Sarah Cohen of Mattancherry Jew Town, and the Muslim Family Who Kept Her Shop Open

For about thirty years, the most visited private house on Mattancherry Jew Town was a living room with a sewing machine in it. Sarah Jacob Cohen sat there embroidering kippahs and challah covers, and travellers who had come to see a synagogue found themselves buying a skullcap from a woman in her nineties who had been born on that street when it was still a Jewish neighbourhood.

Who she was

Sarah Jacob Cohen was born on 4 September 1922 in Jew Town, Mattancherry, into the Paradesi Jewish community. She married Jacob Elias Cohen in 1942. When the state of Israel was founded in 1948 and the great emigration began, she did not go. Over the following decades the community around her shrank from thousands to a handful, and she stayed put.

In the late 1980s she started Sarah’s Hand Embroidery out of the front room of her house — kippahs, challah covers, table linen, the small textile things a Jewish household needs — made on the street the household had lived on for generations. It was a business, and it was also, whether she framed it that way or not, an act of continuity. Jacob died in 1999. She kept working.

The family who looked after her

Sarah Cohen was cared for in her last years by Thaha Ibrahim, a Muslim neighbour, and his wife Jasmine, in their own family home. Thaha had worked with her for years; he learned the embroidery, kept the shop running, and looked after her through the hip fracture and the age-related decline that eventually killed her. She died on 30 August 2019, five days short of her ninety-seventh birthday.

He has kept the trade going since. The Jewish embroidery of Jew Town is now made and sold by a Muslim family, on a Hindu king’s land grant, next door to a synagogue, in a quarter named after a departed community. It would be a laboured metaphor if it were not simply what happened.

What is left, and the number to be careful with

Reporting around the time of her death put the Paradesi Jewish population of Jew Town at two, with a handful of Malabari Jews elsewhere in Kochi. That figure is a snapshot rather than a standing fact and we do not update it lightly — a community measured in single figures changes with a single death or departure. Treat any number you are given on the street, including that one, as approximate and out of date.

Thaha Ibrahim has spoken about turning the Cohen house and its warehouse into a museum, both to hold what is left and to serve the students and researchers who arrive in Jew Town looking for the community and find mostly antique shops. Whether that has happened by the time you read this is worth asking locally rather than assuming.

How to visit without being a nuisance

This is a house on a residential lane, not an attraction with opening hours. If the shop is open, go in, buy something, and treat it as commerce rather than as a photo opportunity. If it is closed, walk on. Photographing a private doorway because a guidebook told you a famous person lived behind it is the kind of tourism that makes streets like this one close their doors.

And if you want the wider story that sits behind the shopfront, it is a hundred metres away: the Paradesi Synagogue at the end of the lane, and the antique shops between here and the palace, whose earliest stock came out of houses exactly like this one.