Bombay bustles past the gate of the 140 year-old Mogen David Synagogue, the largest of the city’s six remaining synagogues, tucked in a courtyard off a major thoroughfare. Several times a week, exactly ten, poor, elderly men – nine of them Bene Israel – enter this Mogen David gate to constitute Bombay’s only weekday morning minyan. In return for keeping the minyan active, the Bombay community gives the men breakfast, and for Shabbat, a kosher chicken killed by Bombay’s only kosher ritual slaughterer (shochet) in Mogen David’s gravelly yard.

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