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In search of the Jews of Karachi

T-Faz

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Feb 16, 2010
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In search of the Jews of Karachi – The Express Tribune

In the heart of Karachi, amidst the sounds of traffic and the ever-present smog, one can hear shouts of bus conductors calling out “Tower, Tower!”

The object of their affection is the 19th century Merewether Tower on II Chundrigar Road, dwarfed now by tall buildings in the city’s busy financial area, but still unique due to its design. In the middle of the tower is an engraved Star of David, set in stone. Some upholder of religion has thoughtfully spray painted Yahoodi (Jew) on the tower, perhaps to mark it for demolition in the future.

During the British Raj, there was a small but vibrant Jewish community in Karachi, which was renowned even then for being a multi-ethnic city. One member of the Jewish community, Abraham Reuben, was even elected to the post of councilor of the Karachi city corporation, the forerunner of the KMC, in 1919. Many members of the community left after the founding of Israel and more left after the Arab-Israeli wars led to increased anti-Jewish feeling in Pakistan. Of those who remained, many succumbed to old age and disease, but urban legend has it that a few still live on in deliberate obscurity. And those who died here have left their mark on the land.

Walking into the Jewish cemetery in Mewa Shah, Karachi, one is greeted by a family sitting on a charpoy, soaking in the sun. “Is this the Jewish graveyard?” I ask. A young boy lisps back, “This is the Israeli graveyard”. To him, the meanings of Jewish and Israeli are interchangeable.

Muhammad Ibrahim, the 62-year-old caretaker of the cemetery, was born in a small room located inside the cemetery. “We’ve spent our entire lives here. My parents, now long dead, also lived here.”

Funds to maintain the cemetery are drying up. “Some people come once a year, they donate money and leave. We’ve paid for some of the maintenance ourselves such as the construction of the boundary wall around the cemetery,” says Ibrahim.

Nearly 5,000 graves are present here. Many are broken, and nettles and thorns adorn the site. “A woman named Rachel used to come here. But we’ve been told that she’s moved to London now.”

Mehrunissa, a wizened old woman, is a member of one of the six families that live on the cemetery’s grounds. Raving against the government for neglecting the place, Mehrunissa says the land mafia has repeatedly tried to take over the land. “We have repeatedly filed First Investigation Reports with the police about this. We’re the ones who have been safeguarding this place. Why doesn’t the government do anything?”

Ibrahim shows me around the cemetery; in a room lies the grave of Solomon David, an official of the Karachi Municipal Corporation, who also built the Magain Shalome synagogue in Saddar. The room also doubles as a storeroom for a pile of twigs, a clock with no hands marks the time. “The last burial here was in the 1980s,” says Ibrahim. Some Jewish people were present in the city, according to Ibrahim, but have married within Muslim families.

There was once a Jewish synagogue here too — according to Karachi’s residents, who had seen it. It was a small building located at Nishtar Road in Saddar. However, it was torn down in the 1980s, and a shopping plaza now stands in place of the synagogue.

Byram Avari, a prominent member of the Parsi community, says there are now no Jews left in Karachi that he is aware of. “There were prominent Jews here, one used to be a pilot at the Karachi Port Trust. I had a friend at school who was Jewish, they used to tell people they were Christians. They moved to Canada, and that’s where he passed away. There was a Jewish synagogue in Manora, and the Jewish graveyard in Karachi. The Jewish families used to tell people that they were Christians because their features resembled them, and they wore shalwar kameez.” Avari says he had heard there was a woman who used to pay for the maintenance of the Jewish graveyard, but says he has no contact with any Jewish family in Pakistan.

Being a Jew in today’s Pakistan would be living a life fraught with fear and constant persecution. The term Yahoodi (Urdu for Jew) is frequently tossed around as a curse word. Dozens of personalities have been accused of being part of the Jewish lobby, and rightwing op-ed writers have frequently accused the Jewish lobby (whatever that may mean) of being responsible for Pakistan’s woes. From former President Pervez Musharraf to human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, the Jewish lobby has sponsored all and sundry according to the colourful imagination of the right-wing. At protests, the Israeli flag is frequently burned, and slogans are raised against the Jewish community. In drawing rooms, discussions about the veracity of the Holocaust come under debate. In such circumstances, it is little surprise that the small Jewish population lived a life of obscurity, or migrated to Israel and other countries.

Ardershir Cowasjee, a prominent columnist and member of the Parsi community says that there were very few Jewish families left in Karachi, and most of them have passed away. Arif Hasan, renowned urban planning expert, says many left the country after the anti-Israel campaign. “There were Jewish cabaret artists and film actresses in the city, along with bureaucrats. The bureaucrats left in the 50s, the cabaret artists in the 70s,” says Hasan. The Roma Shabana nightclub that once stood on Frere road also boasted two Jewish cabaret dancers, who later faded into obscurity.

Attempts to contact members of Jewish families that lived in Karachi were in vain. Prominent architect Yasmeen Lari, who is working on a project to conserve the city’s historical buildings, did not have any pictures of the Jewish synagogue that once existed in the city. Hasan says there is only one known picture of the synagogue that has been circulated on the Internet on various blogs.

“People come here and take pictures, but no one comes to help us maintain this place,” complains Ibrahim as I leave, “but we will continue to do so.” As one looks at the state of disrepair that the Jewish cemetery and the Merewether Tower exist in, one can only hope that these symbols of a once vibrant Jewish community remain for the next generation of Pakistanis to witness.

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Bonding with an ex-Karachi Jew against the Indians in Israel – The Express Tribune

KARACHI: Writer Mohammad Hanif shared anecdotes from Israel and announced the title of his new novel at the Karachi Literature Festival on Sunday evening.

The ascerbic author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes had the entire audience in fits of laughter as he described his sources of inspiration, his experiences in Karachi and his recent trip to Palestine where he was on a creative-writing teaching assignment.

Once as a reporter for an international media organisation he was sent to Israel, where he was asked to address an event. “When I mentioned Karachi, I noticed that a man at the back row began to weep,” he said. “At the end of my address, I inquired and learnt that he belonged to the generation of Jews who once used to live in Karachi.”

The man told Hanif how life in Karachi was for the Jews during Ayub Khan’s time and asked from him the state of the city under the then new dictator Gen Musharraf. Hanif said the man recalled the names of cinemas and places he used to visit as a child despite decades passing by. When the writer asked him where he was living now, the man said a new colony called Ramlay had been built by the Israelis for them. “Here there are only two families from Pakistan, while all the rest are Indians,” the man complained, before going on to add that the Indians won’t allow them to live in peace anywhere. “And there I was in the middle of Israel, bonding with another Pakistani complaining about these Indians,” Hanif said as the crowd burst into another round of laughter.
 
Funds to maintain the cemetery are drying up. “Some people come once a year, they donate money and leave. We’ve paid for some of the maintenance ourselves such as the construction of the boundary wall around the cemetery,” says Ibrahim.
Jewish cemeteries are never rented or leased, they are always purchased and belong to the local Jewish community in perpetuity. (That's why Germany still has Jewish graveyards; the Nazis could find neither a legal nor an administrative abuse to dispose of them.) Even when the Jews are gone and forbidden to return, the descendants of those buried may find some way to pay for some maintenance; at least, that's what my family does for our ancestors' graves in Germany. That the resident families claim no maintenance funds are available is rather striking.
 
I am sure there are some Jews left in Pakistan but they are living anonymously. You will find evidences here and there that they do exist but it is next to impossible to locate them.

VIEW: Where have Pakistan’s Jews gone? —Adil Najam

There was once a small but vibrant community of Jews in what is now Pakistan. Most of them left Pakistan decades ago in circumstances that were not comfortable for them and a matter of some shame for us

The front page of last Friday’s Jerusalem Post featured a boxed item headlined “Surprise! There are still Jews in Pakistan.”

The story in The Jerusalem Post was triggered by an email sent to the newspaper’s online edition in a Reader’s Response section by one Ishaac Moosa Akhir who introduced himself thus: “I am a doctor at a local hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. My family background is Sephardic Jewish and I know approximately 10 Jewish families who have lived in Karachi for 200 years or so. Just last week was the Bar Mitzvah of my son Dawod Akhir.”

I remember seeing the mail when it originally appeared middle of last week and wondering whether the writer was, in fact, who he claimed to be or an over-zealous Pakistani trying to make a point behind the Internet’s obscurity. The Jerusalem Post and the experts it interviewed seem to have harboured similar doubts, I think largely because of the tenor of the debate on that discussion board. Some Indian readers seemed bent on proving that Pakistanis are intrinsically anti-Semitic and over-enthusiastic Pakistanis trying to cleanse Pakistan’s international image by pontificating about the connections between Islam and Judaism. It was in this context that Mr Akhir wrote, “I must convey to the Israeli people that Pakistani society is in general very generous and my families have never had any problems here. We live in full freedom and enjoy excellent friendships with many people here in Karachi.” He went on, then, to add: “I have been to India as well, though I found Indian society to be less tolerant, highly emotional and more anti-Semitic. Pakistanis respect people of all faiths because it is a doctrine of their Sufi version of Islam, which is very different from Arab Wahhabism.”

Unlike the readers, The Jerusalem Post had Mr Akhir’s email address (they did not print it). It seems that they wrote back to him and he added some thoughts that were not in his original post. The newspaper reports that Akhir wrote about holding prayer services in his home for the Jews of Karachi and that “although he and his fellow Jews there could practice their religion openly if they wished to” they have chosen to live a life of anonymity. Mr Akhir is quoted as saying that “We prefer our own small world and, since we are happy and content, we never felt there was a need to express ourselves. ... We don’t want to let anyone make political use of us. We enjoy living in this simplicity and anonymity.” He goes on to say that he has no desire to leave Pakistan but would like to visit Israel.

Like the Jerusalem Post, I am still not sure whether this is in fact one of the few remaining members of the Pakistani Jewry. However, even if that is not so, it raises the very interesting question of where are the Pakistani Jews?

There isn’t much reliable information on the subject. The official census reports that 0.07 percent of the population is of ‘other’ religions but does not say how many, if any, are Jews. Various Jewish websites suggest that there were about 2,500 Jews living in Karachi at the beginning of the twentieth century and a few hundred lived in Peshawar. There were synagogues in both cities. Reportedly, the one in Peshawar still exists but is closed. The Magain Shalome Synagogue in Karachi was built in 1893 by Shalome Solomon Umerdekar and his son Gershone Solomon (other accounts suggest it was built by Solomon David, a surveyor for the Karachi Municipality, and his wife Sheeoolabai, although these may be different names for the same people). It soon became the centre of a vibrant Jewish community, one of whose leaders, Abraham Reuben, became a city councillor in 1936. There were various Jewish social organizations, including the Young Men’s Jewish Association (founded 1903), the Karachi Bene Israel Relief Fund, and the Karachi Jewish Syndicate formed to provide affordable homes to poor Jews.

Some Jews migrated to India at the time of partition but reportedly some 2,000 remained, most of them Bene Yisrale Jews observing Sephardic rites. The first real exodus from Pakistan came soon after the creation of Israel, which triggered several incidents of violence against Jews in Pakistan including the burning of the Karachi synagogue. From then onwards most Pakistanis viewed all Jews through the lens of Arab-Israel politics. The wars of 1956 and 1967 only made life more difficult for Jews in Pakistan. The Karachi synagogue became the site of anti-Israel demonstrations, and the Pakistani Jews the subject of the wrath of mobs. Ayub Khan’s era saw the near disappearance of the Pakistani Jewry. The majority left the country, many for Israel but some for India or the United Kingdom. Reportedly, a couple of hundred remained in Karachi but out of concern for their safety many went ‘underground’, sometimes passing off as Parsees. According to a website on Jewish history, many of the Karachi Jews now live in Ramale and have built there a synagogue called Magain Shalome. Much of this was corroborated when I recently ran into a ‘Pakistani Jew’ (my term, not hers) now living in Massachusetts, USA. She told me that her father was a community and synagogue leader of the Karachi Jews. She herself had grown up in Karachi and studied at St Jospeph’s Girls School. Her family had moved to Israel during Ayub Khan’s era.

The Magain Shalome synagogue, in Karachi’s Rancore Lines area, became dormant in the 1960s and was demolished by property developers in the 1980s to make way for a commercial building. The last caretaker, a Muslim, reportedly rescued the religious artifacts (bima, ark, etc). It is not clear where he or those artifacts are now. However, thanks to the tenacity of Rachel Joseph the story of the Karachi synagogue is not yet over. In her late ‘80s, of frail health (hopefully still alive) and living in Karachi in a state of destitution, Ms Joseph is the surviving custodian of the Karachi synagogue and the Jewish graveyard in Mewa Shah suburb of Karachi, parts of which have now become a Cutchi Memon graveyard. Ms Joseph claims that the property developers had promised her and her now deceased brother (Ifraheem Joseph) that they would be given an apartment in the new building and space for a small synagogue. She feels that she was swindled and has been trying (unsuccessfully) to move a court to get what she was promised. In 2003, Kunwar Khalid Yunus from Karachi wrote a moving letter to daily Dawn pleading that she be helped.

What does all this tell us about Mr Akhir. Not much. But it does offer some lessons that we might want to heed as a nation. First, it tells us that there was once a small but vibrant community of Jews in what is now Pakistan and that most of this community left Pakistan many decades ago and in circumstances that were not comfortable for them and a matter of some shame for us. Second, it tells us that despite this mass exodus, a small number of Jews — maybe as many as a few hundred — still remain in Pakistan and are forced to lead a life of anonymity, even camouflage. Mr Akhir may well be who he claims to be. Even if he is not there are likely to be others who have been forced into anonymity for too long and who need to be brought back into the national folds. Whether we ever recognize Israel or not, we need to recognize and make peace with our own Jews (and other minorities). After General Musharraf is done dining with the American Jewry, maybe he should also break bread with the Pakistani Jews, including those who are now spread across the world, Pakistani no more.

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan



Government census poses question about remaining Jews

Islamabad: The government census on civil servants raised curiosity yesterday about one of the Islamic Republic's smallest and most low-profile religious minorities - the Jews.

The 2003 census, released on a government website last week, showed none of the 234,933 government employees declared themselves to be Jews, though 10 had done so in the previous census three years earlier.

"Whatever happened to the 10 Jew civil servants?" read a headline in The News Daily, Pakistan's biggest-selling English language newspaper, yesterday.

But, for many people the real news was there were still any Jews living in Pakistan at all, given Pakistan's longstanding antipathy towards Israel and Zionism.

Even a former minister for religious minorities was taken aback that there were Jews in the country.

Surprised

"I never thought there were Jews in Pakistan. I have never seen them or met them, even when I was a minister," remarked Colonel S.K. Tressler, who served in President Pervez Musharraf's first cabinet in 1999.

"I was also surprised to see the report that there were Jews in the government service."

Officials who conducted the census couldn't say whether the Jews had retired, converted, migrated, died, or simply chose to mark themselves in an "Other Religions" category.

The census depended on what answers respondents submitted, and Jews might have chosen not to disclose their religion.

"In the latest census, they might not have indicated their religion. If it is not there, it will not reflect in the census," said Saeed-un-Nisa Abbasi, of the Establishment Division, which looks after civil service affairs.

The existence of Jews in Pakistan is seldom acknowledged, although the mostly Muslim country has sizable Hindu and Christian communities, who between them make up about four per cent of Pakistan's 160 million people.

The number of Jews living in Pakistan today is unknown.

There were a couple of thousand Jews living in Karachi and Peshawar before the partition of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947. Their families mostly migrated from Iraq in the 19th century.

A 55-year-old woman, who converted to Islam from Judaism when she married, remembered attending services at a synagogue in Karachi.

Migrated


The woman, who asked not to be named, says all of her relatives have migrated to Israel, the United States and Europe, and she hasn't seen any people from her old faith for years.

"I have been separated from them for a long time," she said.
 
I found Indian society to be less tolerant, highly emotional and more anti-Semitic.

when was last time any thing resembling Anti semitic/jewish happened in India ??? the guy was pakistani for sure
 
Educated Pakistanis understand that being anti-Israel does not mean you have to be anti-Jew.

Judaism is arguably the closest religion to Islam -- even more so than Christianity. We both retain the Middle Eastern, sephardic feel, which Christianity lost when it moved to Byzantium.
 
I have been to India as well, though I found Indian society to be less tolerant, highly emotional and more anti-Semitic

I have stopped reading this article here itself...

As some 1 just asked above..show us one incident of anti-semitism in not just 65 yrs of our india's independence..but 2000 yrs of indian history..
 

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