When six-year-old Rahel Musleah moved with her family from Calcutta, India, to Philadelphia in 1964, the culture shock affected her new neighbors as well as her.
Yiddish-speakers would come up to her and say, “What, you don’t speak Jewish, then you can’t be Jewish!” she recalled in an interview at The Chronicle offices last week. “We were like a little Indian Jewish island in a sea of Ashkenazic Jewish culture in Philadelphia,” she said.
“That message stayed with me for a long time and it made me ambivalent,” Musleah said during a visit to Milwaukee last week. “It was only when I matured that I [learned to] appreciate the beauty of what I had.”
Musleah, now an award-winning journalist, author, singer and storyteller, spoke to several groups during her visit. She shared her personal story and also talked about the history of Indian Jewry.
Musleah represents the seventh generation of a family that moved from Baghdad to Calcutta in 1820 for personal and business reasons.
The Jewish communities in India were at their zenith prior to World War II. Cochin had a Jewish population of 2,000, Calcutta had 5,000, and Bombay boasted a Jewish community of 35,000.
Those numbers today are very different. Bombay now has approximately 3,500 Jews, Cochin has six Jewish families, and about 35 Jewish elders remain in Calcutta, Musleah said.
“It’s hard to understand, especially for Ashkenazi Jews, especially after the Holocaust, why a community would leave if there was no anti-Semitism,” she said.
In 1947, when India became an independent nation, there was significant uncertainty regarding how the country would be governed.
Rioting and political turmoil was commonplace. The following year the State of Israel was founded, and many Jews made aliyah.
Musleah’s family stayed in Calcutta while many Jews left. Her father, Rabbi Ezekiel Musleah, was ordained in the United States in 1952 and returned to lead the Maghen David Synagogue for 12 years.
My father “was very committed to the Indian Jewish community,” Musleah said. “There was still a community there.”
But in 1964, Musleah’s parents chose to seek a brighter future in the United States. That July, she moved with her parents and two sisters to Philadelphia, where her father became the spiritual leader of Mikveh Israel, a Spanish/Portuguese synagogue.
The Musleahs stayed deeply connected to their Indian culture. Though in India, the family had employed a cook, nanny and other locals for household chores, Musleah’s mother learned to cook in America.
And though they prayed with Sephardic melodies and liturgy at shul (her father learned them by listening to reel-to-reel tapes throughout the first days), the family continued to sing Indian melodies and keep traditions at home.
In 1997, at age 39, Musleah returned to India for the first time since emigrating. Seeing the places where she and her family had lived brought her history to life, she said.
“It grounded me in my background…. The stories were not just stories anymore, they were real places,” she recalled.
Upon observing the synagogue her father had led, Musleah was saddened by the emptiness of the formerly vibrant house of worship.
For her, it symbolized a once thriving community her parents had described in countless stories that has become a mere historical artifact.
“[Sitting in that synagogue] changed my life…. It made quite vivid the responsibility that I had” to preserve our traditions, Musleah said.
Musleah now travels the country, sharing her experience with others and preserving her family’s heritage. “My experience is particular to me, but I think people respond to it because it’s a universal story,” she said.
“People from Eastern Europe, or even Brooklyn and Queens, whose communities are disintegrating, identify with my story.”
“I know that the legacy of this community can disappear and so, how do you pass that on?” Musleah said. “My father and mother taught me and I’m teaching my children.”
She is also teaching other people’s children. During her visit, Musleah met with students at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, where fifth-graders are studying India for the school’s Folk Fair. In addition to teaching facts, sharing stories and showing slides, Musleah taught the students the Bagdadi Indian version of the song, “Eliahu.”
Through such presentations and group singing, Musleah hopes that people will feel the beauty of Indian Jewry. “That’s the tangible experience I want people to have,” she said.
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