(JTA) — KOCHI, India — Today, a stroll along this seaside city’s “Jew street” will reveal lively Kasmiri businesses offering Persian antiques, pashmina shawls, and traditional Islamic handicrafts – a sharp contrast to the neighborhood’s heyday, when every household was Jewish.
“In Jew Town, there are only two people left. Shalva Weil, a senior researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Seymour Fox School of Education and a major authority on the Jewish communities of India, said, “One extremely old, who spends most of her time in Los Angeles, and one other.”
Only a handful of elderly Jews remain in a metropolis of 677,000, where the Jewish population formerly numbered around 3,000 people at its peak in the 1950s. According to Weil, there is no longer any community in Kochi.
