Netanyahu trip highlights tiny Jewish community

MUMBAI — Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu makes an emotional visit this week to a Jewish centre targeted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in a trip that India's tiny and shrinking Jewish community hopes will boost its profile.

Netanyahu will talk trade in New Delhi and marvel at the Taj Mahal before rounding off his visit in Mumbai, where the majority of India's estimated 4,500 Jews live.

There he will accompany 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg as the boy returns for the first time to the house where his parents were killed in the 26/11 terror attacks that left 166 people dead.

At Mumbai's Magen David synagogue, worshippers are excited about the first visit to India by an Israeli leader in almost 15 years.

"It's very good news for us. We're very lucky to get to see the prime minister over here," Joel Gershon Awaskar told AFP after concluding his morning prayers.

Netanyahu will be only the second Israeli PM to visit India and the first since Ariel Sharon in 2003. It comes six months after Indian leader Narendra Modi toured Israel.

For Jonathan Solomon, chairman of the Indian Jewish Federation, the reciprocal visits and warm ties between the two countries are of the "utmost importance" to Jews in India.

"The closer the co-operation, the closer the Jewish community in India feels to Israel. So we feel recognised and we feel secure," he told AFP.

It is not just recognition from abroad that many Indian Jews crave.

Although historians believe Jews first arrived in India 2,000 years ago, their descendents today say they are virtually unknown in a country where they are hugely outnumbered by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians.

Nor are Jews officially recognised as a minority community by India's government.