Most of ORT’s children and teachers are no longer Jewish (Shira Schoenberg)

MUMBAI, INDIA -- In many ways, Queenie Mendoza, 34, is a typical success story for ORT India’s Vocational Training and Computer Center in this coastal Indian city once called Bombay. She worked as a servant, caring for children in an upper class home, before entering ORT’s beautician program on her employer’s recommendation. After graduating, she started a full time job in the school’s salon, and has worked there for 13 years.

But Mendoza is not the type of student that the school’s founders had in mind when they established it 45 years ago. Mendoza is Catholic. ORT, the Organization for educational Resources and Technological training, is an international Jewish organization with the mandate of helping impoverished Jews.

When the Mumbai school opened in 1961, it was almost entirely Jewish. Three years ago, its boys’ school closed due to a lack of Jewish students. Today, only one of 18 girls studying early childhood care and education is Jewish, according to the program’s coordinator, a ratio that is consistent across ORT’s preschool, and virtually every other vocational course except computers. ORT is not the only school that has seen its Jewish population virtually disappear. Two Mumbai high schools started by Jewish donors, which previously had Hebrew and Torah classes for the Jewish students—the Sir Jacob Sassoon and Sir Elly Kadoorie High Schools—also have only a handful of Jewish students.

Religious schools with diverse student bodies are common in India. Many Hindu and Muslim parents, for example, send their children to Christian convent schools to get a top education. Nevertheless, the Mumbai Jewish schools are only one symptom of a Jewish community depleted by mass immigration to Israel and abroad.
When asked about the community’s future, Benjamin Isaac, the director of ORT India, said confidently, “We will always have a Jewish presence in Mumbai.” Then he paused for moment and qualified his statement. “At least for the next 15 to 20 years.”

In a country where more than 30,000 Jews once lived, only about 5,000 remain, 4,000 of those around Mumbai. In order to stay open, Jewish schools had to accept a broader population. Part of the reason for this, in the case of ORT, is that Mumbai’s remaining Jews are leaving blue-collar jobs for fields like management and computers, Isaac said. Rabbi Joshua Kolet, 36, a Mumbai native and the community’s rabbi since 2001, added that for the past decade, the Jewish population has shifted to newly growing suburbs, like Thane. This draws children away from ORT, Jacob Sassoon and Elly Kadoorie in South Mumbai and into suburban schools.

But the main reason given by ORT employees for its demographic makeup is immigration. “Young people are migrating to Israel because there are better prospects,” said Elkan Palkar, 29, head of ORT’s computer department. “All families have relatives in Israel.”

This does not mean that Jews have no religious life around Mumbai. ORT sells kosher wine, challah, chicken and baked goods. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee runs a Jewish Community Center for 500 members who attend classes on Hebrew and Judaism, holiday parties, youth discos and clubs for children and seniors.
Kolet two years ago started the Hazon Eli Foundation for Jewish Life in India, based in Thane, to teach Torah, Hebrew and Jewish law to the suburban population. He runs a Sunday school for children under 13, which attracts about 25 students weekly. He dreams of starting a new Jewish school in Mumbai.

But many question whether these measures will be effective in reenergizing the small remnant of the formerly vibrant community.

Even Palkar, who has family in Mumbai and a steady job at ORT, said he would consider leaving. Palkar lives in Panvel, a suburb of Mumbai, and travels more than an hour by train one Sunday a month to teach Torah in local villages. He visited Israel last summer with 40 Indian students on birthright Israel, a free educational trip for Jewish young adults, and said he wants to move for religious reasons. In Mumbai, he said, synagogues have trouble getting a minyan and unless one works for a Jewish organization, it is difficult to take off work for Shabbat and holidays. “If the time comes, I’ll go to Israel,” he said.

The 4,000 Jews left in Mumbai are descendants of two communities—the Baghdadis and the Bene Israel. The Baghdadi Jews, many of whom were wealthy traders and businessmen, came from Iraq about 250 years ago. These included the Sassoon family, who made a fortune in cotton mills and became known nationally for their philanthropy. The Baghdadis, who at their peak numbered 5,000, were generally anglicized and comfortable under British rule. After Indian independence, virtually all of them left for England, Israel or other countries. Today, less than 200 Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai.

One recent Friday night in Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, one of the city’s two Baghdadi synagogues, about 20 people attended services, mostly visitors. At Shabbat lunch the next day, three elderly Baghdadi women proudly compared the accomplishments of their children living abroad. The elderly stay because life is comfortable, they said, but all the young people have left. About 1,000 Baghdadi Jews currently live in Israel, according to Ze’ev Schwartzberg, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s India desk.

Most of Mumbai’s community is comprised of Bene Israel, Jews who trace their origins to a shipwreck off the Maharastra coast around 175 B.C., which according to legend left seven Palestinian Jewish couples living on the Indian coast. The progeny of these Jews today speak Marathi, dress in Indian styles, and maintain customs peppered with Indian traditions. “They eat rice and mangos, play cricket and wear saris,” said Isaac of ORT. “If you live in a village for 2,000 years, you’re not going to be eating matzoh.”

For years, the Baghdadis looked down on the Bene Israel as inauthentic Jews. Today, any Bene Israel can recall with pride when in July 2002 the Times of India published a story about a DNA study done by University of London professor Tudor Parfitt proving that that the Bene Israel are descendents of the Jewish priestly class.

Yet for the last half century, the Bene Israel have also been emigrating in large numbers, motivated in early years by Zionism, economic uncertainty after independence and a sense of Jewish identity. Immigration started after 1948, mainly to Israel, and increased when the Israeli government accepted the Bene Israel’s legitimacy as Jews in 1964, after some controversy. The 1970s saw large scale immigration from the villages. Part of the reason the ORT school was founded in 1961 was to help Jewish men gain skills in draftsmanship, electronics or mechanics, which would make them employable in Israel. There are between 55,000 and 60,000 Bene Israel living in Israel today, according to the Jewish Agency.

Today the largest Bene Israel synagogue in Mumbai, Magen Hassidim, attracts about 60 worshippers on Shabbat, Isaac said. The other synagogues get less than 30 worshippers.

According to community leaders, aliyah has slowed over the last 10 to 15 years, and the Jewish population in Mumbai has remained constant. Kolet said particularly over the past two to three years the number of people making aliyah has declined significantly, largely for economic reasons. Maybe 25-30 percent of the youth are leaving, he said. “If the community wants to continue, it’s viable,” Kolet said. “And the community doesn’t want to move.”

But the numbers remain small. Several men are paid 1,500 rupees a month (about $30) to attend Magen David Synagogue’s daily minyan to ensure a prayer quorum of 10 men, said tour guide and cantor Benjamin Dandekar.

Although ORT offers education to Jews at only 10 percent of its full fee (it offers a free education to impoverished Jews and non-Jews alike), the school still remains largely non-Jewish.

When Palkar of ORT was asked how he envisions the Mumbai community in 20 years, he laughed and shook his head. “After 10 years, I don’t know what will happen,” he said.

Despite immigration, community leaders and institutions such as ORT, the JDC and Hazon Eli remain committed to ensuring that those left behind can live Jewish lives.

Leora Ezekiel, 37, the JCC director, said most Jews growing up in Mumbai never had a formal Jewish education. “Most of my generation went to convent schools because they were the best quality,” she said. They got their Jewish education from their families at home. Today’s children, she added, have more than she did. “So much is happening with the Jewish community that didn’t exist in our generation or before.”