Calcutta’s Jewish Community Is Safe but Shrinking

While the Jews of Calcutta live in a multicultural city with a large Muslim population, not unlike Toronto and Montreal, they do not exhibit the fears that Canadian Jews reasonably have. This Jewish community was founded in the 18th century by enterprising emigrants from Aleppo, Baghdad, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its members are thus known as Baghdadis. Yet despite high levels of tolerance increasingly rare in the diaspora, the community is shrinking. Sayan Lodh reports on attending the funeral of one of Calcutta’s last Jewish grandees, Flower Silliman: