Queenie Hallegua, second-to-last Jewish resident of historic Indian Jewish community, dies at 89

Four years ago, when a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent visited Kochi, India, researcher Shalva Weil said only two Jews were still living in Jew Town, a vibrant community where perhaps 3,000 Jews lived at its peak in the 1950s.

On Sunday, one of those two survivors died: Newspapers in India reported that Queenie Hallegua, the last of the Paradesi, or “foreign,” Jewish women in Kochi, died at age 89, leaving her nephew Keith Hallegua as the last Jew in Kochi.

Queenie Hallegua was the warden and managing trustee of the Paradesi Synagogue, a 450-year-old landmark, from 2012 to 2018. She was also managing partner, until 2011, of the S. Koder House, a boutique hotel in a house once owned by her grandfather, Shabdai Samuel Koder, an Iraqi immigrant who settled in Kochi in the early 20th century and later owned the local electric company. Hallegua sold the property to the hotel’s current owners, and it remains a popular spot for tourists.

Queenie and her late husband Sammy hosted Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, when they came to the Paradesi Synagogue in the Mattancherry neighborhood in October 1997.

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