SPEAKER TRACES CULTURAL HISTORY OF LIBYAN JEWS
Diana Ming
Dartmouth, May 25, 2011
Libyan Jews comprise one of the smallest ethnic Jewish populations in the world today and possess a deeply rooted and unique cultural identity, Harvey Goldberg, an anthropologist from Hebrew University in Israel, said in a lecture in Kemeny Hall on Tuesday. Goldberg, who began researching Libyan Jews in 1961, said the notion of “Libyan Jewry” should never be taken for granted because of its “valuable and precious” past.
Jewish populations have existed in the North African regions of current-day Yemen, Iraq and Libya since ancient times, according to Goldberg. During the 20th century, over 30,000 Jews lived in the Libyan region, he said. “In Libya [there] emerged general categories of Jews in reference to immigrating groups,” Goldberg said. “In many ways these categories were very revealing.”
The largest population of Jews in Libya at this time was centered in the capital city of Tripoli, Goldberg said. The Jews who lived in the region surrounding the city were known as “Tripolitans,” he said. Goldberg also discussed other local Jewish groups including Gharyan Jews from the Libyan town of Gharyan as well as the Amrusi Jews from Amrus. Jews from these areas felt strong cultural and social bonds with their towns, according to Goldberg.
“Among immigrants, local identities certainly played some role in perceptions even though others may not have been cognizant of them,” Goldberg said. “The term ‘Jew’ alone had little meaning in the villages in North Africa.” After World War II in 1948, over 80 percent of Libyan Jews moved to the newly founded state of Israel, Goldberg said.…
Despite the passionate cultural ties that Libyan Jews maintained while in Israel, struggles to preserve the Libyan Jewish identity persisted on a greater scale, Goldberg said. When war broke out in Libya in the 1960s and Muammar el-Qaddafi assumed control of the country in 1969, the situation for Jews still living in Libya became “untenable,” Goldberg said.
In one instance of a lack of cultural awareness under Qaddafi’s regime, plans to construct a road in Tripoli destroyed a Jewish cemetery, Goldberg said. In response to discriminatory actions by the Libyan government, many Libyan Jewish leaders “took steps to make sure the memory of the dead and the past in Libya would be made elsewhere,” Goldberg said.
One of the most prominent efforts to “solidify” the Libyan Jewish identity included the creation of the Libyan Jews Heritage Center in Israel, he said. The heritage center includes an education and research center as well as a museum, according to Goldberg. “The heritage center emphasizes the ethnic experience of Libyan Jews,” Goldberg said. “Part of its success is that it creates accessible generational connections between first generation Libyan Jews and future generations.”
While the Libyan Jewish population in Israel remains one of the smallest of North African Jews, Libyan Jews’ integration into Israeli life was successful and relatively quiet, Goldberg said.…
TUNISIA’S JEWS PONDER MODERN-DAY EXODUS
Jon JensenMinnesota Post, April 20, 2011
As Jews around the world celebrate the Passover holiday this week, which commemorates the Biblical migration of the Israelites from ancient Egypt, some in Tunisia’s Jewish minority are considering their own modern-day exodus.
In the three months since the ouster of former strongman President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s interim government has struggled to reinstate normalcy in this once prosperous Mediterranean nation.
For some in Djerba’s small Jewish community, many of whom work in the tourism industry, the financial uncertainty is becoming too much to bear. The long absence of security on the streets in Tunisia seems to have scared away many foreigners and their vital tourist dollars, a large component of the country’s economy.
Most European tourists came for the whitewashed, dome-topped bazaars and lavish five-star hotels dotting the desert landscape on this resort island. And with the conflict worsening next door in Libya—just a short drive from Djerba’s sunny beaches—Tunisia’s already battered tourism sector has largely dried up.
“I have only seen one customer all week long,” said Haddad Sion, the owner of a gold shop in Houmt Souq, the largest city in Djerba. “If business continues as is, I will have no choice but to leave, either to go to Paris or Jerusalem.”
Djerba has long been home to one of the oldest and largest communities of Jews in North Africa.
Their numbers have dwindled to about 1,500 over the past 50 years—only a tiny fraction compared to Tunisia’s nearly 10 million Muslim residents. At its peak in the 1950s, Tunisia’s Jewish population numbered about 100,000, according to sociologist Claude Sitbon.…
Today, with secular Ben Ali out of the picture, Tunisia’s once-banned Islamists are making a political comeback—to the dismay of many of Djerba’s Jews.
“Ben Ali was good for the Jewish people,” said Daniel Sayada, a jeweler in Houmt Souq. “Since the revolution, being a Muslim is coming back in fashion. And I’m very uncertain on whether this is a good thing for us.”
The Islamist al-Nahda, or renaissance, movement has registered to form a political party and announced their intentions to compete in parliamentary elections scheduled for later this summer. Al-Nahda members have argued that freedom and democracy in post-revolution Tunisia means that all political parties should have the chance to compete freely.
Still, some Jews here are fearful that Islamist leadership would drastically alter the laws in the secular North African state. “We’re definitely scared about the idea of what a takeover by Al-Nahda would look like. I worry that many things here would change,” said Gabriel Attea, who has already moved his family from Djerba to Paris.
For Jews hoping to leave, Israel’s government is trying to make things easier. After Tunisia’s revolution, Tel Aviv offered several financial incentives toward the immigration of any Jews living in Tunisia, citing the economic hardships facing Jews in the post-Ben Ali era.…
Tunisia’s interim government blasted Israel’s attempt to “to tarnish the image of post-Revolution Tunisia and arouse suspicions about the country’s security, its economy and stability,” according to Tunisia’s official TAP news agency.
But the option to emigrate may be resonating with some in Djerba. “We are scared here. There’s just not enough security,” said Haddad, the gold vendor. “I fear an Islamist government that would try to change everything in Tunisia.…”
IN KABUL’S ONLY SYNAGOGUE,
AFGHAN MERCHANTS SET UP SHOP
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, June 1 ,2011
A lattice of corrugated iron Star of Davids marks Afghanistan’s only working synagogue, a white-washed, two-story building tucked into a sidestreet in the center of Kabul.
Kebabs, carpets and flowers are served and sold on the ground floor of the synagogue, which has been transformed into businesses over the last 18 months by the country’s sole remaining Jew, who lives upstairs in a small pink room.
Cafe manager Sayed Ahmad is unfazed by his small cafe’s history, where Kabul’s hundreds-strong Jewish community once gathered for prayers. Most fled to Israel and the United States amid the Soviet invasion of 1979.
“Some of my customers know this is the synagogue and know about the Jew upstairs, but they don’t care and neither do I,” Ahmad told Reuters in his cafe, where bearded men on purple cushions puff on water pipes and eat traditional Afghan food.
The firebrand anti-Semitism found in some other Muslim countries, often fueled by anti-Israeli sentiment, seems noticeably absent among ordinary Afghans. “I pray my way and he prays his way. I see him as a friend, someone to spend time with,” Ahmad said of his landlord, sitting beside large black and silver wall-hangings depicting Mecca.
Zebulon Simentov, who chose to stay behind when his wife and children emigrated to Israel, has been known to conduct services in the upstairs of the synagogue for visiting Jews even though he is not a rabbi. He achieved fame beyond Afghanistan’s borders because of a raging feud with the country’s second-last Jew that only ended when his rival died in 2005, and which inspired a US play.
Now living alone in the synagogue, the 52 year-old says the building has become too hard to maintain. “This place is big and I need money,” he told Reuters as he adjusted his pajama-like shalwar kameez, traditional clothing for men in the region.
Simentov traces his ancestors to the western Afghan city of Herat, the cradle of Afghanistan’s Jewish civilization, which he still visits sometimes. But after 2,000 years, the community there has died out.
Today, only raised Jewish graves with Hebrew lettering and ornate stone synagogues remain, one of which was renovated two years ago and turned into a school for Afghan children, a move celebrated by Herat’s Jews who had left for the West.
In Kabul, Simentov spends most of his time in his small room, where Hebrew calendars look down on a small red sofa bed and a mahogany table laden with silver bowls of almonds and Sabbath candles.
The last Afghan Jew is well liked, known simply as ‘Yehud.’ Three businessmen now rent space from him, and may be joined by others, in a city where despite decades of war, property prices are booming and space is at a premium. He said a grey-painted room littered with concrete debris, adjoining his, would also be put on the market. “Soon that one will also be rented out.”
Wary of talking to reporters after years of media attention, he declined to comment further on his plans for the synagogue. But he is well-liked by his neighbors and tenants. Amongst the unpaved and dusty roads encircling his synagogue, he is known simply as “the Jew”, or “Yehud” in his native Dari.
His penchant for whiskey—extremely expensive and hard to obtain in Muslim Afghanistan, but totally permissible in Judaism—has also earned him affection. “Everyone here is doing their own kind of business. I am doing mine and he is doing his. We just want to feed our families,” said Qadar Zada, perched on a stack of deep red carpets in the shop he opened six months ago.
DELHI’S LAST 10 JEWISH FAMILIES GUARD ANCIENT HERITAGE
Editorial
Reuters, June 5, 2011
In the capital of one of the world’s most religiously-diverse countries, a rabbi who has never been ordained bends ancient customs, ensuring New Delhi’s 10 Jewish families a place to worship.
Unlike most synagogues, there is no separation of men and women as Jewish-born worshippers, converts and followers of other faiths chant Psalms in perfect Hebrew, with doors thrown open to all. The service leader never asks attendees what religion they follow, and envisions his daughter becoming India’s first female rabbi.
“Being a small community, we cannot be so rigid, so orthodox,” says Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, honorary secretary of the synagogue whose unpaid job of thirty years has overlooked religious convention to keep this tiny group together.
“Our openness, our liberal approach is what allows us to survive. For reading the Torah, you must require 10 men, a minyan. But I made radical changes, because why should we discriminate between women and men? I count the women.”
In the small Judah Hyam Synagogue, tucked between one of the city’s most popular markets and most expensive hotels, the tight community, as inconspicuous as the small black plaque outside, gathers every Friday to bring in Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
The synagogue and its adjoining cemetery, gifted to Delhi’s Jews by the Indian government in 1956, is one of over 30 in India, where Jews first arrived 2,000 years ago but account for barely 5,000 people in a population exceeding 1.2 billion.
Lieutenant General J.F.R. Jacob, a former governor of Punjab and Goa and the synagogue’s President, leads the service alongside a Canadian tourist for a dozen worshippers who have travelled up to 30 kilometers (19 miles) across the city.
Some of the small crowd have been coming to the small, brightly-lit synagogue for decades, and say the weekly services are crucial in binding together the city’s Jewish families.
During the High Holidays, the synagogue’s sparse but dedicated crowd is substantially bolstered by Israeli diplomats and other Jewish expatriates, while up to 10,000 international travelers visit during India’s busy winter tourist period. “We are a tiny, miniscule community, but what keeps us together is a special bond. We are one family, we meet, we talk, we share with each other,” says Shulamith, Malekar’s daughter, minutes after her father offers a blessing for the daughter of a 94-year-old woman he knows from Kolkata.
After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which six Jews were kidnapped and killed by militants who had stormed a Jewish outreach center, the government posted ten paramilitary soldiers outside the tiny Delhi synagogue, a precaution repeated following the killing of Osama bin Laden this month.
The targeted attack was an isolated incident in a country that has seen bloody conflicts between Hindus, which account for over 80% of the population, Muslims and Sikhs since independence from Britain in 1947.
“I am an Indian first and a Jew second. India is one of the places where Jews have never suffered from anti-Semitism or persecution, therefore I consider India my motherland,” said Malekar, who lives in a small cottage in the synagogue complex.
India’s 1951 census listed 35,000 Jews, mostly living in or around the commercial hub of Mumbai, where 4,000 live today, and where the city’s biggest fishing docks bear the name of the Sassoon family, the country’s most famous Jewish residents.
Malekar, a qualified attorney and former deputy secretary of the National Human Rights Commission, participates in national memorial services for independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi and the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
He was invited to deliver Jewish prayers at the burial services of former Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi, and was part of an interfaith prayer service during the funeral of popular guru Sathya Sai Baba last month.
“Israel is in my heart, but India is in my blood,” says Malekar, who recounts a legend of a shipwreck in the 4th century that landed seven families on the shores of Mumbai.
“We have survived here this long,” says Elizabeth, a regular at the New Delhi synagogue. “Somebody will always be here.”
BOTH RABBI AND ‘PRESIDENT’
James D. Davis
Sun Sentinel, May 16, 2011
Rabbi Gershom Sizomu knew he wanted to be a Jewish scholar. He also understood his position as a leader in the small Jewish community of Uganda. But he didn’t quite grasp that he would one day deal with jobs, clinics, mosquito nets and other mundane matters.
“It’s like being president of a country,” the quiet but outgoing African rabbi says, just after addressing high school students this past week at the Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton. But he says it’s all part of spirituality. “Religion is not just about keeping Shabbat and kashrut alive. Good relationships include God and man. You must fulfill your obligations among people.”
Sizomu, 42, may not be a president, but he does lead the 1,500-member Abayudaya community in Uganda. This past week he introduced the community around South Florida, not only speaking but playing guitar and singing in his tenor voice. In fact, he did take part in a recording that earned a Grammy nomination in 2004.
His main message: The Abayudaya, whose name means “People of Judah,” are part of the worldwide Jewish community, and much of their story has reprised Jewish themes of liberation and community building.
“Judaism is not homogenous; it has different languages and cultures,” Sizomu says. “The Abayudaya journey is the Jewish journey. We celebrate that.”
The message meshes with that of Be’chol Lashon, an organization that emphasizes Jewish diversity, for which he is the senior rabbinic associate. His current 25-day tour began in San Francisco, where Be’chol Lashon has its headquarters, then went to Maryland, New York and Boston. From South Florida, Sizomu goes to New Mexico before returning to California.
In contrast to the Beta Israel of Ethiopia and the Lemba of southern Africa, the Abayudaya accepted Judaism less than a century ago. A great warrior named Semei Kakungulu gave Christian missionaries a hearing, but preferred Judaism.
“He found the Old Testament structure, of a relationship of obligation between God and man, resonated,” Sizomu says. “If man does something for God, God does something for man.”
The Abayudaya began practicing Judaism in 1919, but some gradually drifted away. Then Idi Amin, the nation’s brutal dictator from 1971 to 1979, began to ban any expression of Judaism, including kippot or Sabbath services, on pain of death.
“We went underground, so when we emerged, we were stronger,” he says. He said Amin was overthrown on the eve of Passover. “We compared that to the Israelites who left Egypt.”
To be connected with world Jewry, more than 350 Abayudaya underwent a mass mikvah baptism in 2002. The following year, Sizomu entered the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He was ordained in 2008, then returned to Uganda and opened a yeshiva, or rabbinic school.
Other big concerns are health and jobs for the Abayudaya.
With help from Be’chol Lashon, the Ugandan government and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Abayudaya have designed a five-year health and development plan. It includes things as simple as mosquito nets and as complicated as a medical clinic.
The clinic is up, but it hasn’t been equipped yet. Sizomu is trying to find donors for X-ray, ultrasound and other equipment. That, plus personnel, will cost $300,000, he says.
Once up and running, the clinic could supply jobs for secretaries, security, teachers and maintenance workers, Sizomu says. Other enterprises include a guesthouse, an Internet café, bracelets and crocheted kippot. So many mundane matters to handle. How does Sizomu keep from feeling overwhelmed? His ebullience brings a quick answer. “I just have no boundaries,” he says, spreading his hands. “I just think and think. No end.”
LOST & FOUND
Aryeh Tepper
Jewish Ideas Daily, January 4, 2011
In 1974, a strange letter from northeastern India landed on the desk of Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir. It was sent by a group of Indians claiming to be descendants of the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten tribes “lost” to Jewish history after the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. The writers hoped the prime minister would recognize their portion in the extended family of Israel. Although Golda didn’t respond, the Indians persisted, and their persistence paid off: today, 1,700 members of the community called Bnei Menashe, the children of Menashe, live in Israel. Recently the ministry of immigrant absorption urged the government to bring the remaining 7,000 members of the community home.
Are the Bnei Menashe really descendants of one of the ten lost tribes? It depends on whom you ask. The Indians themselves harbor no doubts. Their forefathers sang a traditional song about crossing the Red Sea; they have a history of circumcising their children on the eighth day; and, rice-eaters, they once celebrated a springtime festival in which they ate unleavened bread.
The way the Bnei Menashe tell it, their distant ancestors, after being exiled from the land of Israel, traveled east until reaching China, where they settled for a few hundred years. Religious persecution then drove them to the isolated northeastern Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, where most of the community lives today. British missionaries succeeded in converting some members to Christianity during the 19th century, but by the latter half of the following century the Bnei Menashe had returned to their Jewish roots and begun their roller coaster of a ride back to the land of Israel.
They got a push when Eliyahu Avichail, a rabbi and messianic dreamer, made contact with them in the early 1980s. Convinced of their Jewish ancestry, he nevertheless explained that, having been cut off from the Jewish people for so long, they would be required to undergo Orthodox conversion. Happy to demonstrate the intensity of their desire, the Bnei Menashe agreed: between 1990 and 2003, approximately 800 members of the community managed to settle in Israel by entering as tourists and officially converting once inside.
In 1997, the Bnei Menashe were honored with their first reply from an Israeli official when another in their long series of petitions reached Michael Freund, then an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and today the chairman of Shavei Israel, an organization dedicated to helping “lost Jews.” Skeptical but moved by their sincere piety, Freund decided to help them; in time, he also became convinced that they were indeed what they claimed to be, and started to lobby intensely on their behalf.
The Middle East being the Middle East, politics inevitably insinuates itself into every story. The slow but steady flow of Bnei Menashe into Israel was halted in 2003 when Israeli leftists charged that they were being cynically manipulated by the settler movement for messianic-political purposes; indeed, fully one-third of the community lives in the West Bank city of Kiryat Arba, and the Bnei Menashe also formed the largest immigrant group in Gaza prior to the 2005 disengagement. Freund counters that the community set up shop in the territories because no one else was willing and able to take them in. In order to prevent further politicization of the issue, Shavei Israel has directed the most recent arrivals to Israel’s north.
To the delight of the Bnei Menashe, in 2005 the Sephardi chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, ruled that the community belongs to “the seed of [the people] Israel” and dispatched a rabbinical court to India to assist in converting members of the community formally. But “mass conversion” is against the law in India, and the government ordered the rabbinical team to leave. Which brings us to the present situation, and the recent declaration by the immigration ministry urging the government to take action on behalf of the aspiring community.
Beyond the needs and challenges of immigration to Israel, there is much to be said about the Bnei Menashe episode. The Jewish people have been dreaming of the ten lost tribes for a long, long time, the way brothers sometimes dream of one day seeing siblings they’ve lost. It is an especially poignant dream for a people that historically has felt, and been, alone. Thus it was that, in the late 1990s, the writer Hillel Halkin, intrigued by the Bnei Menashe story, set out to explore its various dimensions and implications and ended up journeying to India and publishing a book on the subject, Across the Sabbath River.
After much investigation, Halkin, a self-declared “amateur historian,” concluded that there might indeed be a kernel of historical truth to the group’s claims. If a small number of Israelite exiles had mingled with local Indians, from whom some of the Bnei Menashe are descended, that would explain the biblically resonant stories and customs remembered by the elders of this “Manasite tribe.” And if that was the case, Halkin wrote, the modern debate over the history of the Bible would have to be revised:
For years now, a war [has] been raging between the biblical traditionalists and the revisionists, [the latter of whom hold] that the Bible was a late document composed in Persian or Hellenistic times, when many of its stories and customs were invented. If a group of Manasite tribesman, permanently separated from their fellow Israelites in the 8th century B.C.E., had known some of these stories and practiced some of these customs, it might be possible to refine the terms of the debate.
In addition to possibly shedding light on Israel’s distant past, the story of the Bnei Menashe also touches deeply upon questions of Jewish identity. Toward the end of Across the Sabbath River, Halkin speculates that genetic testing might help make sense of the story of the Bnei Menashe. Taking up his challenge, two Israeli geneticists invited him to participate in a study of the community’s DNA. The results came back almost entirely negative.
Of course, not everybody is happy with the current fad of DNA testing in general. Some observers worry that it might, among other things, be a way of re-admitting the much-maligned notion of a Jewish “race” in through the back door. Are Jews a religion, then? Not simply a religion: even if testing should explode the notion that they constitute a distinctive race, they are unquestionably bound by biological ties.
If the Jews are neither a religion nor a race, what are they? The best answer would seem to be the Bible’s: they are the children of Israel—that is, an extended family with a distinctive way of life. Like every self-respecting family, moreover, they are entitled to ask questions of anyone wishing to join them. Hence, the whole notion of conversion, about which, DNA or no DNA, Jewish religious law could not be clearer. If the Bnei Menashe convert to Judaism, they’re Jews.
Maybe the Bnei Menashe are descended from the ten lost tribes; maybe not. Either way, they’re part of the family now.
