In Picture: Cochin Synagogue

Visitors by the thousands come to the 550-year-old Paradesi Synagogue to marvel at its chandeliers, four-century-old floor tiles and other furnishings.

Possibly a last hurrah for the tiny Jewish community of Cochin is the first-night seder to be held next Wednesday in the home of Queenie Hallegua on Synagogue Lane in Jewtown.

Now numbering less than a dozen elderly members, the dwindling community will celebrate the festival of deliverance as it has done for perhaps 2,000 years, since the first Jewish settlers landed here in southern India upon the destruction of the Second Temple in 72 C.E. Such dates are shrouded in legend, as are the cherished reports that the merchant ships of King Solomon traded goods with merchants from this part of India as early as the sixth century BCE.

Cochin is a small town in Kerala, India’s southern province on the coast of the Ara
bian Sea, and Hallegua is a descendant of the Sephardic families who eventually landed in that town and others in the province after their expulsion from Spain.

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Gabe Levenson - Travel Writer