Maharashtra Tourism Department To Promote Tours Of Jewish Sites In Mumbai; 2 New itineraries To Be Added

Mumbai: The ‘Jewish Route’, a collaboration between the Israeli Consulate General and the Maharashtra tourism department to promote tours of Jewish sites in Mumbai, will be expanded to feature two more walking itineraries that tourists and history enthusiasts can enjoy. The project, inaugurated last year, currently has five routes, but are not walkable.

The routes cover sites connected to local Jewish history, like the Knesset Eliyahoo, or the blue synagogue in Kala Ghoda, David Sassoon Library, which was funded by the philanthropic Sassoon family, Chabad House in Colaba, which was besieged in the 26/11 terror attack, and cemeteries, including those in Worli and Chinchpokli.

Tours and routes

The tours are based on a book ‘BOMBAY MUMBAI: City Heritage Walks, Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage’ written by Saul Sapir, a professor of historical geography at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The routes include two in Mumbai, one each in Pune and Raigad district. Currently, the information is available on a website www.jewishroute.in, but there are plans to create a mobile-phone application for the tours with audio and visual data, said a person with knowledge about the project.

As part of the project, plaques, with information in English, Marathi, and Hebrew, have been installed at some of the sites on the tour itinerary. The job to develop the mobile-phone application will be entrusted to a travel company. The application will be able to read information on the sites through the barcodes on the plaques, said the source.