PUNE: It’s the Lal Deval for most, but very few know what is inside.
The grand old Ohel David Synagogue, fondly called Red Temple or Lal Deval in Marathi, cannot be missed while on the move along Moledina Road towards Sadhu Vaswani Road.
The gates are mostly shut with some policemen guarding the structure from behind sandbags. Most locals have ever been inside and to whom the the structure is dedicated to or what it symbolises is for anyone’s guess.
“It looks like one of those old churches, like St Paul. We call it Red Temple (Lal Deval) in Marathi. I don’t really know what is inside,” autorickshaw driver Abdul Shaikh said.
The earthen-red coloured structure is one of the largest places of worship for adherents of Judaism outside Israel. But as Abdul described the structure, it indeed resembles a church in a kind of architecture perfected by the British — the English Gothic style, with slanting roofs, ornate columns and at least one obelisk with a bell, clock or both mounted on it.
An army engineer of the East India Company, known for his restoration of ancient structures in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, had designed and built the synagogue. Henry Saint Clair Wilkins, who later became a general in the main British Army, completed the structure in 1867. But the commission to build the structure, along with a hospital, came from a flamboyant businessman shortly before he died.
David Sassoon, a wealthy Jew who had served as the treasurer in his land, had fled Ottoman witch-hunt while in Baghdad and came to Mumbai (then Bombay) in the early 1830s. He found a business opportunity with the East India Company, especially its vast opium trade with China. Besides, he became one of the largest cotton mill operators and oil traders in the subcontinent.
His trade gave him ample wealth for his successors and enough for his philanthropic activities, too. The Ohel David Synagogue was one of those, and so was the Sassoon hospital, now the major referral hospital in Pune. This was besides the Sassoon Library and the Sassoon Docks in Mumbai, where he resided in what has been described in history as “a palace”.
His place of retreat, however, was Pune. He died in Pune as well, in 1864. He did not live to see most of the structures in the city he had commissioned, but was interred in a mausoleum on the grounds of the Ohel David Synagogue.
While Sassoon is frequently referred to in discussions on the influence and history of Jews in India, Sassoon and Baghdadi Jews were actually one of the last communities of the Jewish people to set foot in India.
Bene Israelis, then much larger in number, settled in small villages in the Konkan belt and preserved the traditions of Judaism. In the 19th century, they migrated to the trading bases of the Company, like Mumbai, Pune, Karachi, and Kolkata.
While a Bene Israeli cemetery in Mumbai has been running for centuries, the older Jewish cemeteries in Pune have been poorly preserved. Some of those have turned onto parking lots, like the one on Church Road behind a group of administrative buildings.