Samuel Ezekiel Divekar

Origins and early life

Samuel Ezekiel Divekar, also recorded under the Marathi name Samaji Hassaji, was born in 1730 into the Bene Israel, the Jewish community of the Konkan coast of western India whose tradition traces its arrival to antiquity and which kept the Shema, circumcision and the Sabbath through centuries of isolation from the rest of the Jewish world.

Work and career

He remained Jewish all his life. He enlisted in the army of the East India Company around 1760 and rose to the rank of native commandant, and during the Second Anglo-Mysore War he was taken prisoner by Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Accounts of his release differ in the sources, one tradition crediting the intervention of the sultan's mother and another the Jews of Cochin, and the fiche notes the discrepancy rather than choosing between them; both agree that he vowed, if freed, to revive Jewish practice among the Bene Israel of Bombay.

He kept the vow: he led the building of the synagogue Shaar HaRahamim, the Gate of Mercy, completed in Bombay in 1796, the first synagogue in the city and the mother congregation of Bombay Jewry. He also worked to bring Cochin Jewish ritual, teachers and Hebrew books to the Bene Israel, who had long lacked trained readers. He died in 1797 at Cochin while procuring Torah scrolls for his new congregation, and the Jewish Encyclopedia calls him the second founder of the Bene Israel community of Bombay.