Chapter 14 Synagogues in India and Myanmar
Jay A. Waronker
India and Myanmar are today home to more than forty buildings constructed as synagogues, over half of them functioning, while the others are inactive and sit idle or, decommissioned, serve other purposes. This architecture, realized not by a single homogenous Jewish community but rather by autonomous groups having diverse backgrounds and origins who settled independently through- out the region, dates from the mid-sixteenth through the twenty-first cen- turies. Erected on urban, suburban or rural sites in different styles, sizes and spatial arrangements, and influenced by an assortment of design precedents, construction traditions and climatic considerations, these extant synagogues also vary considerably in their levels of maintenance and preservation. The most established and well-known of the Indian and Burmese Jews are the Bene Israel, Baghdadi and Cochini communities. Over the centuries there were also Mughal-period Persian-speaking Jews and seasonal Near Eastern traders beginning in ancient times and continuing into the early modern peri- od. European Jews also came in rounds, a result of the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions of the 1490s and during the colonial era. Also among the Jews are the B’nei Menashe of India’s northeastern hill states and northwestern Myan- mar, an obscure faction who contend to be descendants of ancient lost Jewish tribes. Not to be left out are the Bene Ephraim in the village of Kotha Reddy Palem near Chebrolu in Guntur district and the town of Machilliptnam in the coastal region of Andhra Pradesh state, who came to embrace Judaism fairly recently. They also claim to have ancient origins. The Shavei Israel, based around the city of Erode in western Tamil Nadu state, likewise should be in- cluded as they are India’s sixth and latest group of Jews to be organized.1 While not all groups built synagogues, or some that were constructed no longer sub- sist, present-day ones can be found within India in New Delhi and the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.2 In Myanmar, there is the still-functioning synagogue in Yangon.3
1 A Shavei Israel community also exists in India’s northeastern hill states. 2 There were once synagogues in Pakistan: the large Magen Shalom in Karachi, which func- tioned until the early 1960s and was destroyed in the late 1980s. The city also had a prayer hall. There were two synagogues in Peshawar and a prayer hall in Lahore and Quetta. 3 A second synagogue in Yangon Myanmar, Beth El, opened in 1932 but no longer survives.
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1 Cochini Synagogues
The oldest synagogues belong to the Cochini Jews of Kerala in southwestern India. Though Kerala’s early Jewish houses of prayer from the tenth through fifteenth centuries perished as a consequence of natural disasters, attacks by the Moors and Portuguese, and shifting congregations as did the first con- firmed and later destroyed synagogue authenticated to 1344 by an a surviving inscription,4 those originating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries endure.5 Albeit all altered or rebuilt over time, some after Tipu Sultan’s army burned them in the 1780s during the Second Anglo-Mysore War6 and others as a result of congregational actions,7 the synagogues that remain include not only the oldest in India but within the British Commonwealth. When placed in the context of Jewish houses of prayer globally, they stand out for their consid- erable age coupled with distinct architectural and liturgical qualities. Currently seven synagogues once belonging to the Cochini Jews, which in- cludes the Malabari (named after the region) and the later-arriving Paradesi (“foreigners” expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century who eventually came to settle in India) subgroups, can be found in Kochi (for- merly Cochin) and the towns of Parur (Paravur), Chendamangalam (Chen- namangalam) and Mala (Fig. 14.1). No one of these synagogues is identical to another, yet they share features that unify them, making the group aestheti- cally akin. Through the synthesis of Jewish and Keralan traditions refined over time, a synagogue style developed there. Mutual characteristics were carried forth from one synagogue to another as Cochini Jews moved or rebuilt their houses of prayer for whatever reasons. From a broad range of natural factors specific to Kerala coupled with religious, social, economic and political considerations, a mode of ver- nacular architectural expression emerged. This is an architecture pro- duced not necessarily by architects but seasoned craftsmen trained in regional materials and construction techniques to confront local cultural and environmental conditions.8 If slow to change, it is not a style frozen in time and circumstance but showing methodical evolution influenced by ever-altering
4 The inscription can be found in a courtyard wall of the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi- Mattancherry, Kerala. 5 Sassoon, David Solomon. Ohel Dawid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1054–1058. 6 Hunt, W.S. The Anglican Church in Travancore and Cochin 1816–1916 (London: Church Mis- sionary Society, 1910), 153. 7 Johnson, Barbara C. and Daniel, Ruby. Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 127–128. 8 Bernier, Ronald M. Temple Arts of Kerala: A South Indian Tradition (New Delhi: S. Chand & Company, Ltd. 1982), 11–13.