“Why did you move to Mumbai?”
“My community is literally dying. Most of them bedridden. My father was a shochet but now he has stopped. There are no young men. There is no minyan. I’m the second youngest Jew in my community…. There is no future for me in Cochin.”
“What do you like most about the Jewish community of Mumbai?”
“When I first came to Mumbai, I saw so many other youngsters celebrating Judaism. I go to synagogue and there are hundreds of people. I love love to dance and I go to the JCC and I dance with Salome Abraham and my other friends. I could have never imagined anything like that in Cochin. I feel happy that the Mumbai community is so active but I’m sad that we will never have this vibrancy in Cochin….”
“What do you plan for the future?”
“I’m of two minds about my future – whether to go on aliyah or stay in India. In Israel, my sister passed Technion and still doesn’t have a job. They discriminate against her because they think she came from a third world country. They say to her, ‘there are Jews in India? You must have converted.’ But we are not converts….”
“So why do you still consider aliyah?”
“In India, they want you to work on shabbat and I love shabbat because you are away from technology — spending time with your family and quality time with yourself. My father tells me that if I go on aliyah and join my relatives it will be good for my future and my children. But I’m afraid to go on aliyah alone….But I survived Mumbai — and as they say — if you can survive Mumbai – you can survive anywhere….”
Source: J.R. Rothstein for Humans of Judaism
