The old Jew raised his wooden walking stick at the top of the ancient clocktower, holding on to his once-white felt hat with the faded black ribbon on his head with the other hand. “That’s how it is,” he shrugged, pointing at the two sun-bleached biblical inscriptions looking down on the day’s pack of sweaty tourists at the synagogue:

“Our days are like passing shadows” (Is:144.4)

“We bring our years to an end like a tale” (Psalm: 90.9)

A fortnight after the cops carried out the dead from Mumbai’s Nariman House, the 440-year-old synagogue in Kochi’s Mattancherry is quietly mourning Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivka — parents of the orphaned little Moshe.

There is something intensely personal about it, for the last of the Kochi Jews. Five weeks before the Mumbai terror strike, the US-based, 29-year-old, soft-spoken Holtzberg was in Kochi eagerly discussing with them a Chabad Centre there, a replica of the one he and his wife ran in Nariman House. They had gladly offered him free land in the city and he had promised to be back soon, with the plans. Then, one evening, they watched on TV a sobbing Moshe in his Indian nanny’s arm,coming out of the terror den. Only Moshe.

For the remaining 48 Jewish men and women in Kochi, the Pardesi synagogue, as they call it, is still the fulcrum of their existence. An unseverable umbilical cord of glass, brick and much polished metal, to a past that many love tracing back to King Solomon’s traders from beyond the seas. But unlike for their timeless synagogue which survived even a Portuguese shelling in 1662, the shadows are lengthening fast for the community. More than half of them are past their mid-seventies, resigned to bringing their years to an end in Kochi, far from the Promised Land many may never see.

... contd.