A peaceful place of rest in bustling Kolkata
IN ITS HEYDAY, the Jewish community of Kolkata consisted of as much as 6000 people. That was in the early 1940s. Today, less than about 20 Jewish people reside in the city. Most of Kolkata’s Jewish inhabitants were members of families that had migrated mainly from Iraq, but also from Syria. They were all Sephardic, rather than Ashkenazi, Jews. They began arriving in Kolkata in the very late eighteenth century. Most of Kolkata’s Jewish people have migrated to other countries – not because of anti-Semitism, but for economic reasons (as have many other Indians of all religions).
One can get an idea of the size of Kolkata’s Jewish community of yesteryear by visiting the Jewish Cemetery on Narkeldanga Main Road. It contains at least 2000 gravestones. We visited it on New Year’s Day 2025.
The genizah standing amongst the gravestones The cemetery is beautifully maintained. Flowering bushes, trellises, and trees punctuate the sea of white gravestones. According to Sephardic tradition, the stones are horizontal, rather than vertical. Most of them consist of a rectangular base surmounted by a hemi-cylinder. Each grave bears the name of the deceased in Hebrew and/or Latin script. It seemed to me that all of the graves are oriented in the same direction: roughly speaking the long axis of each grave runs in an east/west direction (more accurately, the west end of each gravestone is slightly north of the east). The majority of the gravestones are simple, without ornament. A few of them are ornamented often with a stone carving of an open book.
Several of the stones record the deaths of military service personnel, who died in action. Notices on these record that the bodies of these people were buried in military cemeteries elsewhere, at Ranchi.
In the centre of the gently undulating burial ground, there stands a circular tower, which is higher than all of the other graves. The tower, looking a bit like an enlarged pillar box (letter box). has a rectangular opening like that found on post boxes. This structure is a genizah.
A genizah is a place for disposing of worn out or no longer required sacred texts. These can include any documents that contain the name of God. These can be anything from holy texts to commercial contracts, legal documents, and personal letters. If you wish to know more about the contents of a genizah, you could do well to read “In an Antique Land” by Amitabh Ghosh. I have read this autobiographical novel that includes much about a very ancient genizah discovered in Cairo, and was very excited to see a real genizah in Kolkata.
I am not sure how easy it would have been to visit this fascinating Cemetery – a record of a once thriving community – had we not known one of Kolkata’s few remaining Jewish inhabitants. Mentioning this person’s name persuaded the security officials to allow us to enter.
