Stories from Mumbai
I would like to begin with a story. A long time ago, everyone in the world spoke the same language and the same words. A group of people got together and said, let us build a city with a tower whose top reaches the sky. God saw what they were doing and decided to punish them by scattering them all over the earth and giving them different languages so they could not communicate with each other. The tower was never finished. This is the story of the Tower of Babel.
Ours is a long history of dispersion and migration. The Jewish people have moved to all corners of the earth, migrating from one place to the next, acquiring new languages, methods of communication and customs. Here is the story of one such migration.
Soon after the destruction of the second Temple, a group of Jews boarded a ship headed for an unknown destination. Their journey was obstructed by troubled waters and they found themselves marooned on the Konkan coast of India, which is in the western state of Maharashtra. The survivors, seven men and seven women, settled in the Konkan villages, began to work as oil pressers, and lived peacefully with their neighbors. They retained what they could of the Jewish tradition: they kept the basic laws of kashrut, they observed brit milah, they did not work on Shabbat, and they recited the shema. They called themselves the Bene Israel.
But this is not ancient folklore; it is a story with a pulse, a story that continues to be circulated and transmitted from one generation to the next. It is the oral history of the community of Jews that exists in India to this day.
A couple of years ago, I knew nothing of a Jewish community in India. I had a vague notion that Jews came in all shapes, sizes and colors, but I did not understand the depth of differences. I also knew close to nothing about India. On the map of my mind, it was a distant land of colors and spices, rumored to have some of the worst poverty in the world. I would soon learn to call the country home, however inhospitable, and the Bene Israel my community, however foreign.
In July of 2007, my husband, Reuben, and I left for Mumbai, India, where we would spend the next year in a program run by the Joint Distribution Committee called the Jewish Service Corps. Jewish Service Corps participants are sent to countries with under-resourced or needy Jewish communities, such as Moldova, Georgia, and Turkey. They spend a year with the local community, providing formal and informal education, contributing to welfare programs, innovating and improving structures that already exist. Of course, the volunteers also learn from the community, being embraced by it and brought into its fold in an exchange of learning and teaching, giving and receiving.
Before leaving for India, Reuben and I wanted to have a sense of the community and its history. But ultimately we learned the history of the Jews of India not from reading history books but from speaking to members of the community and getting to know the places, customs and stories that matter to them.
There were three waves of Jewish immigrants into India. The Bene Israel Jews arrived around 2,000 years ago. There is no written documentation of their early history; there is only the story, told over and over again, worn from use and the passage of time, but never obsolete as it continues to influence and shape their experience. It’s a story of survival against all odds. It’s a surprising account of both assimilation and self-preservation. As it is understood, the Bene Israel lived peacefully among their neighbors, never experiencing anti-Semitism. They adopted local dress, language and practices and lived in complete isolation from the rest of world Jewry until the 1400s when Jews from Spain and Portugal, fleeing the Inquisition, arrived in India, settling mostly in Cochin, a seaport city in the southern state of Kerala. They were known as the Paradesi Jews.
The Paradesi Jews came across another group who claimed to have migrated during the time of King Solomon called the Malabari Jews, who had settled on the Malabar coast. Together, the Paradesi and Malabari Jews were the second assemblage of Jews in India, collectively called the Cochini Jews.
In the late 18th century, Jews from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries moved to India, not only to avoid religious persecution but because of the possibilities of wealth and opportunity that they believed they would encounter there. The Baghdadi Jews, as they became known, flourished in Mumbai.
In 1948, when Israel became a state, many Indian Jews gazed westward and dreamed of making aliyah. For the Bene Israel, numbering between 20,000 and 50,000, depending on whom you ask and which version of the story you come across, this was not a dream easily realized as they were not yet recognized formally as Jews. However, in 1964 the Israeli rabbinate declared them “full Jews in every respect” and they were granted entry into the land of Israel. Thousands, including Cochini and Baghdadi Jews, left.
There are now around 5,000 Jews left in India, most in Mumbai. In the Konkan villages, where the Bene Israel first arrived, there remains a smattering, a few here and there. Almost all the Jews remaining are Bene Israel and our work would be with this community. In time, we made a home for ourselves in Mumbai, a city so chaotic, so overcrowded and so inefficient that people ride on the top of train cars to get home, and cows travel alongside rickshaws on the roads, and it takes half an hour to mail a letter. And a city so poverty-stricken that barefoot children beg on the streets and old women sift through trash alongside dogs and crows.
We worked at the Jewish community center, an arm of the local JDC office. Our co-workers had dedicated themselves to ensuring their community’s continuity, providing Jewish education and offering services such as meals on wheels and medical camps, to its poorer and needier members. We were to serve as educators, both formally and informally, for people of all ages. We taught classes for children, adults, and the elderly. We ran holiday programs. We organized day camps and a Shabbaton during school vacations. We wrote articles for the community magazine and implemented a few new programs.
We encouraged our students to examine old and familiar texts and grapple with them because they are the foundation of our religion. I taught a class about women in the Bible and Reuben taught a Talmud class. We explored Judaism grounded in our history, tradition, and Jewish stories. But we began to ask ourselves, What comprises our history? What customs make up our tradition? What are the stories that make up our collective understanding of ourselves?
When the Paradesi Jews arrived in Cochin, they did not mingle with the Malabari Jews. They did not recognize them as Jewish because of their darker skins, their unusual history, and their strange customs. When the Baghdadi Jews arrived they did not accept the Bene Israel. They had a rigid understanding of what it meant to be Jewish and when they looked, all they saw were differences in practice and belief. Reuben and I were saddened by this story of exclusion, prejudice, and rejection. We believed in the importance of pluralism, of accepting each and every type of Jewish practice. We had spent time with Jewish communities in Argentina, Spain, and Israel, and we had moved fluidly through American Jewish communities of different denominations. We had come ready to embrace difference and also find common ground between our communities at home and the Bene Israel community in India.
We were humbled by the realization that this was not as easy as we had anticipated. Jewish identity in India is not part of the Jewish timeline as we conceive of it. We encouraged our students to look back at the texts and use them to gain a stronger understanding of who we are and where we come from. But the story that most informs their community cannot be found in a piece of ancient writing. And the local traditions cannot be found in any other community. Could we come to expand our vision of Judaism to include these foreign customs and stories?
We were challenged in a myriad of ways. We had to change our style of dress, eating, and language. We had to face hordes of impoverished people each day. We had to shop for fruits and vegetables in an outdoor market crawling with rats and permeated by the rancid smell from the fish market next door. We had to rely only on each other for emotional support and learn to work together in a professional setting.
But some of the most surprising challenges came with exposure to local Jewish practice that forced us to reexamine our understanding of Jewish ritual and Jewish identity. At a funeral, the deceased, face uncovered, is laid out on a table for all to see. Oil and dirt from Israel are poured over the body. There is a procession on the street with the coffin and only men attend the burial.
Unique to the Bene Israel community, the malida is a ceremony marking a special event, such as an engagement or the purchase of a new house, and pays homage to Elijah the Prophet. Since it is good to recite as many blessings as possible, each participant receives a plate containing a flower (besamim), dates and other fruit (ha’etz), a banana (ha’adamah), and sweet puffed rice (mezonot), which is itself known as the malida. When I asked someone why Elijah is such a prominent figure, I was told that some believe he was on the ship that landed on the Konkan coast, having been told by God to come out of hiding and work for the well-being of the Jewish people. In Kings 2, a fiery chariot with fiery horses appears, separating Elijah from his disciple Elisha, and Elijah ascends to heaven in the chariot. In one of the Konkan villages, in a place called Khandala, there is a rock, and on the rock there are grooves from the wheels of Elijah’s chariot. It is the place of his ascension, and people from the area, Jew and non-Jew alike, visit the auspicious and holy site hoping it may bring them luck and blessing.
When I asked our friend Sharon, a Jewish educator who works at ORT India, if he believed the story, if there are in fact tracks on the rock, he didn’t answer. Instead, he told me another story. In a village near the rock, there lives a Jewish man who owns a coconut grove. Sharon looks forward to visiting him because the juice inside his coconuts is the sweetest juice Sharon has ever tasted. And when he walks with him among the trees, he feels at home because his family comes from that village as well.
Sharon was teaching me that there is no right answer and, more importantly, that the answer does not matter. Elijah may have ascended from a rock in the Konkan villages, or he may not have. The Bene Israel may have arrived in India on a ship 2,000 years ago or they may not have. The important thing is to unearth meaning and message and allow each story to deepen our understanding of Judaism and of where we come from.
Sharon’s philosophy is not new. When the rabbis came together to make decisions, they argued, each offering a different interpretation. The rabbis read between the lines and extracted new meaning and interpretation of classic Jewish stories. Midrashim, the stories they told to help us understand our texts, epitomize their proclivity toward differences in opinion. There are stories within stories. But they often contradicted each other, leaving us with two or more interpretations of the same story.
In other words, there is no right way to interpret our stories. There is a multitude of interpretations because there is a multitude of interpreters and this is precisely what makes our tradition so rich, so nuanced and so beautiful.
In the JCC in Mumbai, there is a small and modest library of Jewish texts that is only a microcosm of the breadth of Jewish literature. Part of our job was to supplement its contents with other sources. What we realized, though, was that it was impossible to exhaust even all the resources in that little library. Whether it was a biblical text, a rabbinic text, a book of contemporary Jewish poetry, or a feminist revision of the holidays, each book contained a story that shed light on our cumulative identity. Stories are layered, mutable, and open for interpretation. Our collection of them is bounteous and never ceasing. With each passing second a new story is added, and each has the power to change and augment our Jewish narrative.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov believed stories to be a pathway to the soul. He said, “There’s nothing in heaven that rejuvenates the soul, purifies the heart, stimulates depth of mind and brings one close to their father in heaven like a story.” He argued that “while it is true a story can put one to sleep, a story can also wake one up.”
The story of the Jews of India awoke in us a deeper appreciation for the Jewish community. Our Jewish identity is not complete if any story is missing. Our history includes Noah’s ark and the ship that arrived in India. Our ancestors include Adam and Eve and the seven men and seven women who started Jewish life in India. Our traditions include opening the door for Elijah at the Passover seder and thanking Elijah for good things at a malida.
Of course, our Jewish story changed tragically with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Five years ago, Gabi and Rivki Holzberg moved to India to open the first Chabad House in Mumbai. They opened their home to Israeli and other tourists and businesspeople. While their primary purpose was to provide Yiddishkeit for foreign Jews, they did interact with the local community. Gabi helped run and lead services for the Baghdadi synagogue near their home. Rivki ran the mikveh. They hosted local Jews for Shabbat and attended community events. They made a home for themselves and hundreds of others in an unlikely place. When the terrorists invaded their space, they transformed a place of joy and safety into one of fear and tragedy. It does not matter if you knew them or not – each of us is affected by what happened because each tremor, each shift in our reality, changes our Jewish narrative. This is what we learned in India.
I would like to end with a story. A long time ago, human beings grew restless and desired to become something different, something greater. Each person was like the next, everybody understood each other, and there was nothing new to learn on this earth. So they decided to build a tower. God was not angry, but rather understood that this was not the way for people to grow and change. So God scattered them throughout the earth and gave them different means of communication.
Joshua Kolet, an Indian rabbi who recently made aliyah with his family, taught us this particular version of the story of the tower of Babel. As he explained, the punishment of distance and difference was not a punishment at all, but rather a gift and a blessing. God gave people the opportunity to be different from each other so that they could learn from each other. There is beauty in difference – each person has a unique history and a different story to tell. As Reuben and I came to believe, in order to fully grasp the vibrancy and fullness of Judaism and the Jewish people, we must make room for and include each turn in the narrative, each permutation of a text, each idea and practice, and each story within a story. This is our blessing.
Leila Bilick works for Pro Mujer, a nonprofit organization that gives small loans to Latin America’s poorest women. She and her husband live in New York City.
The Masorti Movement in India
We waited for over a week to hear from Masorti Olami India national chairman Ralphy Jhirad in the aftermath of the horrific attacks of December 2008. Because 90 percent of the Jews of India live in Mumbai, we feared for the members of our communities. When we did finally hear from Mr. Jhirad, he assured us that our community members were safe and doing well.
A Mumbai native, Ralphy Jhirad also heads the national headquarters of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs of India. He was gratified to hear that our prayers and thoughts were with him, his family, and the entire Masorti community.
There are six Masorti-affiliated congregations in India: two near Mumbai, two in Delhi, and one each in Ahemadabad and Alibaug. All of them hold regular Shabbat services every Friday evening and Shabbat morning. Our families practice Judaism in a traditional manner, observing the mitzvot including kashrut. Their siddurim are prepared especially for them in both Hebrew and Maharti, the local dialect. The Indian Masorti community has a strong ideological connection to the Masorti movement, sharing common goals and traditional cultural perspectives interpreted in modern Western terms.
As Mr. Jhirad said, “We believe in pluralized Judaism and an open-minded attitude to a changing halachah for the modern world.” He also described a deep community connection to Chabad in India. In a show of solidarity on the first day of Hanukkah, the Masorti community came together at the Chabad House that had been attacked, “to show support and share a unified message that we will sit together in India and live proudly as Jews, without denominational differences separating us.”
Holding a well-publicized public celebration and memorial was a bold move for both Masorti and Chabad because there are only some 6,000 Jews in an area of more than one million Muslims. To hold a public memorial was an assertion of Jewish permanence in the region.
On a daily basis, the Masorti movement serves the Jewish communities of India, as we do in Israel and North America, including Jewish educational programming for children and adults.
The Indian Masorti community is as diverse as the Indian Jewish community itself. The Bnei Menashe community is making major efforts to move to Israel. So far 1,000 members have made aliyah and the Masorti movement in India has invested in helping more Indian Jews do so. Additionally a Bnei Menashe hazzan teaches in the Masorti community. There have been talks of developing a summer camp in the spirit of Conservative Judaism, but budgetary constraints have prevented the project from reaching fruition.
The United Synagogues of India was set up to unify the six Masorti synagogues. While it has not met its initial goals, it has taken a major step in lay-leadership development, as well as increasing youth programming and adult education. Under Mr. Jhirad’s direction, it is developing stronger security for its synagogues as well as 24-hour computer monitoring.
If you would like to visit or help the Indian Masorti movement, email Ralphy Jhirad at ralphy44@gmail.com. For more information on our communities throughout the world, go to www.masortiworld.org.
Adam Tichter, a fourth-year rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, is a resource development assistant for Masorti Olami and Mercaz Olami.
