The following is an excerpt from “Israel: Democracy, Race, Ethnicity, and More” (Fragments #2).
by Daniel Thalkar
When my grandmother, Hannah Thalkar, moved into the tiny apartment at 384/9 Giora in 1969, she immediately wanted to return to India. The unpaved, rocky road petered out shortly after their hurriedly built, Soviet-style cement apartment building, giving way to citrus orchards and donkeys. The Thalkars were the first family to move into the building, which quickly filled with other Indian immigrant families, many of whom had been on the same f light from Bombay. In Israel, however, the hallways more frequently echoed with the sounds of Marathi, Hindi, and Bollywood love songs than with modern Hebrew. The same could be said for Ramla at large — the historic city 35 miles south of Tel Aviv was one of many predominantly Arab cities where the Jewish government was placing new immigrants in an effort to establish a majority Jewish presence.
My grandmother lived in that apartment until her death in 2018.
In many ways, Israel’s unprecedented growth passed Hannah Thalkar by. She continued to primarily speak Marathi, the Hindi-language channel Zee TV’s logo burned itself into the glass of her TV screen, her social network consisted almost entirely of other Bene Israel immigrants, and she rarely left her apartment, especially as she grew older. She collected closets full of new towels and technology given to her by well-meaning children and grandchildren. They all went unused. She didn’t feel like she was missing out on anything; the world she created for herself was the only one she needed.
Hannah didn’t want to leave Mumbai. She was happy in India and felt she had everything she needed. My grandfather Abraham, a quietly religious man, was infatuated with the idea of making aliyah. He did the research, prepared the documents, and made the ultimate decision to immigrate. Though a respected supervisor at a factory in India, in Israel the best job he could find was as a night watch security guard. After he passed away of a heart attack in 1976, only seven years after arriving in Israel, Hannah became the center of the Thalkar family orbit for the next 40 years. As the family spread across the breadth of the country — and even farther, as my father migrated to the United States after completing his army service — they crowded the tiny apartment for Shabbat dinners whenever possible. The benchmarks of my childhood were our annual trips to Ramla and those happy, jetlagged Friday nights spent sweating over a plate of fish curry while surrounded by a cacophony of Hebrew, Marathi, and English.
Hannah’s children and grandchildren went on to fight in Israel’s wars, study in its schools, and flourish as its high-tech economy blossomed. Her descendents live lives she couldn’t have dreamt of during those first days in the country, when they struggled to find their footing and make sense of their identities in this foreign homeland, especially the more they learned about the challenges that had recently faced the Bene Israel community that had made aliyah before them.
The Bene Israel trace their history in India back at least 2,000 years, when legends claim their ancestors shipwrecked on the Konkan Coast. Over time, the majority of the community migrated from the Konkan area to nearby Bombay, as the rapidly growing city needed more and more workers to fuel its growing industries. The Bene Israel, along with the other major Jewish groups in the area — the Bagdhadi Jews and the Cochin Jews — never experienced discrimination or violence in India. They quietly and naturally folded into the vast, diverse canvas of the country.
Thus, the first wave of Bene Israel who made aliyah to Israel in the early 1950s differed from other immigrant communities in Israel in several key ways. They were not fleeing persecution or oppression. They were not in danger because of their heritage. To the contrary, they had just lived through the Indian independence movement and the birth of a new country, breathing the air of satyagraha — Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance. The Bene Israel were largely bystanders to the violent Partition in August 1947. The Bene Israel were not running from anything. They were running towards the dream of a Jewish state.
So imagine their dismay when they arrived and were shunted off to development towns in the Negev Desert, the predominantly white, Ashkenazi government providing them with sub-par housing, limited job access, and deplorable educational opportunities. The Indian immigrants were caught in a larger system of inequity, wherein the Mizrahim — the darker skinned Jews from North Africa and the Middle East — were placed in development towns and kept out of, and away from, positions of power.
The Bene Israel responded by taking up the civil disobedience tools that they had carried with them from India. The 1951-52 “Indian Protest” was one of the first protests by Jews accusing the fledgling Israeli government of racism. Strikingly, their goal wasn’t equality within Israel. Instead, they demanded that the Israeli government send them back to India. The Indians, many of whom learned English before Hebrew, wrote to newspapers, to Ben Gurion, to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to anyone they thought would listen. They held hunger strikes. They were beaten by police. Though the ultimate “victory” remains controversial — around 150 Bene Israel chose to be repatriated to India at the government’s expense — the template had been set. Indian Israelis would not passively accept discrimination and second-class citizenship status. They would fight. They would force the nation to question just how committed it was to this idea of democracy.
They would utilize these lessons barely a decade later in 1962 when, after over ten years of immigration and attempted assimilation into Israeli society, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim issued a directive barring Bene Israel from marrying other Jews.
Nissim claimed that the Bene Israel had practiced intermarriage and unsanctioned divorce in India for generations. In essence, since so much of Bene Israel history occurred in isolation from other Jewish communities, he argued there was no way to verify whether or not they followed Jewish marital law, in particular chalitzah, a ceremony that must be performed before childless widows are able to remarry. According to scholar Joseph Hodes, whose From India to Israel: Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality is a treasure trove of research about the Indian Protests, in the absence of clear documentation of their entire history, Nissim assumed that they must have strayed from Judaism and introduced the “concern that they intermarried with non Jews.” The Bene Israel’s credentials were questionable. Therefore, they weren’t fit to marry Jews from other ethnic backgrounds.
Immediately following the release of the directive, the Bene Israel took the lessons of Indian Independence and of the struggles of 1952, and they prepared to fight back. The goal was no longer repatriation to India. No, these Indian-Israelis demanded inclusion in Israeli society. More broadly, they demanded a reckoning with Israel’s understanding of itself. How much power would religion have in dictating day-to-day life? Could Israel be Jewish and also inclusive and democratic? Their appeal to other minority Jewish communities was poignant and direct: This is happening to us now, but it could happen to you next.
The Bene Israel community embarked upon a program of civil disobedience and activism. They mobilized quickly, leveraging the many pre-existing community organizations to rally the community behind the emerging leadership of Samson J. Samson. One of their first goals was to raise awareness and bring the issue to the wider Israeli society. They repeated many of the activities of 1952, writing letters and editorials to anyone who would listen or publish their words. Their goals of equality and justice, combined with their direct challenge to racist institutions and power structures, spoke to far more people than the repatriation efforts of a decade earlier. This time around, their cause was supported by wide swaths of Israeli society, ranging from Mizrahim in development towns to the largely Ashkenazi kibbutzim.
Reading their letters and op-eds today, there is a word that shouts off the page: “Apartheid.” The Israeli government, the letter writers claim, was practicing apartheid. These Indian Jews, intimately familiar with caste systems and structurally-enforced inequality, loudly denounced what they saw as the institutional enforcement of second-class citizenship, of two different Israels. “Like the South African government, which does not bother about a negro marrying a negro, the Rabbinate could not care less when a Bene Israel marries another Bene Israel. The only difference between the two is that South Africa practices apartheid openly, whereas Israel practices it under the cloak of religion,” wrote the Bene Israel Action Committee in March 1962. The outspoken protesters ripped the cloak off.
The Bene Israel activists knew their history, and they knew that arguing about esoteric minutiae of Jewish law was not likely to win them widespread support, so the argument took on secular terms and drew upon examples much of the world agreed were unjust. In framing the debate around apartheid, they implicitly aligned themselves with freedom fighters around the world. They also directly challenged the credibility of the state, which claimed to offer sanctuary to all Jews. In the homeland of the Jews, some Jews were more equal than others.
The letter-writing and protesting continued for two more years, when Bene Israel activists escalated their actions and began a series of hunger strikes. The hunger strikes, along with a high-profile demonstration attended by several thousand people from across Israeli society, kept their story in international news, especially in the United States, and continued to embarrass the government. Gamal Nasser’s Egypt cynically offered asylum to all Bene Israel. Prime Minister Nehru of India, which had not yet recognized the State of Israel, said it would not do so until the Bene Israel situation was resolved.
Rabbis from around the world expressed disagreement with Nissim’s decision, pointing to halachic authorities, some of whom dated back centuries, who had vouched for the Jewish identity of the Bene Israel.
The issue came to a head when Levi Eshkol, Israel’s third Prime Minister and a founder of the Labor Party, frustrated with Nissim’s unwillingness to compromise and the headache this tiny population was causing his administration, held an emergency session of the Knesset.
His opening statement, as translated in Hodes’ From India to Israel, is a remarkable document worth citing at length:
The government repeatedly declares that it sees the Bene Israel community of India as Jews in all respects without qualification, not differing from all other Jews and having equal rights, including those of personal status…
The complaint made by the representatives of the community. . . refers to the marriage directives issued by the Chief Rabbinate. It has been shown that the Bene Israel community and large segments of the Jewish population of Israel are opposed to the continued existence of the directives. A feeling of discrimination has made the matter a question of acute public interest deserving our attention. After decisions in two cabinet meetings, the government expresses the opinion that it is imperative that the rabbinate bow to public opinion and find a way to remove the factors causing a feeling of under-privilege and discrimination.
Eshkol then addressed the larger implications of the issue for Jews around the world.
There is one People of Israel in the world. There are Jews who returned to their homeland and all are equals, and dear to us. Members of the Knesset, for our generation the most important contemporary historical condition is the rebirth of Israel and the ingathering of exiles. We look forward, and justly so, to a solution based on the love of Israel, a solution which will enable us to gather the exiled unconditionally and without obstacles. For reasons pertaining to Judaism as a whole, our laws have placed matters of personal status, in relation to the Jews, in the hands of the rabbis. But this grant has conditions: The rabbinate must fulfill the greatest commandment of our generation, to enable the nation to live its life and gather its exiles. The rabbis must take the burden of this commandment upon themselves, to foresee the future and avoid a conflict with serious consequences, between rabbinic law and the needs of a nation reborn, a conflict which may undermine their unique position and their authority, which we have appointed, to organize matters of the personal status of Jews.
Thus, in one fell swoop, Eshkol affirmed the purpose of the Jewish nation, situated it within a global context, and, in no uncertain terms, reminded the Rabbinate that they held power in Israel due to the grace of the government. Shortly after Eshkol’s speech, the Chief Rabbinical Council issued a press release announcing the removal of the words “Bene Israel” from its marriage directives. These words were replaced with the phrase, “Anyone about whom there is any suspicion or doubt regarding the ritual purity of their family status.”1 There was no apology or direct acknowledgement of the Bene Israel community’s fight, but by this point it was clear — the Bene Israel had won. They were Israelis, they were Jews, and their government would defend them.
There was no storybook ending for the Bene Israel; some holdout Sephardic rabbis continued denying the Jewishness of Bene Israel well into the 21st century. The socio-economic status and marginalization of the community did not immediately improve. Racism and discrimination did not end overnight. In fact, they have not ended at all.
The question at the heart of the Bene Israel’s struggle was never about how Nissim interpreted Jewish law. It was about why he used the law to single out and exclude the Bene Israel. The Indian Protests were not a halachic debate. They were about power, identity, and memory. They were about what Israel could be.
The apartment building my grandmother moved into in 1969 still stands, but the citrus fields are long gone, replaced by busy streets, luxury developments, and a shopping mall. You hear less Marathi on the streets these days, as the younger generations speak predominantly Hebrew. There are no Thalkars left in Ramla — we’re in Petah Tikva, Gilon, Rishon LeTzion, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles. Those boisterous, crowded Shabbat dinners don’t happen nearly as often as they used to. My daughter won’t ever know Hannah’s fish curry or her perfectly round nankhatai biscuits, but when we take her on her first trip to Israel this December, we’ll walk the streets of Ramla and tell her our family’s stories. We’ll visit the apartment building, buy chocolates at the lottery booth on the corner, swing on the old jungle gym in the playground nestled between apartment complexes, and make our way to the shuk for tiny plastic cups of lemonade and Tunisian sandwiches.
The Indian Protests of the 1960s have, by and large, faded from memory, yet, as Israelis once again take to the streets in a struggle for democracy, their movement belongs to the present as much as it does to the past. In late 1962, as their fight for recognition gained in both momentum and anger, the Bene Israel Action Committee’s editorial board penned an English-language op-ed:
The government of Israel has failed in its basic duty to protect the rights and honor of a small community, and is acting in contravention of the Proclamation of Independence of Israel of May 14, 1948 which states:
‘The State of Israel. . . will rest upon foundations of freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the Prophets of Israel. It will maintain complete equality of social and political rights for all its citizens, without distinction of creed, race or sex. It will guarantee freedom of religion and conscience of language, education and culture. It will be loyal to the principles of the United Nations Charter.’
This state of affairs will not continue for long, as young freedom loving Israelis will dominate the Israeli scene when religion will no more have bargaining power as a political weapon.
Their words ring as hopeful and as painfully relevant today as they did 60 years ago.
1 Statement of the Chief Rabbinical Council, 31 Aug 1964, quoted in Hodes.
DANIEL THALKAR (he/him) is a teacher and writer in Los Angeles. His writing frequently explores the ways knowing our history can help us build a more just world. He aspires to do the same in his teaching.
