A home away from home
There are fewer than 4,000 Jews in India, while the number of Indian Jews in Israel is close to a hundred thousand. Here is a look at how this happened.
The first time Sophie Judah became aware of her Jewish identity was when she was 14 and her uncle gifted her a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. “Since then,” she says, “I have read it seven times, and have read (Leon Uris’s novel) Exodus 10 times.” Sophie, who was born in Pune, is 56 now and lives with her husband and five children in Israel.
I
heard about Sophie by accident. Some time back, I stumbled on a
coffee-table book about Indian Jews, a collection of deeply moving
stories about everyday life within this community. The book, Dropped From Heaven,
was authored by an Indian Jew, Sophie Judah, and while in Israel later
that year, I resolved to meet her at her home in Hod Hasharon, a town
north of Tel Aviv. Sophie and her husband Simon had a fascinating story
to tell me.
In Pune, as a young stewardess at Indian
Airlines, the doe-eyed Sophie was reprimanded by her father, an army
officer, every time she mentioned moving to Israel. “We are Indians
first and Jews later,” her father used to say. Her family wasn’t overtly
Jewish, even though some Jewish practices were followed at home, and
they didn’t work on Saturdays — observing the Sabbath.
Sophie
had three close friends in India. “Two were Hindus; the other was a
Malayali Christian,” she remembers. “We couldn’t stay apart from each
other!” This isn’t hard to imagine. As Simon Judah, who used to work in
India Steam Ships in Pune, says, “India was never anti-Semitic. That was
a plus, but it also had its minuses.” His paradoxical comment has a
strong basis: India was one of the few countries that had a Jewish
population and was never anti-Semitic. This tolerance, in a way, cost
India its Jewish population.
“In India, you felt
more accepted, and you gradually intermingled and integrated and lost
your identity,” says Simon who speaks Hindi as well as he speaks Hebrew.
He eats only Indian food. He prays in Marathi. And even after all these
years, he sometimes feels alien in his Jewish homeland. He says he
doesn’t know why he came to Israel, but “there was something within me
that dragged my footsteps here,” he adds. Simon emigrated to Israel in
1969 and Sophie followed after she married Simon in 1973.
India
today is left with less than 4,000 Jews, while Indian Jews in Israel
number close to a hundred thousand. Only recently, dozens of Jews
immigrated to Israel from Manipur and Mizoram, after a five-year
struggle to get visas. These Bnei Menashe say they are descendants of a
biblical Jewish tribe, banished from ancient Israel to India in the
eighth century B.C. An Israeli chief rabbi recognised them as a lost
tribe in 2005 and about 1,700 moved to Israel over the next two years.
There
were three groups of Jews who migrated from India after Israel’s
creation in 1948, the Bene Israel from the Mumbai area, the Cochinis
from Kerala and the Baghdadis, Middle Eastern Jews who had come to India
under the British rule. The Judahs are from the Bene Israel clan who
were thrilled at the formation of Israel in 1948. “When the wheels of
the plane touched the tarmac, I felt I had come home,” says Sophie,
recollecting the first sight of her new country, Israel.
Like
every immigrant community, Indian Jews faced troubles being accepted in
Israeli society, especially because their traditions were quite
different from those of other Jews and incorporated various Hindu
practices.
Raymond Abraham, 78, was one of the first
immigrants who arrived in Beersheva, Israel, in 1949. Abraham was born
in Karachi and fled to Bombay during the Partition. “Then in 1949, when I
was 18, some people came from Israel and asked us to emigrate,” said
Abraham. Having no home in India, his family sailed to the port of Haifa
in Israel, where they stayed in a camp with Jews who had come from all
over the world. Then they were divided into groups and distributed
around the country. Only Indian Jews came to Beersheva. “There was no
food, no water, but it was a good time — because we came with a passion
to build Israel,” he says.
In the 1950s, when the
Indian Jews began to migrate, they were among the darkest of all the new
immigrants and experienced racism. Shalva Weil, senior researcher on
Indian Jews, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, says, “In India, they never
had to fight for their basic rights but in Israel they did, and this was
something new for them.”
They had held influential
positions in Bombay, Kochi and Calcutta. There had been Vice Admirals,
Governors, Major Generals and businessmen. They served as officers in
the British Indian Army and gained higher positions in Post &
Telegraph, Railways, Ports and the medical profession. They expected to
hold similar positions in their new homeland. But that wasn’t to be, at
least initially. At first, when they arrived in Israel, they had
difficulty being recognised as ‘authentic’ Jews. In 1962 they held a
sit-down strike, and in 1964 they were accepted as “full Jews in all
respects,” Weil says.
After all these decades, Jews
of Indian origin have come full circle. Just as they had struggled to
keep their Jewish culture alive in India, they are now struggling to
keep their Indian culture alive in Israel.
Many of
Judah’s generation now have children and grandchildren born in Israel.
Therefore, while the older generation still speaks Marathi, Malayalam,
Bengali and Hindi and cooks Indian food at home, the Israeli-born
generation speaks only Hebrew and knows little of its Indian heritage.
“One
of the main reasons I came to Israel was because I didn’t want to see
my children marry non-Jews,” says Sophie. “There were so few Jews in
India.” She raised her five children in Israel and, today, three of them
are married to people of Yemeni, Greek and Iraqi descent. Since the
Jews have Hebrew as a common language, and since most of the main Jewish
practices are similar, integration into the Israeli society is quite
seamless for second-generation immigrants. “I am not sure how much of an
Indian background my son will get,” says Moshe Judah, Sophie’s son.
“My
first son was born in India, so he is the only one who can speak
Marathi,” says Rabbi Eleazer Sasonkar, who migrated to Israel in 1972.
“His siblings tease him about his Hebrew pronunciation,” he adds, “but
he doesn’t care. Also, I haven’t seen him have a meal without dal.”
Unlike
most European immigrants to Israel, though, Indian Jews were not
persecuted in India. Hence their memories of that country are not sour
and they don’t want to break ties with India completely. Sophie’s mother
and sister still live in Ahmedabad and the Judahs visit them
occasionally.
The Judahs are planning to start a
museum to preserve the heritage of Bene Israel. They have collected many
black-and-white photographs of their ancestors, showing women with nose
rings and dressed in saris, in the traditional Western Indian style.
The museum will recreate Jewish villages in India and the Indian-style
elevated ‘huppah,’ the canopied platform where weddings were
held. Since many of the Bene Israel were oil pressers, the museum will
have a section dedicated to that profession. The songs and prayers in
India have a different ring to them from Jewish rituals elsewhere, and
the museum will showcase Indian Jewish songs for every occasion — birth,
death, circumcision, Purim and Passover.
“It is too
expensive to rent a place, but we are trying hard,” says Simon, who
thinks it is important for the younger generation to be aware of their
lineage. The museum will be located in Hod Hasharon.
There is no Jewish museum in India in honour of Indian Jewish culture, but perhaps India will feel the need for it soon..
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