Indian Jewish community keen to rebuild Mumbai centre

MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's Jewish community, thrown in the spotlight after it was targeted in the Mumbai attacks, will rebuild the damaged Chabad-Lubavitch center, the group's country head said on Monday.

Nariman House, which was nearly destroyed in a siege that killed 171 people in Mumbai, including the centre's Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, will be rebuilt and opened again shortly, Dov Goldberg said.

"We are very determined to rebuild because the activities of the Chabad-Lubavitch have to continue and we cannot let this attack stop that," he told Reuters.

They would assess the damage as soon as police hand over custody of the building, Goldberg said.

"We will rebuild on the same site for now, and will look to expand the center and its activities," he said. "Certainly, we will have maximum security."

Nariman House, home to the Mumbai chapter of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement, was one of 10 sites attacked by gunmen during a 60-hour siege in the city that began on November 26.

Fewer than 5,000 Jews remain among India's 1.1 billion people, but the faith has a long history in the secular country, with the first established community thought to have been formed in the southern state of Kerala in 70 AD.

"There is support from the community around the world to continue the work of the Chabad House in Mumbai, so we are very determined to make a new beginning," Goldberg said.

India's Jews

Gary Weiss 08.13.07, 6:00 AM ET

There's no question that India's secularism is under strain. Militant Hinduism remains as much a potent force as extremist Islam. The ongoing bloodletting in Kashmir is an open sore, and the periodic spasms of communal violence in Gujarat, combined with memories of the Mumbai bombings of 2006, have led to undeniable tensions. Just have a chat sometime with a Kashmiri Pandit--a Hindu displaced from that war-torn region--and you will know what I mean.

Yet this country of 1 billion largely impoverished people, home of the second-largest Muslim population in the world, still manages to maintain a sturdy system of democracy based on respect for religious and ethnic diversity. In the U.S., diversity is a politically correct slogan. In India it is a historical fact. Much as we in the West may resent it, India has a lot to teach us when it comes to religious tolerance.

To my mind, the best example of that can be found in the remarkable story of a tiny minority--India's Jewish community. India may be the only country in the world that has been free of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout its history. As the Jewish genealogical journal Avotaynu recently observed in an article on one Indian Jewish group, "The Bene Israel flourished for 2,400 years in a tolerant land that has never known anti-Semitism, and were successful in all aspects of the socio-economic and cultural life of the people of the region."

That's really a bit astonishing, if not ridiculous, when you think about it. Compare that with any Western nation, be it France or Russia or even the U.S., where discrimination against Jews in housing was a fact of life as recently as the 1950s. But in "backward" India, from the beginning, the Jewish communities have not only been free of discrimination but have dominated the commercial life of every place where they have settled--something that has fed traditional European anti-Semitism.

Why has India remained free of this scourge? Various reasons have been advanced for that--such as, the Hindu religion does not seek to convert those from other faiths. What we do know is that anti-Semitism seems alien to the Indian character. And if you don't believe me, I suggest you take a trip to a southern Indian town called Kochi, in the state of Kerala. There you can find the physical evidence of this glaring historical anomaly.

Kochi, formerly called Cochin, is a former European settlement with a large Christian population and a seafaring heritage. It is a town of enormous charm that reminds some visitors of the Caribbean more than India. On a shabby lane in Kochi you can find a complex of four 439-year-old buildings--the Paradesi Synagogue.

There you have Exhibit A for India's tradition of secularism and day-to-day tolerance of religious diversity: the fact that this synagogue exists at all.

Kochi's Jews trace their descent back to 700 B.C., and lived in harmony with their Muslim and Hindu neighbors until--well, I guess I’ll have to backtrack a bit on my claim that there was never anti-Semitism in India. There was quite a bit in the 16th century.

Kochi's Jews were indeed persecuted--not by Indians but by the Portuguese, following in the glorious traditions of the Inquisition. With the help of the Hindu maharaja and the Dutch, Kochi's Jewish community rebuilt its synagogue, burned by the Portuguese, in its current location near his maharajah's palace. It has remained there, unmolested, ever since.

The Jews of Kochi are largely gone now, mostly emigrated to Israel, but it remains a very Jewish landmark in a very non-Jewish country. The synagogue, at least when I last visited it, had none of the heavy security that is common in large New York City synagogues. A short distance away is a Jewish cemetery, and again the distinction is in what you don't see--there's none of the overturned headstones and vandalism that have been sadly common in Jewish cemeteries in the U.S. Yes, even in Brooklyn...

Excerpted. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/05/india-jews-antisemitism-oped-cx_gw_0813jews.html

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