KARACHI, DECEMBER 16: Rachel Joseph may well be Karachi’s last surviving Jew. And the battle the 82-year-old is fighting today is already a lost cause in the face of the city’s increasingly powerful builders’ mafia and the growing religious intolerance.Joseph is battling for compensation and the right to build a synagogue on the site of Magain Shalome, Karachi’s last synagogue, which was demolished in the 80s to make way for a shopping plaza. Magain Shalome Synagogue was allowed to be demolished in view of the dwindling Jewish population in Karachi, with the understanding that Joseph would get an apartment in the new building alongwith a site for a smaller synagogue. Predictably, this did not happen. Now Joseph, a retired school teacher who supplements her income by taking tuitions, says Pakistan’s only Jewish graveyard faces a similar fate if the courts do not come to her rescue. The Bani Israel (People of Israel) graveyard is situated in Mewa Shah, an old suburb of Karachi, and is the last resting place for hundreds of Karachi’s Jews, many of whom preferred to stay on in Pakistan instead of going to the promised land. Several of them died at the turn of the last century when the city had a small but vibrant Jewish population. Buried at the graveyard are the two watchmen of the Magain Shalome Synagogue, who died in the early nineties. In its furthest corner, almost obscured by vegetation, is a room that houses the grave of Solomon David. Although the etched script is almost faded, a little effort exposes the words: ‘‘The widely-known and highly-respected Solomon David always sought welfare of the Jewish community and through his liberality erected at his own expense a handsome synagogue, Magain Shalome Synagogue.By his death, the community has lost a firm leader and a wise counsellor.’’ Solomon David, surveyor of the Karachi municipality, died in March 1902. The other grave in the room is that of his wife, Sheeoolabai, who died a year later.Until 1921, the Cutchi Memon community, comprising Muslim Memons from the Katchh area, had a graveyard within the Jewish graveyard. After a prolonged court battle, a court reduced the area of the Jewish graveyard to give the Cutchi graveyard more space as that community was growing while the Jews were fading away. Today, that Jewish graveyard is part of the larger Cutchi graveyard.Most of Karachi’s Jews are now gone. Even the present caretaker of the graveyard is a Muslim. He says, however, that some families do remain, but they prefer to pass themselves off as Parsis because of the intolerance for Jews in Muslim Pakistan.Some Jews do visit now and then, but do little to help Joseph, who is now the custodian for the Magain Shalome Synagogue as well as the Jewish graveyard. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, she continues to fight for what she feels is her due right in Pakistani society. The possibility of anything happening, though, is as dimunitive as is the number of Jews in Pakistan today.
