Tuesday September 30th, 2008 - Kolkata

In preparation for the Pujas next week, we had a class on Hindu Goddesses and Goddess worship within India. Durga, to whom the Pujas, this next week long festival is dedicated, is a form of the Mother Goddess of Hinduism. She is worshipped particularly in Kolkata and the Durga Puja festivities, we are told, in this city are unlike anything anywhere else in India.

Our professor for this class began by talking about how Goddess worship originated in Hinduism. She went on to describe some goddess worship ceremonies and certain practices and traditions in which some people participate to worship and show respect for various Hindu Goddesses. Although she started off quite seriously and seemed to be talking earnestly, as she went on she began to break out into quiet laughter at the end of all her sentences. It was the strangest experience…because as she began to laugh with her deep-bellied silent giggle, she started to make the rest of us laugh. And we couldn’t even figure out what it was that was so funny, what it was that she was laughing at. She could have been laughing at us perhaps for some reason, or maybe it was the material she was teaching for some odd reason. We just couldn’t figure it out, and pretty soon we were all breaking out into nervous, confused, and sometimes hysterical laughter in the middle of our cramped class because she kept giggling and having to stop after every few sentences…Good thing we only had two classes with her…

Today was also Rosh Hashanah - Le Shannah Tovah

Dan, Seth (the only two guys here on IPSL), and I skipped out on service this morning to go and check out Kolkata’s Jewish Synagogues, and to see if we couldn’t find a few of the supposed 50 some Jews still living in the city with whom to celebrate the Jewish New Year. And we did find some, a few at least…We took the metro from Kalighat Station just about fifteen minutes from our house all the way up past Park Street (city center area), to the Central Metro Station which is just north of an area called BBD Bagh, where many of the British lived during colonization and where West Bengal’s current government headquarters are located. We found our way (quite miraculously – as many streets are unmarked and wind this way and that) to Canning Street also sometimes/once called Jewish Synagogue Street I believe, home to Kolkata’s oldest Synagogue, the Maghen (or Moghen or Magen) David Synagogue. The gated entrance was crammed between the stalls of a market lining the street outside and although there was a man who let us in, the doors leading inside the Temple were locked. From what it seemed the gatekeeper was trying to tell us we needed to get someone’s permission to go inside. Luckily there was another foreigner outside the gate who had followed us inside, a man named Cliff who had been in India for a while for his work. And he showed us to BethEl, where Rosh Hashanah services were being held.

We were really in a whole new area of Kolkata. The streets seemed to be even more packed than usual, cramped so much that it was tough for even one car to squeeze its way through all that was happening on foot. I don’t think I have seen equal loads to some that men were pulling in their bicycle carts and carrying on their heads on these streets…stacks of fifty or more shoe boxes held together by a cloth sack balanced upon a small cloth cushion and stabilizer atop one head, a huge coffee-table sized basket full of fish, fruit, or street snacks atop another’s head, carts so full of building material and bamboo rods that it took three men pushing to get it to move on the flat section of the road, and I could go on…there were also what seemed to be a number of mosques in this area, and many women bore covered heads and men small white skull caps. We later found out that it is a predominantly Muslim area of the city, and that the two Synagogues in the area are kept entirely by Muslim men.

Both Synagogues were absolutely beautiful. Maghen David looked almost like a church from the outside, painted in yellow and red with a huge squire like structure on one end. The entry doors were huge and the covered entryway looked as if it had been designed for carriages to pull right up into, dropping their passengers off just in front of the entrance steps. BethEl, which was located on a smaller side street called Pollack Street, had a larger more open entryway whose gates also open up into a market only slightly less packed than at the other Synagogue. There were seven people sitting together on the benches and chairs off to one side of the very open and spacious interior of BethEL. The monstrous front doors were wide open and the tens of windows lining both the lower and upper levels of the Temple were open as well, letting the sun shine in from all sides and the noise from the streets outside add a slightly different type of music to the gathering.

Four of the seven people at services were native Indians or Kolkatans, yet each and everyone with whom we talked, told us that they came from outside of India. It seemed that if even they had been born in India along with their parents and perhaps grandparents, they still did not totally identified as Indian. Their identities seemed to rest more upon where their Jewish ancestors had come from…Pakistan, Afghanistan…
One of the two ‘Indian’ men, who were both well into their sixties, named Mordechai told us a little bit about the Synagogue and the Jewish community in Kolkata. He explained how there were once thousands of Jew in Kolkata, but how that number had now dwindled down to only around fifty or so. His children, along with many other Kolkatan Jews as of recently have moved to other places in India, Israel and the US, leaving only a small group of older men and women to make up Kolkata’s Jewish population. The man leading services turned out to be (a) Nachoum, an eighth generation Kolkatan Jew who runs a very popular and one of the only Jewish bakeries left in Kolkata – Nachoum’s. Even as an eighth generation Kolkatan, he identified himself as a Jew of Middle Eastern origin. His bakery is in the Center of New Market, a huge shopping center near Park Street (said to be one of the largest shopping centers in Asia). It’s mostly run by Indian men any more though, as most of his family has either died or moved out of the city.

The three other people attending services that morning were also foreigners, all from the US. So with our arrival, us foreigners outnumbered the Kolkatans six to four. We must have showed up pretty far into the service, because it only went on for about another forty-five minutes or so after we arrived. All of it was in Hebrew, straight from the prayer book and I couldn’t really identify any of it even the few songs were completely different from anything any of us seemed to be familiar with. Dan and Seth were handed yarmulkes as we walked in and we were passed small prayer books as we sat down with the rest of the group, but there weren’t quiet enough to go around. So I sat and listened and looked around at the insides of the Temple…

It was really spectacular! Because the windows were open, little birds had found their way inside and were chirping away behind the ceiling beams as Mordechai went on in prayer. Although we were sitting a bit far off from the bema and some of us had our backs to it, as we were set up in a circle facing each other, it certainly stood out. Set off from the rest of the Sanctuary with a small intricate metal gate and the usual higher step up, there were four or five some door-like fixtures covered with dark silky curtains covered in Hebrew prayers and beautiful embroidered designs. The ceiling over the bema went up into a high archway and there were candles and lanterns hanging from high up. It was painted in a dark blue with soft golden stars here and there. I’m assuming that there were Torah scrolls behind the doorways, but I am not sure as there was no Torah reading during the service and the doors were shut and locked tightly. Some of the windows were large flower shaped blue and red stained glass and the second floor was a balcony like level where the women must once have sat through services looking out over the same ornate metal balcony rail which marked off the bema. The middle of the ground floor also had a large stand from where the Rabi must have given sermons and lead services when the congregation was a bit larger. It was all a mix of Indian and Jewish décor, as well as perhaps some colonial European designs too.

We brought a few apples and a jar of honey to share after services had finished. And we all stayed and talked for a while, and eventually found our way back over to Maghen David Synagogue and took a look around with the other three Americans. It was only a little after ten in the morning by that time and so the six of us decided to find some bread and make Tishlich…for the Ganges was not too far off.

And so we had Tishlich on the banks of the Ganges with Rs 3 for each of the two tiny loaves of bread we bought on the way to the ghats. There were already some thirty people at the waters edge when we arrived washing and playing in what seemed like their daily routines in the dark water among the trash and flowers and other things (offerings) they were throwing into the river. There was a speaker blasting one of the local radio channels and we stood towards one side of a ramp that lead into the water, looking out at Howrah and the ferries shuttling people across for only a few rupees per ride. There was a strong smell of feces, mixed with rotting food and we cast our sins into the Ganga making sure not to slip into the water nor step too far backwards into the mounds of excrement and insect covered, rotting debris…but it was darn moving all the same. We even said a short prayer and finished off the last bit of apples and honey…