Detailed
Description |
|
Two sided flyer issued by the Thana Bene-Israel Graveyard Fund. The text is in English and the reverse side repeats the text in Marathi. It begins by recalling that the prophet Abraham did not feel it below his dignity to approach the Children of Health (foreign community) in requesting a burial plot for his family and the members of his congregation. The representatives of the Thana community approach their Bene-Israel brothers and sisters throughout Baharat, both individually and through community representatives, for help in this undertaking. The flyer informs that the signatories have been empowered by the community to approach members and personally request funds and to issue a printed and numbered receipt. Individuals donating 100 Rs. or more will have his or her name engraved on a marble slab or a brass plate to be prominently exhibited in the location suggested for the graveyard. The purpose of the fund is to provide, in the graveyard, a place for a family of caretakers to guard the graves amd tombs, to provide a veranda in which to hold the funeral, and to prepare or hold corpses coming from outside Thana. The names of the committee members appears below, as does that of Abraham Reuben Koletkar (Hon. Secretary) and the address, Sonumiya Road, Pimpal Bawdi, Tembhi Thana.
The largest Jewish community of Indian Jews is that of the Bene Israel. Earlier the Bene Israel lived in the villages of west Maharashtra in the Konkan coast. In the nineteenth century they started moving to the cities, mainly to Bombay (now called Mumbai) and to other cities among them Pune, Ahmadabad and Karachi which is now part of Pakistan. From 1950 onwards they started immigrating to Israel. The Bene Israel community was completely isolated from most of the other Jewish communities of the world. They are known as Bene Israel because that’s how they called themselves. The Bene Israel believe that their forefathers arrived in India before the destruction of the second temple. The accepted version is that their forefathers were sailing in a commercial ship from the Land of Israel to India. The ship wrecked near the coast of Konkan. From the ship survived 14 people, seven men and seven women. They swam towards the land and arrived at the village called Navgaon. All their belongings drowned in the sea. The dead bodies of the others from the ship were buried in the village. The survivors somehow managed to settle in the village and started working in agriculture and oil producing which later on became their main profession. As time passed the descendants of the survivors forgot Hebrew and their religious tradition. But they carried out some of the Israeli tradition.
|
