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Shares
It is Friday 6th April 2012. I am in Fort Cochin, Kerala, Southern India, enjoying my first solo holiday since moving to Malaysia. I have pottered the streets, raised and lowered Chinese fishing nets, had dinner with a local business man, lain awake in damp sheets during a power cut, drifted down tree-lined backwaters in a canoe, and visited a 450 year old synagogue. I have not found a community with which to spend tonight’s Passover meal. Kerala’s Jewish community has all but gone and of those few that remain, most are spending Passover with family in Israel or elsewhere. There is one woman left, who seems jaded by the depletion of the community, holding on just to give the synagogue purpose. She told me yesterday that there might be a service, and so I get in a tuk tuk at 5.50. At 5.52 it starts raining. Not drizzle, but monsoon rain. The kind that lashes at you. The water reaches for me on both sides and by the time I reach my destination I am drenched. The synagogue is down 150m of lane that is inaccessible to vehicles. I am let out outside a shop that is closing, but the shopkeeper lets me take shelter inside. We stand in the doorway and watch the rain. I can see that the lane has flooded and I am not relishing the journey I will have to take any minute now. Suddenly, I am run into by an American man seeking change for his tuk tuk. After paying his driver, he turns to me and asks whether I am going to the synagogue. In the middle of a flood of near Biblical proportions, the universe has sent me another wandering Jew in Kerala: Noah. Noah and I contemplate our next move. The door of the synagogue said it opened for services at 6. The rain starts to ease and I hitch my skirt up around my knees, whilst Noah removes his shoes. We wade through more than a foot of water. We laugh at how ridiculous we must look to the shopkeepers sheltering in their doorways. I see the man I dined with last night, who shouts to me that the synagogue is closed. We shout back that we are going to pray and wade on. The door is locked. We knock and hear movement inside. A little Indian man opens the door a crack and tells us that there is no minyan. No service. We beg him to let us in, but he shakes his head and begins to close the door, repeating ‘No minyan. No service’. Noah pleads that we have come a very long way, that this is not just Shabbat, but Passover, and that all we want to do is sit and pray for a few moments in our place of worship. The man pauses, then relents and lets us in. He instructs us to leave our bags and leads us through. The rain has caused a power cut. The tiny synagogue is illuminated solely by the different coloured glass oil lamps that dangle from the ceiling. It is beautiful. I cannot believe that I am living this moment, that it is actually happening to me. The man fetches two prayer books for us. Side by side, shivering in the candlelight, we sit flicking through prayers, trying not to drip onto the pages. We speak fragments of Hebrew and share stories about our childhoods, about living in Israel, about Judaism. I feel myself filling up again with it, remembering what it is to be Jewish, to have this huge part of my identity being revealed again. I had forgotten how much I missed the ease of it. Like coming home. After 20 minutes, we are told we need to go. We agree to eat together and to drink four cups of wine in honour of the seder tradition. But it is Good Friday and the whole state of Kerala is dry. It doesn’t matter - I got the one thing I hadn’t fully realised I wanted until I entered that tiny, ancient synagogue: I got to be Jewish again.