Jewish Cemetery, Chinchpokli

The Jewish Cemetery, Chinchpokli, is a cemetery in Chinchpokli, Bombay, laid out near the Chinchpokli railway station by Elias David Sassoon in 1878.

Covering two acres, the burial ground now contains more than a thousand graves, and new burials continue to take place.[1]

History

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Elias David Sassoon, a leading Bombay merchant and banker, created the cemetery in January 1878 in memory of his son Joseph, who had died at Shanghai in 1868.[1] It was originally intended for Sephardic Baghdadi Jews.[2]

The cemetery has declined since the days when there was a large community of Jews in Bombay, with numbers falling during the second half of the 20th century from around 7,000 to only a small fraction of that.[3]

Mausoleums

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Two large mausoleums of very similar design contain the remains of Sir Jacob Sassoon (1844–1916) and his wife, Rachel Sassoon. A third mausoleum is that of Sir Albert Abdullah David Sassoon, 1st Baronet (1818–1896),[2] who in the event was buried in England.

Notable monuments

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The first Miss India, Esther Victoria Abraham (1916–2006), also an actress and film producer, is mentioned on the monument to the Abraham family.[1] There are plaques to the memory of Otto Mass, who was murdered in Buchenwald, and Ernst Mass, who was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.[3]

21st century

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In 2014, the cemetery was reported to be "overrun with weeds" and still used largely by the small Baghdadi Jewish community, said to number just over a hundred. While some Israelis were also being buried, they were usually ones related to the Baghdadi Jews.[3]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ a b c “The Mausoleums of Sassoon family and Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli”, in My Heritage Chronicle, 13 January 2020
  2. ^ a b Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, Rachel Dwyer, eds. Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos (Oxford University Press, 15 August 2019), p. 11
  3. ^ a b c Nergish Sunavala & Rizwan Mithawala, Mumbai Secrets: Jewish film stars and holocaust victims remembered in a Chinchpokli cemetery, Times of India, 28 September 2014, accessed 12 July 2021
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