Tense Times for Mumbai's Jews

December 1, 2008

Author: Soutik Biswas

Source: BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7758930.stm

The mood at Monday morning prayers at the 124-year-old, green-painted Keneseth Eliyahoo synagogue in Mumbai was grim as members of the city's Jewish community paid homage to the six people who lost their lives in the attacks that hit the city last week.

The outreach centre of Chabad Lubavitch - a New York-based orthodox Jewish organisation - in a nondescript building in a crowded and grubby sliver of a lane in Mumbai, was taken over by gunmen who held hostages before Indian commandos rappelled down to the building in helicopters and cleared it out.

Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, were among the six people who died in the attack at Nariman House. The couple, who moved to India in 2003 from Brooklyn, New York, offered lodging and ran a kosher kitchen for Jewish travellers out of the four-storey building.

Their son, Moshe - who turned two on Saturday, three days after the attack - survived, along with his maid Sandra Samuel and family cook Zakir Husain.

At the prayers Moshe, cradled in his grandfather's lap, cried out "Ema!" (mother).

"Everybody at the prayer was crying. These are very tense times for our community, which has never faced anything like this before," says Reena, a Mumbai Jew.

'Sense of discomfort'

About 90% of India's approximately 6,000 Jews live in Mumbai and the neighbouring suburb of Thane. It is a low-profile community which since the attacks has been avoiding the media.

I tried to get in touch with a prominent Jewish community centre and vocational training institute in the city, but they would not even reveal their locations, let alone allow me to speak to the people who run them.

"There is certainly a sense of discomfort. There is a feeling that community members could be under threat," says Ruth Krishna, a Mumbai Jew and former hospital administrator.