What India’s Jewish buildings have to say

Jewish-origin architecture in the country appears to advocate a community-led way of life. What’s unique is that the restoration and adaptive reuse of synagogues, hospitals and houses is often funded by people of other faiths

In 2017, Jose Dominic was invited to dinner with the Salem family in Kochi’s Jew Town. Kenny Salem, an “old friend”, had migrated to Canada and was back to visit his ancestral home. Dominic was expecting his hosts’ famous dishes that evening, perhaps Jewish-style chuttulli fish fry and egg pastels. But there was more in store.

“My friend, the grandson of A.B. Salem, a Gandhian who’d fought in the Independence struggle, wanted to sell the house,” recalls the co-founder of CGH Earth, a renowned hotel and resort chain in Kerala. “With his sister, he made a list of five people, and I was the first person he called. He said he was hoping that whoever bought it would somehow try to keep the place in its original character.” A year later, it was mostly restored and members of the Salem family and the wider Jewish community, who had arrived for the 450th year anniversary of the Paradesi Synagogue, stayed there.

The 350-year-old house is the first of a cluster of Jewish heritage bungalows to be restored in the neighbourhood. Others include Mandalay Hall, now a Postcard hotel, and Ezekiel House, also a project initiated by Dominic — all in a bid to revive Synagogue Lane in Kochi’s Jew Town. “The first wave of Jewish refugees, known as the Malabari Jews, came to this coast before Rome was built,” he says. “The second wave, the Sephardic Jews, migrated here in the 15th-16th centuries to escape persecution in Spain.”

Synagogue Lane used to be a residential district up until the 1950s, when the Koders, Cohens, Salems, Robys and many others lived there with large families and staff. The lane, as Dominic told The Hindu last year, was the front yard for these homes “as parties, weddings, rituals flowed out onto the street. Tables laden with food and chairs were brought out in the evenings and the community gathered together”.

Since then, younger generations have left — all except two. Over the decades, the street was taken over by handicraft traders and Kashmiri souvenir shops, and would be dead by nightfall. But now, as Kochi’s smart city project is underway, the street isn’t only getting a facelift, a small group of stakeholders is seeing to it that they also re-engineer some of that “old-world charm” and transform the area into a “living museum”.

“The Paradesi Synagogue is now something like the Taj Mahal of Kerala,” says Dominic. “While there’s been a decline in foreign tourist footfall post-COVID, domestic tourism has exploded.” He cites Vietnam’s Hoi An as an inspiration: a heritage town that was a “contemporary of Mattanchery”, which has been beautifully preserved. “We want to preserve the intangible heritage of the Jewish community, which was very important to Kochi.”

Of India’s abundant heritage architecture, buildings of Jewish origin hold a special place. In the last few decades, these private bungalows and estates, as well as public places such as synagogues and hospitals, have become the subject of major restoration work — even as the number of Jews in India dwindled to below 5,000 according to the 2011 census.