When Muslims in Mumbai observe Bakr Eid on November 28, two days after the first anniversary of the most audacious terror attack on the financial capital, some 500 of them will offer prayers inside the compound of a synagogue in Byculla, an unusual coming together of communities. “They needed space and requested me,” says Solomon Sopher, the chief managing trustee of the EEE Sassoon High School in whose property the Eid prayers will be held and also chairperson of the Indian Jewish Congress. “It’s just how the Jewish community in Mumbai has always been,” he says, adding that nearly 90 per cent of the students at the EEE Sassoon School are from Muslim families.

It is a unanimous feeling among the Jewish community in Mumbai a year after 26/11: We’re safer here where there is no Intifada; there are shared concepts of kosher food that keep Jewish and Muslim colonies in close proximity; we’ve integrated so well that we’re like any other Maharashtrians. Ask any Jewish family in Mumbai about how vulnerable they feel one year after the Chabad House in Colaba, a centre of the orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement, was attacked, and those are the first responses, the stress always on the fact that 26 /11 has not altered cordial relations between the Indian Jewish and Muslim communities.

“But a fear psychosis is there,” admits Jonathon Solomon, a Mumbai-based lawyer and president of the Indian Jewish Federation. “There is more alertness regarding allowing those who are not Jewish into our institutions,” he adds.

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