Saturday's Oilmen

Barnstorming Jewish congregations in the U.S. this week was a dynamic, coffee-skinned Indian from Bombay. The Honorable Baruch Bension Benjamin first came to the U.S. last month for the launching of Conservative Judaism's new World Council of Synagogues, at which he represented one of the oldest and oddest Jewish communities in the world. Its name: Bene Israel (Sons of Israel).

No one knows exactly when, but it was some 2,000 years ago that a ship from Egypt was wrecked on the west coast of India, south of Bombay. Seven men and seven women survived, and an ancient cemetery at the village of Nowgow is traditionally the place where they buried the bodies of the drowned. The 14 survivors were given jobs by a Hindu oil merchant, who put them to work pressing seeds for oil (still a traditional occupation of some Bene Israel villagers). Because they refused to work on the Sabbath, the Hindus called them Shanwar Telis--Saturday's Oilmen.

New Genesis. Without any written records of their faith, which were presumably lost in the shipwreck, Saturday's Oilmen handed down what they could remember of their rituals and practices from generation to generation, losing more and more as the centuries rolled on. Then, tradition relates that some time in the 12th century a Jew named David Rahabi, believed to be from Egypt, discovered them. Noting that they abstained from work on the Sabbath, circumcised their male children when they were eight days old, stayed indoors on Yom Kippur, and refused to eat fish without fins and scales, he decided they must be Jews. Rahabi set about rescuing their religion; he gave them prayers and rituals, and taught Hebrew to three of their most promising young men. Ever since, the community has observed the Sephardic rites they learned from him.

But the little community of Indian Israelites knew nothing of their Scriptures until 1819, when U.S. Christian missionaries published a translation of the Book of Genesis into Marathi, the language of the Hindus among whom the Jews lived. And it was only in the 19th century that the British recognized them as a separate community.

Rabbi Wanted. The 21,000 Bene Israelites, most of them in the Bombay area, are the largest single group in India's small (25,400) Jewish community. There are 28 Bene Israel synagogues, whose congregations will hold their first assembly in Bombay this month. After living and intermarrying for centuries with the Hindus, Bene Israelites practice many Hindu customs. Most of them eat no beef, in observance of the Hindu prohibition against slaughtering cattle. They break the bangles of a widow when her husband dies, and remove from her neck the mangal sutra (auspicious thread) of black beads that a Hindu wife wears while her husband is alive.

Last week B. B. Benjamin, president of the Jewish Welfare Association of Delhi and Northern India, and onetime Under Secretary of Commerce and Industry in Nehru's government, was looking for ways to ensure "sound education" for his sect. Still more important is a rabbi. "Who can come to the spiritual rescue of these unfortunate remnants in a country of 370 million people?" asks Benjamin. "Only a rabbi with sufficient knowledge of their' background and sympathy with local traditions and customs can save them."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.