The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  “We left India as a very proud people and we’re still a very proud people here,” Nili explained. “Even the younger generation who’ve entered mixed marriages, they say, ‘I am Cochini.’ They’re still proud. Nobody can say to me ‘You are less than me’. Some Ethiopian Israelis used to ask me: ‘How come you don’t feel less in Israel, because you’re dark?’ I said to them, ‘First of all I have a beautiful color. I am chocolate and everyone wants our color, you know.’ Here, we have an Ashkenazim school, and they’re all white. On friendly days they say to us, ‘You have a beautiful color.’ Then when they want to tease us, they say ‘Oh, you are dark like chocolate.’ I say to them ‘And you are cheese. Cheese is less tasty than chocolate’.” She smiled at her story and glanced at her father for approval.

  Then she added more seriously that sometimes the issue of color evoked the old Cochini divide. “One Ashkenazim said to me in the museum, ‘You’re not Jewish because you’re black.’ I said: ‘Abraham was a dark man was he not? Not blue eyed and blond.’ All of his friends told me I was right. And I told him, ‘Now you need to ask yourself who you are’.”

  However proud she was of her Jewish Indian culture and however bold she was in defending it, Nili acknowledged it would be difficult to preserve as so many Kerala Jews were marrying outsiders within Israel. She remained optimistic for her own fortunes, all the same, telling me if she could not find a Cochini man to marry, then she would marry an outsider and instill in her husband the Kerala ways. I had no doubt of it, for behind her father’s smile lay her grandmother’s indomitable will.

  “It’s what I want. It’s in my blood,” she said firmly, running her fingers through her bobbed hair. “It’s never going away, no matter who I marry. See, my aunty married an Ashkenazi. He told her ‘Wife, I will never eat spice’. Every Shabbat she would lovingly make her spiciest chicken dish from Cochin. Every Shabbat he would refuse. After so many refusals, on so many Shabbats, he now eats the same food. He even asks for this one dish. This will be my way also.”

  * * * *

  It was night by the time I left Nevatim. The desert was cold and empty again as we climbed into the car to leave the father and daughter on the threshold, waving their goodbyes. They had shown me their community, replete with a gaily painted replica of the Ernakulam synagogue and the museum. After fifty years, the Cochini Jewish way of life was thriving in the Middle East just as it was dying in southern India. The community here took every opportunity to push things forward to the next generation. They were ruthless in their pragmatism as one would expect of a desert people. If they could not marry a Cochini, then they would marry another Jew and show them the Kerala Jewish life. It was better than the alternative.

  My thoughts settled on Nili and her good humored determination to make her future husband love Cochin as much as he loved her. She was very much the modern Israeli woman and yet despite having never stepped foot in Cochin, she was unmistakably a daughter of Kerala. I remembered Anil Abraham’s ardent wish as he played with the peppercorn necklace beside the riverbank near Parul. Here was one Jewish girl who would not give him headaches.

  As Nazeeh and I drove away, heading back to Jerusalem, I considered these remarkable stories of adaptation. The elders had plucked whole communities from the tropics and transplanted them to the desert. The motivation of the people I had met so far had been Zionism, to follow in the footsteps of Abraham and take on the toughest of assignments by bringing a Jewish renewal to the Negev. The differences between what they sacrificed and what they embraced were marked not just by the contrasting landscapes, but equally in the religious mentality of the Jewish communities in India and Israel. Kerala offered a conservative, highly traditional and orthodox way of life for the Jews. Israel was the Jewish homeland and yet it was fast paced, modern and secular. Even Isaac had noted the difference when he first arrived as a small boy, telling me that he was shocked to see people working on Shabbat, to see that not every community had a synagogue by way of right. In Westernized secular Israel, the synagogue was not the absolute center of life as it was in rural Kerala.

  I was driving beneath a canopy of velvet blue skies on the road toward the Holy City that remained the heartbeat of the faith which sustained the body of the Jewish people even in their long exile and dispersal. Always, day or night, when traveling through these lands, past signposts that were not merely traffic directions but markers of history, one was overwhelmed by the past. This was more true in Jerusalem than any other place I had ever seen. In the morning, I would meet a man who had come to Israel more than thirty years ago. Not for Zionism, for he was not a politically minded man, nor was he a man who sought economic opportunity or freedom from Kerala. Abraham Eliavoo had come to Israel more than thirty years ago for the love of his faith. He had come to immerse himself in the history of his people and to be part of the ultimate religious experience of living in the Holy City. Being a religious man he had seen it as his duty to leave behind the privilege and comfort of his village in India to end his life in the city of Solomon. He lived with his family here, he worked for the good of the nation and prayed regularly at the Western Wall, which continued to hold the power to move him to tears even now. The dream had been realized. And yet all was not well in Jerusalem.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Home

  “So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham, and He brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.”

  —GENESIS 19:29

  It was five o’clock in the morning and most of Jerusalem was sleeping. Abraham awoke for prayers. His body was stiff from cold and his bad leg always proved more resistant to movement at this time. He reached out for his stick and hauled himself onto his feet. After prayers, he ate breakfast and prepared to leave for work as an accountant at the Star of David emergency services organization in the center of town. He had to be out of the house by six thirty in order to catch the bus on time. His working day began at seven thirty in the morning through to three in the afternoon, six days a week. Afterwards, he would go to the local shopping mart and pick up some provisions before taking the bus home. After making his way up the steep pathway and steps, he finally reached the house and let himself in. There, he would prepare a cup of tea, not proper Indian chai which was boiled in a pan with milk, sugar and black leaves, but the inadequate sort made with a bag dipped in hot water. Afterward, he would make something to eat and await the family’s return at night.

  It would be a grueling routine for a young man in his prime, but Abraham was seventy-eight and unable to walk without the aid of his stout stick. He had lost his sense of optimism long ago, yet he retained the fierce independence of the young man who moved to Israel more than three decades ago. His routine, which began at five and ended late into the night, was the price Abraham had to pay to live in the Holy City. In India, he had a life of privilege, education, money and servants. Here, he could not afford to retire or hire help.

  It was not that he had not worked hard. Nor that he had no family to hand. Abraham had grafted all his life and yet still could not muster enough of a pension to retire. He lived with his second son and family in one of Jerusalem’s better suburbs in a modern house with a small garden. From the living room one could see a dramatic panorama of the city. A concrete ring of tower blocks nestled in the hills surrounding the old city, a modern-day fortress to keep out the enemy. Within the next concentric circle lay the newer part of the city, with the emblems of the nation state: opulent hotels, grand museums, government buildings and the Knesset nestling within. At the very heart was the eternal city of gold, Old Jerusalem. From a great distance, the pearl-like shimmer of the Western Wall concourse can be visible on a clear day, sitting alongside the iridescent majesty of the Dome of the Rock. After all the incantations of longing to go to Jerusalem one day, now Abraham could gaze upon it every morning from his window, taking in the millennial sweep of history over a cup of tea. From a di
stance it seemed perfect, the dream realized and everything he hoped it would be. But as the brutal reality of everyday existence zeroed in, life in the Holy City was one of long working hours, high taxes, a crippling cost of living and fear.

  Culturally, it was very different from the Jewish way of life in India. Here, society was fast, highly modern and Westernized, with Israeli society taking many of its cues from the United States. Religion sometimes seemed to take a secondary place to survival in the lives of many ordinary busy Israelis, even while lying at the very heart of the country’s political troubles.

  When Abraham and his family had chosen to make the aliyah they saw it as a spiritual homecoming. The weight of expectation was so great after two thousand years of exile that it was bound to end in anti-climax. He fully expected faith to be at the center of everything, much as it was in Jew Town in Kerala. There, religion permeated every facet of daily life, whether a person was Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Jewish. The village pace of life made it easier to accommodate God and ritual into everyday existence. There, life had been financially easier as well. Living in Israel meant having to work longer hours to pay higher bills, which meant that a lot of people could not afford to even respect Sabbath in this, the Holy Land.

  But most of all, Kerala had afforded him a peace of mind. Co-existence was not an aim for ideal times, but simply the way there. The Jew would invite the Muslim into his home as a trusted friend. The Muslim would bring sweets to the Jew when he broke his fast during Ramadan, sharing his blessings. In Jerusalem, for the first time in his life Abraham had to rewire this logic and go against his natural instincts to live in a city where a Muslim brother, whether Palestinian or any other nationality, equated fear.

  I first met Abraham at his office on Hamag Street in central Jerusalem. It was a modern building with an outpatient section in the foyer. An armed security guard, a Somali Jew, manned the entrance and scanned the bodies and bags of all who entered for traces of explosive. He did it as if it were no big deal, rather like asking visitors to put on an ID badge. This was routine procedure in the city which had until recently been targeted by waves of suicide bombers after the beginning of the second intifada.

  * * * *

  Abraham’s office was positioned at the end of a corridor to the right of the foyer. He stood up to greet me, a dark skinned man with kindly eyes screened behind thick glasses and the familiar Indian paunch protruding beneath his jumper. A small white knitted kippah covered his bald head, framed by a halo of fine silvery hair. He wore a shirt and thick ribbed brown sweater pulled tight over his belly and grey slacks. He had a ready smile with neat even teeth. Seeing I was an Indian, his face was animated with evident delight.

  Abraham spoke in soft, precise cadences, emanating a kindly wisdom like Yoda from Star Wars. He offered a chair and immediately made arrangements for coffee to be served, diligent in his duties as the host. He seemed particularly concerned I was not taking sugar and personally tore open a sachet and poured its contents into my cup, as if worried that I should miss out on a treat. Seeing I was comfortable, he settled back into the administrative chaos of his small empire. A cassette-player tinkled Bollywood music in the background, the notes of its jangling melodies floated through the open window like pollen into the courtyard garden below.

  Every bit of available space on his desk was covered in piles of medical correspondence: claims, follow-up paperwork, sets of accounts, plus great bundles of unopened letters that still had to be sifted and sorted. Abraham sat with his hands folded in his lap, still and calm amid this paper storm. It was a throwback to every Indian office I had ever visited: a mysterious, unfathomable Eastern order concealed amidst the pandemonium of towers of brown files, paperwork and half-eaten pakoras.

  He reminded me very much of his first grandchild Anil, whom I met in Cochin. Anil clearly held a cherished spot in his grandfather’s affections and remained at the foremost of his thoughts and prayers. More than anyone in his family, Abraham worried for his grandson’s future and his marriage prospects in particular. It was to become a recurring theme in our conversations: the need for Anil to find a Jewish wife.

  He told me his family was from Ernakulam where he had once managed a construction business. There he had been a wealthy man with land and property and good connections from his days as a senior member of the ruling Communist Party. He dabbled in politics and even considered a political career, but decided to forsake all that for the chance to come to Israel. For his family, Israel was not a matter of choice, but of faith.

  But having returned “home”, Abraham found the Jewish observances were often ignored in this modern, secular nation. The pace of life was faster, more expensive, less bound by tradition. In his late seventies, he found himself living the eternal dream in the Holy Land, yet somehow the spiritual moorings of his life had been loosened. Now after thirty years, he was thinking of returning to India.

  “After I came here, after six months I saw this place is no good for me, I want to return back to Cochin,” he told me, his small head wobbling in anxiety. “Unfortunately, we sold all the properties there. So many times I tried to go back to Cochin. But I found I could not, for some reason or another. Now on the tenth of January, I’m going. Not for holiday. Maybe I’ll never come back.”

  I asked him why he was leaving Jerusalem now, after so much and after so long? The city meant everything to him. It had been worth losing India for thirty years.

  “Jerusalem!” He sighed, twiddling the volume control on his tape recorder as he turned up a hit he particularly favored. “If you come one time, it is paradise. But to stay . . .” His voice trailed off sadly, cheeks puffed out in dismay like a sad child. “In Cochin there was no trouble, there was no trouble for Jews. Here, it’s a different story. Yesterday, you asked me to meet you there, at your residence (I was staying at the Notre Dame guesthouse just outside the old city walls). I couldn’t come there. We’re afraid to come there, near East Jerusalem. They’re dragging people, shooting people.”

  “You go to the Wailing Wall?” I asked.

  “Wailing Wall, I’m going. But I’m taking the bus number two from here and just going to the Wailing Wall. When I’m before the Wall, I feel I’m standing before heaven.” He paused as he briefly journeyed into his memories before coming back to me again. “Then I return home by bus,” he said. “The Wall is safe, the bus is safe.”

  But Israel generally was not, he believed. I was to find out that Abraham had suffered an internal struggle for some time. On the one hand, in this city he believed he was closer to God. He marveled that he was lucky enough to be able to visit the Wall but not as frequently as he would wish. Whenever he did go, it comforted him and compensated for all he had relinquished. He had fulfilled the religious duty to return to the Holy Land. But three decades on, it was not enough. Israel failed to fill the emotional and spiritual vacuum in his heart after he left India. He was saddened to see the lack of religious observance in the Holy Land, he felt neglectful of his own duties as a Jew because he was too busy working and prayed less than he did in Cochin. He saw how modern ways were taking his own family further away from the traditions of the faith that had ruled their lives in Cochin. Last, the political violence corrupted his peace of mind. He was still a man of the village. He remembered how Jew, Muslim and Christian had lived as friends and neighbors and in this new life he could not reconcile the clash between the ethos of his faith and culture and the political cost of realizing the dream of the Promised Land.

  Abraham’s eldest son Sam, Anil and Solomon’s father, had also come out to Israel with the family in 1971. Abraham and his wife followed two years later with their parents. Initially, they were all flushed with optimism at the thought of resettling here. With his skills as a manager for a major construction company in Kerala, he felt he had something valuable to contribute to a country which needed to build itself from scratch. The construction dream never materialized. Also, in the end, Sam and his family were defeated by
the violence and siege like atmosphere that was part of Israel.

  After Sam’s arrival, war broke out in 1973. In October that year Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel. It was the date of Yom Kippur. Sam fought in that war and then again in the 1984 war with Lebanon. He was a tank driver and saw action on the front line. He did not wish to resurrect the experience. The wars marked him deeply. Unlike Bezalel, he could not reconcile himself to the violence which was so against everything he had ever known in India. It helped him to decide to leave and return to Kerala.

  “He got the shock from the war,” Abraham explained. “We all did. My wife became ill and then in 1985 she expired. Sam also suffered deeply from his mother’s death and that was it. He decided to go back to Cochin.”

  Anil had told me in Cochin that his father rarely spoke of those days of conflict in 1973 and 1984. He felt uneasy fighting against men who looked much like those he had grown up alongside in India, men who were not so different from old friends. He fulfilled his duty to his country, but he was not a fighting man. He did not want this for his sons who were still very young, so the family went home. Abraham told me the fear of those terror-stricken days of Israel being destroyed had passed. Yet the internal security menace remained ever present.

  “We’re still afraid because of the security situation. All the places for Jews have security. Even here you’ve seen the security guard. In India, Jews had a very peaceful existence. In Ernakulam we were surrounded by so many people of different religions. On Jew Street we had one mosque and two synagogues. Yet we saw had no trouble with our neighbors.

  “Why do I think of going home? I’m an old man. I wish to have peace, to pray in peace. In Cochin there was no tension. No tension,” he emphasized, lifting his hands to the skies and letting them fall again. “In all the places where we lived—Cochin, Chennamangalam, Parul—no tension.”