The Jewish Cemetery, Chinchpokli, is a

cemetery A cemetery, burial ground, gravesite or graveyard is a place where the remains of dead people are buried or otherwise interred. The word ''cemetery'' (from Greek , "sleeping place") implies that the land is specifically designated as a buri ...

Chinchpokli Chinchpokli ( mr, चिंचपोकळी) is a neighbourhood in South Mumbai. It is also the name of a railway station on the Central line of the Mumbai suburban railway. Historical British era spellings include Chinchpugli and Chinchpoogh ...

Bombay Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second-m ...

, laid out near the Chinchpokli railway station by

Elias David Sassoon Elias David Sassoon (27 March 1820 – 21 March 1880), an Indian merchant and banker born in Baghdad, was the second son of David Sassoon, an Iraqi-Indian philanthropist Jewish businessman involved in trade in India and the Far East, with bran ...

in 1878. Covering two acres, the burial ground now contains more than a thousand graves, and new burials continue to take place. “The Mausoleums of Sassoon family and Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli”, in ''My Heritage Chronicle'', 13 January 2020

History

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 Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...

in 1868. It was originally intended for Sephardic

Baghdadi Jews The former communities of Jewish migrants and their descendants from Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East are traditionally called Baghdadi Jews or Iraqi Jews. They settled primarily in the ports and along the trade routes around the Indian ...

.Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, Rachel Dwyer, eds. ''Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos'' (Oxford University Press, 15 August 2019),
p. 11
/ref> 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.

Mausoleums

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), who in the event was buried in England.

Notable monuments

The first

Miss India Miss India may refer to: * Femina Miss India, the most prestigious and oldest surviving national beauty pageant in India that started in 1964. It sends its winner to Miss World. * Miss Diva, the national beauty pageant that sends its winners to Miss ...

, Esther Victoria Abraham (1916–2006), also an actress and film producer, is mentioned on the monument to the Abraham family. There are plaques to the memory of Otto Mass, who was murdered in

Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...

, and Ernst Mass, who was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.Nergish Sunavala & Rizwan Mithawala
Mumbai Secrets: Jewish film stars and holocaust victims remembered in a Chinchpokli cemetery
''

Times of India ''The Times of India'', also known by its abbreviation ''TOI'', is an Indian English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the third-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest se ...

'', 28 September 2014, accessed 12 July 2021

21st century

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.

Notes

External links