The courtyard of the Paradesi Synagogue in Jew Town, Kochi. Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On a narrow lane in Kochi’s old Jewish quarter, a hand-painted sign still reads “Sarah Cohen’s
Home.” Inside, a Muslim tailor named Thaha Ibrahim stitches kippahs and challah covers at a shop that has outlived nearly every Jewish family that once lived on the street. The story of how he came to run it is one of the more remarkable friendships to come out of India’s oldest Jewish community.
Jew Town, Kochi
The lane is known as Jew Town, part of the Mattancherry neighborhood in Fort Kochi, on India’s southwestern Malabar Coast. Traders, spice merchants, and antique dealers now line the street that once housed roughly 2,500 Jewish residents at its peak in the 18th century. By the 1940s that number had fallen to around 250, and by the 1990s fewer than 20 remained.
Today only one Jewish resident, Keith Hallegua, still lives in Jew Town. The community’s near disappearance makes the story of Sarah Cohen’s shop, and the man who kept it running, especially significant for understanding what Cochin Jewish heritage looks like in its final years.
Who Was Sarah Cohen?
Sarah Cohen was born in Jew Town in the early twentieth century to a Paradesi Jewish family, part of the Sephardic Jewish community that settled in Cochin in 1492 after fleeing persecution in Spain. She married Jacob Cohen, also raised in the neighborhood, in 1944. The couple never had children, and both felt too rooted in Kochi, where generations of their families were buried, to join the wave of Cochin Jews who emigrated to Israel after 1948.
Sarah became known in the neighborhood as a skilled seamstress, eventually opening a small shop from her living room where she sold kippahs, challah covers, and other Jewish ritual items to the tourists who came to see the nearby Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568. The shop came to be called Sarah’s Hand Embroidery.
A Chance Meeting on a Sunday Afternoon
Thaha Ibrahim grew up in Mattancherry and left school after the sixth grade. As a teenager in the early 1980s, he sold postcards to tourists visiting Jew Town, storing his stock overnight in a rented warehouse space near the waterfront.
One Sunday in 1982, the warehouse was locked and the caretaker never arrived. Jacob Cohen, passing by, noticed the stranded boy and offered him storage space in his own home instead. Sarah was far less welcoming of the arrangement, and by Thaha’s own account, she barely spoke to him for the first few years afterward.
Learning to Stitch
The relationship changed when Sarah needed help finishing a cushion cover for the synagogue. Thaha’s father was a tailor, and though the young man had never formally learned the trade, he offered to try. Sarah was surprised by the quality of his work, and from that point she began teaching him traditional Jewish embroidery techniques, including the patterns used on kippahs and ceremonial textiles.
By the late 1980s, Thaha was skilled enough to help produce items for the shop, learning on Sarah’s treasured Singer sewing machine, a gift Jacob had given her decades earlier. As Jew Town’s Jewish population continued to shrink through the 1990s, tourist interest in the shop grew, and Sarah began relying on Thaha to help manage both the crafting and the business side of the operation.
A Promise to Jacob
Jacob Cohen died in 1999. Before his death, he asked Thaha, who was by then married with children, to look after Sarah for as long as she lived. Thaha agreed, and the two became closer than many families are, in his own description of it. He bought her kosher food and fish when it was available in Kochi, arranged for help around the house, and eventually moved his own family nearer to Jew Town so he could care for her more easily.
In 2000, Sarah formally asked Thaha to take over daily operation of the shop, telling him the business should keep growing and that he should take its profits while continuing to look after her. He has run it ever since.
Continuing Sarah Cohen’s Traditions
Sarah Cohen died in August 2019 at the age of 96, ending a friendship with Thaha that had lasted nearly four decades. She had asked him to stitch the cloth used to cover her coffin and to keep visiting her grave at Kochi’s Jewish cemetery, requests he has continued to honor.
Thaha still closes the shop every Saturday to observe Shabbat, just as Sarah did, and lights a candle on Friday evenings even though he remains a practicing Muslim. He has described the choice as being about humanity rather than religion. The unusual bond between the two later became the subject of a documentary, Sarah Thaha Thoufeeq, filmed over several years before Sarah’s death.
The Documentary That Captured Their Bond
Filmmaker Sarath Kottikkal followed Sarah and Thaha’s relationship from 2013 until Sarah’s death in 2019 while making Sarah Thaha Thoufeeq. Kottikkal has said his original interest was in the interfaith dynamic between the two communities, but that spending years with the pair convinced him their bond went far beyond religious difference, resembling a son caring for his mother more than a friendship built around shared faith.
What Researchers Say About Cochin Jewish Identity
Anna Zacharias, a researcher who has studied the Jews of Kerala for her doctoral thesis, has noted that Cochin Jews who left for Israel were motivated by a mix of religious attachment to the idea of a homeland, economic opportunity, and a shrinking pool of marriage partners within the community in Kerala. She has also pointed out that despite living as a small minority in a majority Hindu region for centuries, Cochin Jews integrated closely with their neighbors, adopting the Malayalam language while still maintaining distinct religious practices, including Judeo-Malayalam, a hybrid of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Malayalam used in the community’s hymns and prayers.
The Larger Story of Cochin’s Jews
Sarah and Thaha’s story sits inside a much longer history. Jewish traders are believed to have first arrived on the Malabar Coast roughly 2,000 years ago, settling near the ancient port of Cranganore before eventually moving to Kochi and becoming known as Malabari Jews. The Paradesi Jews, Sarah’s ancestors among them, arrived later, in 1492, after being expelled from Spain, traveling through Portugal, Turkey, and Baghdad before settling in Kochi under the protection of the local Cochin king.
Together, the Malabari and Paradesi communities built a network of synagogues across the region, including the Kadavumbhagam Synagogue in nearby Ernakulam. For more on how these communities shaped the wider region, see this overview of Kochi’s ancient Jewish heritage.
Most Cochin Jews left for Israel after 1948, drawn by a mix of religious sentiment and economic opportunity. Those who stayed, like the Cohens, did so mostly out of attachment to a home their families had lived in for generations.
Why the Shop Still Matters
Sarah’s Hand Embroidery is often described as the last Jewish embroidery shop in Kochi, and it survives today largely because of Thaha’s commitment to a promise made to a dying friend. The shop still sells the kippahs, challah covers, and menorahs that Sarah once made by hand, and the walls remain covered with photographs documenting her life, including one image of her meeting the then Prince Charles during a 2013 visit to Jew Town.
For visitors, the shop offers something rarer than souvenirs: a living connection to a community that has all but vanished from the street it once called home.
Visiting Jew Town Today
Jew Town remains a popular stop for visitors to Kochi, most of whom come first to see the Paradesi Synagogue before wandering the lane’s antique shops and spice stalls. Sarah’s Hand Embroidery, marked by its Star of David sign, is still one of the street’s most photographed storefronts, and Thaha continues to welcome tourists and answer questions about the woman whose home he now maintains.
The shop closes on Saturdays for Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, a schedule Thaha maintains out of respect for the customs Sarah followed her entire life. It is a small detail, but one that captures the larger point of the story. In a town where the Jewish community itself has nearly disappeared, its rituals continue anyway, carried forward by someone who was never part of the faith but was also never treated as an outsider.
The Objects Sarah Made
Much of what makes Sarah’s Hand Embroidery memorable is still visible on its shelves. Kippahs stitched with small geometric and floral patterns hang alongside table linens, placemats, and towels bearing similar needlework. Challah covers, the decorated cloths used to drape bread during Shabbat meals, sit near menorahs and other ritual pieces that were once made almost entirely by hand in the back room of the shop.
Black-and-white photographs line the walls between the merchandise, tracing the Cohens’ life from their 1944 wedding through the decades that followed. One photo shows Sarah in a red saree meeting the then Prince Charles in 2013, a moment locals still point to when describing how far word of the shop had traveled. Thaha keeps the display largely unchanged, treating the walls as much as a small museum of Sarah’s life as a place to sell souvenirs.
A Small Story With a Larger Meaning
Sarah Cohen and Thaha Ibrahim never expected their friendship to become a symbol of anything. It began with a locked warehouse door and a spare room to store postcards, and it grew slowly over nearly forty years into a bond strong enough that a Muslim shopkeeper would keep a Jewish woman’s shop, her Sabbath schedule, and her memory intact long after she was gone.
As Kochi’s Jewish population narrows toward zero, stories like this one offer a different way of measuring what a community leaves behind. It is not only the synagogues and cemeteries that remain, but also the relationships formed with the neighbors who chose to remember.
This account draws on reporting from the BBC and Al Jazeera, along with published academic commentary on the Cochin Jewish community.