About this trail
The Jewish India Digital Heritage Trail is a working catalogue of the built and spatial heritage of India's Jewish communities — the Bene Israel, the Baghdadi (including the Sassoon family network), the Cochini and other Jews of Kerala, communities of the broader Indian Jewish diaspora, and emerging communities such as the Bene Menashe.
The data structure
Every site on the trail — synagogue, cemetery, mill, school, garden — is one entry in a single dataset. Each entry has the same set of fields, listed below. Empty fields are fine; the site only renders what's there.
| Field | Required | What it is | Allowed values / example |
|---|---|---|---|
id | auto | Short URL slug. Auto-generated from the name if blank. | magen-david-synagogue |
name | yes | Display name of the site. | Magen David Synagogue |
category | yes | What kind of site it is. | synagogue · cemetery · school · hospital · library · clock_tower · garden · dock · mill · mill_site · district · chabad · civic · other |
community | yes | Which Jewish community/communities the site belongs to. Comma-separated for multiple. | bene_israel · baghdadi · cochini · kerala · diaspora · emerging |
lat / lon | recommended | Decimal coordinates. Leave blank if unknown. | 18.9669 / 72.8322 |
coords_approximate | no | Mark TRUE when only city-level coordinates are known. | TRUE / FALSE |
date_start | no | Founding year. Use a negative number for BCE. | 1861 · -562 |
date_end | no | Year demolished or closed; blank if still standing. | 1971 |
city / state | recommended | Place names as you'd write them in prose. | Bombay / Maharashtra |
address | no | Free-form street address. | 340 Sir J. J. Road, Byculla |
description | no | One or more paragraphs about the site. | Built 1861 by David Sassoon… |
image_folder | no | Name of the folder under Images/ that holds photos of this site. | Magen David Synagogue |
iiif_manifest | no | URL of an IIIF manifest if you have one. | https://…/manifest.json |
verified | no | Set to TRUE once a person has reviewed the row. | TRUE / FALSE |
sources | no | Where the data came from. Comma-separated for multiple. | Sassoon family papers; site visit |