is contained almost entirely in the Recalling Jewish Calcutta archive and photo essays like Sinha’s, alongside the synagogues and cemeteries themselves, still standing on Kolkata’s streets and still cared for by neighbors of other faiths.
For anyone researching Indian Jewish history, these photographs remain an essential visual record of a community that helped shape Calcutta’s commercial, cultural, and civic life far out of proportion to its small size, a legacy that Recalling Jewish Calcutta was built to protect. The full Recalling Jewish Calcutta archive can be explored online, and Ashok Sinha’s 2015 photo essay for Time magazine remains publicly viewable, alongside further reporting on the project from Scroll.in.