(JTA) Take a stroll down Kochi, India’s “Jew street” today, and you’ll discover bustling Kasmiri businesses selling Persian antiquities, pashmina shawls, and traditional Islamic handicrafts, a far cry from the neighborhood’s heyday when every household was Jewish.
“There are just two individuals left in Jew Town,” said Shalva Weil, a senior researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Seymour Fox School of Education and an expert on India’s Jewish communities. “[One] who spends the majority of her time in Los Angeles, as well as another.”
In a metropolis of 677,000 people, barely a handful of elderly Jews remain in what was once a flourishing community of about 3,000 people in the 1950s. According to Weil, there is no longer any community in Kochi.
