Short History of Jews in Pakistan

[Fahad1]

Prof. Adil Najam of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University has written a short history of Jews in Pakistan in the Lahore, Pakistan based newspaper The Daily Times. 1

According to his research various estimates suggest that there were about 2,500 Jews living in Karachi at the beginning of the twentieth century and a smaller community of a few hundred lived in Peshawar. There certainly were synagogues in both cities, and reportedly the one in Peshawar still exists but is closed. In Karachi, the Magain Shalome Synagogue was built in 1893 by Shalome Solomon Umerdekar and his son Gershone Solomon (other accounts suggest it was built by Solomon David, a surveyor for the Karachi Municipality, and his wife Sheeoolabai, although these may be different names for the same people). The synagogue soon became the center of a small but vibrant Jewish community, one of whose leaders, Abraham Reuben, became a councilor on the city corporation in 1936. There were various Jewish social organizations operating in Karachi, including the Young Men’s Jewish Association (founded 1903), the Karachi Bene Israel Relief Fund, and the Karachi Jewish Syndicate which was formed to provide homes to poor Jews at reasonable rates.

Some Jews migrated to India at the time of partition but reportedly some 2,000 remained, most of them Bene Yisrale (or Bene Israel) Jews observing Sephardic Jewish rites. The first real exodus from Pakistan came soon after the creation of Israel, which triggered multiple incidents of violence against Jews in Pakistan including the synagogue in Karachi being set to fire. From then onwards most Pakistanis viewed all Jews through the lens of Arab-Israel politics and the wars of 1956 and 1967 only made life more difficult for Jews in Pakistan. The Karachi synagogue became the site of anti-Israel demonstrations, and the Pakistani Jews the subject of the wrath of mobs. Ayub Khan’s era saw the near disappearance of the Pakistani Jewry. The vast majority left the country, many to Israel but some to India or the United Kingdom. Reportedly, a couple of hundred Jews remained in Karachi but out of concern for their safety and as a reaction to increasing religious intolerance in society many went ‘underground’, sometimes passing off as Parsees. According to a website on Jewish history, many of the Karachi Jews now live in Ramale and have built a synagogue there called Magain Shalone. The Magain Shalome synagogue, in Karachi’s Rancore Lines area, became dormant in the 1960s and was demolished by property developers in the 1980s to make way for a commercial building. Reportedly, the last caretaker of the synagogue, a Muslim, rescued the religious artifacts (bima, ark, etc.) from the synagogue but it is not clear where he or those artifacts are now.

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