The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  Bezalel nodded avidly in agreement. He had always had happy relations with the Muslims during his life in Kerala. After all, Chennamangalam was a city which represented religious harmony. Yet he had left behind the life of that village and Kerala and here he fervently believed that his primary duty was to protect his new country from potential enemies. In India the Muslims had been friends, in Israel it was necessary to defend oneself. Bezalel was an unapologetic realist.

  It was a massive mental adjustment, yet he had readily made the sacrifice, jettisoning the old ways. In India he had been a simple villager, a man of peace. Yet in Israel, he had fought in two wars for his new country, in 1967 and then in 1973. Every chance to prove oneself was relished even though he had no prior knowledge or experience of conflict. A fervent Zionist, he chose to push himself to the limit, to do more, not less; to take on the riskiest of enterprises. As a soldier, he had no compunction about tackling Muslim soldiers from Israel’s border enemies. His was the pragmatism of a natural warrior, whether in business or battle.

  “When we were first training in the army I was asked which group I wanted to join. I chose mine clearance,” he said in a quiet determined voice, stripped of conceit or emotion, as if relaying the bare facts. “Our officer said to us ‘You’re the only people who’ll never make a second mistake’. I liked that. I served almost fourteen years. Now my children have all been officers in the army. This is part of the life of Israel.”

  For him war became his normality and it forged bonds with his fellow Israelis in a way that could never be broken. He learned the nature of Israel during his service. “When you’re serving your time, in that group you have a bank manager, a professor, a doctor, a road sweeping man. Everybody together. We eat together, we sleep together, living as one for those days. All backgrounds, all colors, all different types of Jew.

  “Everybody knew we had no second choice, we must fight for our survival. That doesn’t just mean fight with gun, it means fight to be the best at business, the best at sport, to struggle for the nation. Otherwise we can’t survive. Everybody felt we had to come together. We had a feeling: it doesn’t matter if we work ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter because we’re building.”

  He helped build his nation in many guises: shepherd, soldier, forester and road maintenance man. But his big idea, his real contribution was not in war but helping to build the peace. “Once we had success, many people came to visit us here. The first were two famous French philosophers. What was the name? They came to study us, to find out if there was any problem with color and Indians in Israel. But there was no racism, nothing I felt.”

  Yet he mentioned that sometimes his children were teased at school because of their dark coloring. He took it in his stride. “When they went to school, one time my second son was crying because all the other children called him ‘Nigger or negro or black, black, black’. Then we told him why we are black. That way they understood. Then later, all the important personalities, ministers, even prime ministers came here to see our farm because we took the lead in that.”

  In 1994 he received the highest accolade of all. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin awarded Bezalel the Kaplan prize for his work in agriculture. The Indian ambassador attended and hosted a party in his honor and told Bezalel his work had given Indians in Israel a good name. But a further honor was to come. At the end of 2005 as Bezalel was receiving radiation treatment for his prostate cancer he received a call from the Indian ambassador.

  “Three days before finishing my radiation, I was traveling every day to the hospital in Jerusalem. At this time, the ambassador called me and said ‘stop the car and talk with me’. I said ‘What happened?’

  “He said, ‘You’ve been awarded the Pravasi Bharti Diwas award and you must fly in five days to Hyderabad to get the award from the President of India in January.’

  “When I returned, I went to my professor who was treating me and I told him I had to fly. He said, ‘On the last day, come early and at eight o’clock we will give you radiation, then come back at four o’clock we’ll give second radiation.’ The next day he checked me and said I could fly. I went with my wife to the function.”

  He showed me the award which was framed and hung on his wall of memories. It was signed by President Abdul Kalam, India’s Muslim head of state, and bore the crest of three lions. He stroked the crest with his forefinger very gently.

  “I was chosen from Indians all over the world. Eleven of us were chosen for this. Two thousand Indians came from all over the world for the function. The others awarded were very big businessmen, from places like the United States. I felt like a fly between these elephants.”

  I asked if he felt it had been his destiny to come to Israel to achieve all this, that his life may not have been so enriched had he stayed in Cochin. He laughed. “Oh, I don’t know,” then he thought a bit.

  “See, I think I had a nice circle of life,” he continued. “That means I started something which brought good things for Israel, good things for India. Now maybe in my next trip to Kerala, to Chennamangalam, I’ll try to find people to develop tourism in my village. Because Chennamangalam has a speciality. In 1987 I was invited to Washington by the North American Jewish Flower Growers Association. There I had to give a lecture about my life in India and then in Israel. Then I explained about Chennamangalam.”

  “Chennamangalam is the only place, maybe in the world, where four religions stay together. That means Jew, Muslim, Hindu and Christian. Each has its specialty. The Hindu worshippers blow the conch shell on festivals, the Muslims call ‘Allahu Akhbar’, the Jews call with shofar and the Christians with bell. Once every seven or eight years, the festivals come at the same time and when this time comes, you can hear them together: you can hear the conch shell, you can hear the bell, you can hear the shofar and the call of the mosque. Everything. This happens only in Chennamangalam. There is nowhere else in the world. Not even in Jerusalem, which has only three.”

  The new ambition of the old man who brought roses to Israel’s desert landscape was to disseminate that message of religious unity, a message that Kerala had instilled in him, to a wider audience.

  “Do you miss Kerala ever?”

  “No, truly,” he lightly touched his heart, then took a slice of Golan apple and bit into it as he considered his choice. “Kerala is nice to travel and enjoy. But not for living. Because there’s no adventurous life there. Here, every day we have the challenge. Every day we have fight, struggle, murder, problems. That makes a big difference. Kerala is a calm, cool, quiet place. Israel is our struggle for survival.”

  * * * *

  Bezalel was one example of a Cochini Jew who had made Israel work for his family. Yet there were others. After Shahar I went to a place called “Little India” to meet Isaac Chaim Nehemia, who was one of the most senior Cochini Jewish elders and a leader of the Indian Jews in Israel. He lived in Nevatim, the biggest Cochini settlement in the country which lay southeast of Be’er Sheva. Here, 120 Cochini families and 600 people had settled.

  Nevatim was, perhaps, the most developed of the moshavs where the Cochinis had settled. It had its own Kerala style synagogue, a museum on the old history and it observed the faith in the traditional Indian Jewish manner. In terms of sheer numbers, it was very successful, although less prosperous than its small neighbor Shahar. As we drove into the moshav, the temperature was beginning to drop. In a few hours, the chill of desert evening skies would be with us. Nevatim had none of the regulated perfection of Shahar: the houses looked less fancy and more run down, the gardens and communal areas were not as green and pristine, with lawns overgrown and slightly brown. All around the red desert plains closed in on us, like a sleeping sea, with the mountain ranges of the Jordan beyond.

  Disused greenhouses lay abandoned here and there. Like Shahar, Nevatim had suffered a collapse in its flower export business due to competition from African farmers. So many of its residents now worked in Be’er Sheva in regular day jobs, aba
ndoning the land that has begun to retreat to its natural state.

  But Nevatim remained a clean and friendly neighborhood. Cochini Jews walked their dogs, children played on the streets safely and everyone seemed happy to help a stranger. Old women tended their gardens or sat in wicker chairs watching the desert skyline change color. A middle aged matron speed walked down the main high road, ample, ghee-upholstered buttocks jostling inside tight sweatpants. Some of the older generation adopted a fusion Indian-Israeli frontier style of dressing—one lady wore her silky salwar kameez under a zipped up fleece jacket, while another old man lounged in his garden in a wooly jumper pulled over the lunghi, supplemented with woolly socks and Nike trainers. The local children were unmistakably Cochini. One girl aged about eight stopped skipping with her friends and turned slowly to watch our car as we parked to find our bearings. A curtain of dark curly hair fell over one eye as she looked over her shoulder to scrutinize us; her skin was glossy, almost as black as the teak of Kerala, and her eyes the color of molasses.

  Youngsters like the girl still celebrated the Jewish festivals the Kerala way, they ate Cochini food, they retained unmistakable south Indian features and yet most had never seen India. Hebrew, not Malayalam, is spoken here and the young are marrying non-Cochini and even non-Indian Jews. It is accepted that Cochini-only marriages are inevitably becoming a thing of the past, even in Nevatim. Slowly, the old Cochin life was being diluted, absorbed into the pan-Israeli national identity that is needed in order to keep the state strong.

  Yet I was impressed it had lasted thus far. After fifty years, Cochin remains very much alive in Israel. I was to meet a man who had already succeeded in building the first Cochini synagogue in Israel, the first Cochini museum. Now he wanted to turn Nevatim into a tourist destination for the south, branding it as a Little India. His daughter Nili, a feisty young woman who took tours of the museum, helped her mother Miriam run a Jewish Indian catering business. All of these showed that the Cochini dream was not dying, merely evolving.

  I turned up at Isaac Nehemia’s house mid afternoon. His house was one of the biggest in the moshav: simple, modern and whitewashed, with an adjoining garage large enough for a fleet of cars. Inside, it was full of homely touches and clean lines: white stone floors, white walls and blinds at the windows. All the other rooms led off a large central living area, with a dining room and seating area with plump leather sofas and a massive television. The kitchen led off towards the back of the house, exuding enticing smells of curry and chutneys.

  Isaac was a wonderful character, a blend of the Israeli and Indian Jew: loud, gregarious, irrepressible, funny and captivating. He wore a casual brown shirt, with rolled up sleeves and open neck. On his bald head he wore a skullcap made of cotton fabric printed with bright tropical palm leaves, as if in tribute to his old motherland. His eyes shone with child-like delight and when he spoke in his booming baritone it was like listening to a roaring river. His conversation would twist and turn with boundless energy, catching you in its momentum and carrying you along, leaving you happily exhausted by the ride. At the end of a particularly satisfying anecdote, he would throw his head back and laugh with delight, slamming the table with the edge of his fist. There was no reserve, nor artful modesty with this man. He had the brash directness of the Israelis softened by an Indian’s emotional warmth. Like his daughter, his smile was enchanting. What God had taken away from Isaac in the hair department, He made up for by way of teeth. Isaac’s smile was a joy to behold.

  The two were very close and the father evidently loved teasing his daughter. She in turn adored his stories, even though she had clearly heard them so many times before. Very quickly, I felt as if I’d known these two forever. Nili was born in Israel with her five brothers. Her parents had come when they were still small children. Nevatim started off as a small Jewish settlement in 1946, before the formation of Israel. Isaac and his family came in 1954.

  The Negev had once been populated by Arabs and particularly the Bedouins. Nomadic tribes living in the desert dated back to the time of the Prophet Abraham himself. Today the Bedouins still have a market, which takes place every Thursday in the southern part of Be’er Sheva, where they trade camels, sheep and goats. Yet it has become more of a show for the tourists, with some of the tribe selling crafts to earn extra income. Given their tradition in the desert, many Jewish families who settled here believed they were safeguarding the land for their own people, said Nili. “The Jewish population in the Negev was isolated and it was mostly Arab around here, so they wanted to protect this area which is where Israel would be. There were eleven settlements like this, one was moshav Nevatim, but we the Jewish of Cochin only came in 1954.”

  They followed another group of Jews who had failed to settle here successfully. They did not know who these people were, merely that the life in the desert had not suited the others. The Cochinis were the next group of immigrants to take up the challenge of desert life. Isaac was just thirteen when he arrived with his parents. Like Bezalel he remembered it as a bleak place. But he was still a child and found the prospect of living in such a place to be intolerable.

  “There was nothing, no plants, just dry, dry land. I looked at the desert and cried. I told my mother, ‘Why you come here? Why we leave Kerala? Kerala is a very beautiful place’.” He reenacted the scene of Isaac the boy, full of tears and horror at the new homeland, weeping and tugging his mother’s arm.

  “But, my mother said: ‘Son, listen. This is the place Abraham started and built the presence in Israel long ago. Great history is here. Be’er Sheva is the start for the Jewish people. If we start working, this place will be our paradise’.”

  His mother was the dominant force in the family and very religious. His grandfather Abraham Nehemia had been one of the elders in the Thekumbhagam synagogue in Ernakulam. They had decided to come after a man from the Jewish Agency visited Cochin in 1949 to talk to the community about Israel. “He told us ‘Israel is now independent, we want Israelis from all over the world to come, Cochin Jews please come.’ We said ‘Yes’.” He guffawed with laughter, “Yeees, we said, because this is our Israel.”

  His mother called the shots in their household. When he asked her why she had wanted to come here she told the young boy they came to build a homeland. “She said, ‘We will work the land and if we work the land it’ll give us everything.’ Our Torah said Israel is the land of milk and honey. We believed our country would provide for us. Everything we grow here will be successful.”

  At first it was not so. The first effort to grow crops failed. The moshav had seventy-two families then and they seemed set to fail. Then some of the younger generation took specialist agricultural studies, including Isaac. After leaving the army, he returned to form a plan to make the moshav work. The plan involved planting vegetables, fruits and rearing chickens. Not everyone could make it work. It was tough and around fifty percent of the original settlers abandoned it for the north.

  It was 1961 when Isaac began to put his plan into action. The community planted fruit trees such as apricots and peaches. “These fruits need cool weather but in the spring time, when it makes the fruit, it needs hot weather during day and coolness at nighttime. I said this tree you must plant here. It was success. Yeeah!”

  “When we started, this was the weakest moshav and within a few years it was one of the most successful economically.” From fruit trees, they went into flowers like Shahar and soon Nevatim was also exporting to Europe and earning a good income. In 1964, he married a Cochini Jew who was born in Bombay. Miriam and Isaac had six children.

  The moshav grew alongside its income until it was the biggest Cochini settlement in Israel. Then the 1984 war hit and like many others, the moshav’s business slumped. Isaac knew everything had changed. “I told the people of Nevatim, it’s finished.”

  But he was not beaten yet. He had another plan and this one entailed drawing upon the Kerala history. “My community has a big history, a great history. I want to make a remi
nder of it here,” he told me. He was in his late sixties and it would be his last big project, a legacy of sorts. He began some years ago by taking an architect from Israel to Cochin to see the synagogues there. Then a replica was built in his community.

  Miriam and her daughter also did their part by running a kitchen that catered to Israelis and foreigners. Earlier that day they had given thirty tourists a breakfast of idli and sambal for breakfast. Miriam brought out leftovers for us to try. Tourism was to be Nevatim’s future. Already, Isaac was marking out a vision which comprised new roads, water pumps, enhanced sewage systems, to prepare for the coming of the tourists. He wanted to build an Indian culture theater and host conferences and meetings here. I wasn’t sure whether it would happen, after all it sounded like a costly investment and where would the money come from? But Isaac was undeterred by the practicalities. He had his vision and it would become real.

  “I see a small Kerala here. We want to show people our canals, the water, the fishnets of Cochin,” he told me as his great hands conjured visions of the future, mapped upon his kitchen table. His Tropicana kippah had slipped down in his excitement and he readjusted it.

  I asked how his people had settled here among other Israelis and he explained that many were now marrying non-Indian Jews. There was a better understanding of the great depth of history and culture of their people. This instilled a natural sense of self-worth, said Nili. “I can say in Israel, the Cochin Jewry was successful in immigration. We don’t suffer from feeling we’re lower than other Israelis.”

  Yet it was evident that color continued to be an issue at times in Israel as well. Their neighbors, the Ethiopian Jews, felt it and drew comfort from the Cochinis, who seemed incredibly self-assured despite their coloring. The source of the Cochini Jews’ self-assurance was, perhaps, their history.