In the last 30 years, Ralphy and his wife, Yael, have related this tale to countless Jewish tourists curious to know more about the community's 2000-year-old history in India. As India's most celebrated Baghdadi Jew, who amassed immense wealth and set up a trading empire straddling both Asia and Europe, the Sassoon patriarch is a captivating figure for foreign visitors. Ralphy equates David Sassoon with Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a European Jew, who established an international banking family through his five sons. "The Sassoon family was called the Rothschilds of the East because David placed his three sons in England, China and Japan and then traded with those countries through them," he explains.
Yael calls Ralphy one of the "pioneers" of Jewish tourism in India because he conducted his first big tour for a British rabbi and his 45 congregants as far back as 1985. He then approached the tourism department and convinced them to include a Jewish module in the tour guides' course. "They liked the idea," recalls Ralphy, who drafted the syllabus and became a faculty member. Yael took the course and is today listed on Mumbai's Tourist Guides Association (TOGA) website. She says over a 100 tourists approach her for the Jewish heritage tour each season.
Joshua Shapurkar, who has been in this industry for 20 years, says there is growing awareness of India's Jewish heritage amongst international tourists. He claims that 40% of cruise passengers are Jewish and "every liner coming to Mumbai now offers an exclusive Jewish tour". According to the TOGA website, 49 guides offer these tours and most don't even belong to the city's 3,000-strong Jewish community. Polly, a Parsi, who asked that only his first name be used, has been a guide for eight years and says a four-hour tour costs around Rs 1,500 for up to five people. After 26/11, many of his Jewish clients asked to visit Nariman House. "In the walls, we could see the bullet holes," says Polly adding that visitors often get "very emotional" on hearing about the death of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife and the miraculous escape of their two-year-old son Moshe.
In most cases, however, a Mumbai Jewish tour consists of visits to synagogues, cemeteries, and institutes or monuments built with Jewish funds like the Bhau Daji Lad Museum or the Gateway of India, whose construction was partly funded by Albert Sassoon. Daniel David, a 26-year-old student, often takes tourists to Jewish settlements in villages like Ali Baug and Navgaon, which according to legend was the landing place of the Bene Israelis in 176 BC. Jono David from Japan, who has travelled around the world photographing Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, was extremely taken with how well these village synagogues are maintained despite the community's dwindling numbers.
When orthodox Jews visit, Mumbai's tourism industry willingly caters to their needs. Guides take them to vegetarian restaurants to avoid the difficulty of locating kosher food, during Sabbath they are invited to pray and eat meals with the local community and only walking tours are organized on Saturday when observant Jews abstain from using technology. "In five-star hotels, the front desk sends a bellboy to open room doors, which have an electronic card, and they are given rooms on lower floors so they don't have to take elevators," says Yael.
Visitors eager to trace their Indian roots are a surprisingly common feature in the Jewish tourism industry. Last year, a family with an Indian connection wanted to find the grave of an ancestor buried in the Jewish cemetery at Chinchpokli. Not only was Polly able to help them trace it but he also organized a renovation of the tombstone on the request of the family. Similarly, Shaul Sapir left Bombay as a nine-year-old boy for Israel and returned decades later in the late 1990s. The Jhirads accompanied him while he hunted for his childhood home in Nagpada, visited his family synagogue in Byculla and scoped out little-known Jewish landmarks like the erstwhile Jewish Club at Kala Ghoda, and the David Sassoon Industrial and Reformatory Institute in Matunga. Today, more than a dozen visits later, Sapir is the author of "Bombay: Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage".
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