Tamil Nadu: Chennai’s 'last Jew' fights for place in India’s history

Davvid Levi claims to be the last Jew who lived in the southern Indian city of Chennai.

That's because, according to government records, Mr Levi's was the last Jewish family in the city, which is the capital of Tamil Nadu state. (The BBC could not verify if the last two Jews documented in Tamil Nadu according to India's census were Mr Levi and his wife).

Mr Levi left India for "security reasons" following a property dispute in 2020. He now lives in Germany with his family.

But Chennai, he says, will always be his first home and he's determined to preserve his community's culture and history.

More than 10 generations of the Levi family, which has Portuguese origins, have lived in Chennai, which was then part of the Madras province under British rule.

Mr Levi's great-grandmother Rosa (he says she was named after the Tamil word for the rose flower) married Isaac Henriques De Castro, a diamond trader from Amsterdam who moved to Madras with her. The couple was killed in 1944 during the Holocaust in Germany while they were on a trip.

After their deaths, their only son and Mr Levi's grandfather, Levi Henriques De Castro, returned to India.

For years, Mr Levi has been documenting the history of his family and other Jews who once lived in Chennai on his Facebook page.

"I do this because I don't want the legacy of my ancestors to die with me," he told BBC Tamil.

But he now wants to scale up the mission to preserve his family's past. In 2020, he wrote to Tamil Nadu's archaeology department, requesting the state to take over his family's artefacts and preserve them in a museum.

The items include some sacred Jewish texts bound in silver, a few utensils used in religious rituals and other items from a now-demolished synagogue in Chennai,