Read Leela Jacinto's other reporter's notebook entries:

05/12/2008 - Three questions answered

04/12/2008 - Regrets, goodbyes, curtains - and a Bollywood bungle

03/12/2008 - Mumbaikers take to the streets

01/12/2008 - Questions for a likely ex-chief minister

30/11/2008 - In the city of dreams, a star café

Friday, Dec. 5 

In the narrow, teeming lanes in the heart of the city’s financial district, a massive peeling turquoise blue structure looms out of the dusty streets. The Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue has been a part of this city’s multicultural, multi-religious fabric since 1884, when it was built by the Sassoon family. 

One of Mumbai’s best-known Jewish families, the Sassoons were part of a wave of Sephardic Jewish merchants who migrated from Iraq to Bombay, where they came to be called “Baghdadi Jews”. Some of the city’s best-known landmarks have been built by the Sassoon brothers, including the Sassoon docks and the David Sassoon library.

But these days, it’s hard to get into the Keneseth Eliyahoo. Days after the attack on the Chabad House – where Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, were killed – Mumbai’s dwindling Jewish community is badly shaken and scared.

One of the sadder, more overlooked aspects of the horrific Mumbai attacks was that it was the first-ever attack targeting Jews in an ancient land that has been host to Jewish communities from as far back as probably the second century BC. 

Little wonder that I find it virtually impossible to get into the synagogue. The problem is getting past the guards, a surly lot who are taking their jobs very seriously. In such cases, it’s best to just squat on your heels on the street besides them and sweetly state that you’re ready to wait, it’s really no problem, until he’s ready to let you in. It’s an old Indian position and can be quite comfortable if you’re used to it. It also badly rattles people – especially in India – to have someone who does not belong to a “crouching” class or caste, hunker down at their feet.

Once I make it to a kindly, ancient, yarmulke-wearing staffer with bottle-thick glasses inside the premises though, it’s a different world. A fading, gracious world peopled with fading, gracious staffers – such as Ben Tzion, my bottle-glassed saviour, and Mrs. Symms, an octogenarian secretary who proudly tells me her age – 81 – but clams up when I ask her first name.
 
Mrs. Symms, a Christian, has been working for the Sir Jacob Sassoon Trust, which runs the synagogue, for 24 years. The staffers here include Muslims and Hindus. Mumbai has about 4,000 Jews, about 200 of them are Baghdadi Jews. The vast majority are Bene Israelis, who claim to be descendants from Jewish families shipwrecked on India’s shores in the second century BC.
 
Unlike the inhabitants of Chabad House, who are ultra-orthodox Jews from Israel, Mumbai’s Jews are an integral, integrated part of the city’s history. None of the neighbours I spoke with around Chabad House said they had anything to do with the members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement visiting or living in the now destroyed building in the Colaba area. Many told me the first time they heard about them was when the place was attacked. Others said they saw them entering and leaving the building, but they had little or no interaction with the community.

That isolation is probably only going to increase now.

Back in the synagogue, Mrs. Symms tells me she used to meet Rabbi Holtzberg on Saturdays, when he came in to use the synagogue’s “mikvah” or sunken holy bath for a ritual cleansing.

“It’s so sad, isn’t it?” clucks Mrs. Symms over a cup of tea served from a fading colonial-era tea-set. “And the child,” she remarks, putting her hand to her bosom, where a gold crucifix softly nestles. Mrs. Symms is referring to the Holtzberg’s toddler, who survived the attack and was saved by his Indian nanny. “That’s so sad, I tell you, I can’t even imagine it.”

That, and Mumbai’s morbid first in the history of anti-Semitic attacks. This is not the Mumbai – the Bombay, as I knew it – of my childhood. I was here for another grisly first: the city’s first attack against Muslims in January 1993 in the bloody aftermath of the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in northern India. I left the city for good not long after that. Now this. This is not the place it used to be and I’m ready to leave.
 

Read Leela Jacinto's other reporter's notebook entries:

05/12/2008 - Three questions answered

04/12/2008 - Regrets, goodbyes, curtains - and a Bollywood bungle

03/12/2008 - Mumbaikers take to the streets

01/12/2008 - Questions for a likely ex-chief minister

30/11/2008 - In the city of dreams, a star café