Nirit Singers perform Songs of Zion

Washington, April 7: Jews from Kochi who migrated to Israel in large numbers 54 years ago are adding a new dimension to the strong bonds between America’s powerful Jewish community and Indian Americans here this week.

Nirit Singers, a group founded in Israel by a Jewish Malayali to revive and promote traditional songs of Kochi Jews, began a series of performances and academic discussions in Washington yesterday.

The US tour of the group — its first since Nirit Singers was started in Israel by Galia Hacco eight years ago — will give a major push to pioneering efforts by anthropologist Barbara Johnson of Ithaca College, New York, three decades ago to save Malayalam Jewish songs from extinction.

Scaria Zacharia, who retired last year as professor and head of the Malayalam department at Sree Sankara University of Sanskrit in Kalady, Kerala, told The Telegraph last night that the group’s programme in the US represented the internationalisation of a campaign to bring the “Malayalam language back to Israel”.

Since 1999, Zacharia has been part of efforts to recover Malayalam Jewish songs. He was the organiser of an international conference in 2006 on “Jewish Heritage in Kerala” and co-authored a book published in Israel three years ago with the title Karkulali-Yefifiah-Gorgeous!: Jewish Women’s Songs in Malayalam with Hebrew Translations, according to a press release by the Jewish Community Center here.

The group’s US tour is the result of efforts by Smita Jassal, an anthropologist and author of Daughters of the Earth: Women and Land. When Smita, wife of the then Indian ambassador to Israel, arrived in Tel Aviv in 2001, she was fascinated by the monthly meetings and performances of Nirit Singers at an Indian synagogue in Rishon-Le-Zion that she attended.

Smita had a special interest in the group because at that time she was researching folk songs of her native Uttar Pradesh, especially the Bhojpuri-speaking parts of the state.

When Smita’s husband, Raminder Singh Jassal, was posted as deputy chief of mission at the Indian embassy in Washington, she continued her work to internationalise efforts by Israel’s Kochi Jews to recover their traditional folk songs.

Two Nirit Singers — originally from Kerala — Galia Hacco, now living in Rishon-Le-Zion, and Zipporah “Venus” Lane of Tiberias will perform today at the prestigious US Library of Congress here.

That programme will be accompanied by a special exhibition of books on the Jewish community in Kochi from the Asian collection of the Library of Congress.

Hacco founded Nirit Singers in memory of Nirit, her 15-year-old daughter who died in a car accident in Israel.

Before Nirit’s death, her mother was disturbed that children and grandchildren of Kochi Jews who migrated to Israel knew very little about the community to which they belonged.

Lane, who still goes about in a sari in Israel, hoped this week’s programme would be a beginning for international exposure of Jewish Malayalam songs.

Zacharia said the US tour was meant to publicise the larger project of recovering Kerala’s Jewish songs, which have a history that goes back to 1000 AD.