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By David Strom
 SAN DIEGO—Sadia Shepard received a Fulbright Scholarship to India. She quit her job, sold her belongings and flew off to India. She was an American born young research scholar looking for some of her family “roots”.
Her interest in India came naturally. Her grandmother, her beloved Nana, was born in Bombay, India. “So much of what I want to know about my grandmother and my ancestors is a mystery, a well guarded secret.” She returned to Bombay where her grandmother was born and where her mother was nurtured. By coming to Bombay, she hoped to trace their steps and make some of her own. Sadia needed to discover more about her Indian Jewish heritage. In fact, she hoped to “find” her Jewish heritage.
Yes, you read it correctly. Sadia went in search of her Bene Israel Jewish heritage. Nana, in one of her casual conversations with her granddaughter Sadia, revealed that she was raised happily in a Bene Israel home. She also informed Sadia over the years about her family, which was still in India and Pakistan. Nana told her stories about her Moslem husband, a good friend of her father’s, who she had married secretly since they knew both families would not approve of such a marriage. Nana was the third wife to her husband. For a few years they lived apart from each other as she attended, and eventually graduated from nursing school. Only when Nana became pregnant was her marriage to a Moslem revealed. Then she went to live with her husband’s other two wives. All of them seemed to get along.
“Your grandfather built me a house in Bombay, facing the ocean. You could hear the sound of the waves as you slept, as if you were sleeping in a ship….” Over the years Sadia heard this and other fragments of life in India from Nana. Now she wanted to piece many of these fragments into a whole collage and make it a part of her own story. Fifteen months after her grandmother’s death in September 2001, Sadia began her journey into her grandmother’s past. She hoped to use the time there to discover the places of her grandmother’s childhood, and to fulfill the promise she made her grandmother before she died to learn more about her grandmother’s family and her ancestors. Sadia learned about her grandmother’s only home in India. When Sadia was a little girl her grandmother’s descriptions made it sound inviting and romantic. It overlooked the sea, was large and on a beautiful street lined with other beautiful homes. Now Sadia searched Bombay and when she found the house, the current residents graciously gave her a tour. This experience made her understand her Nana’s love for the place and to begin to piece together the fragments of her grandmother’s fond recollections of her life in India.
Sadia enrolled into the Film and TV Institute of India, the host institution for her Fulbright Scholarship. She did not plan on taking many, if any, classes at the Institute. Mainly, she wanted to use the library facilities and to meet other filmmakers. At the Institute, Sadia met a young chain-smoking filmmaker, Rekhev. In a round about fashion,
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Rekhev and Sadia become friends, with Rekhev taking on the role of looking out for Sadia’s welfare during her stay in India.
From the Institute’s library, she learned about the Bene Israel in India. The Bene Israel community that Sadia’s grandmother had come from had been living in India for a few hundred years. They believed they were Jews from Israel, shipwrecked off the Indian coast who had survived and started a Jewish community. They had no Torah and they didn’t remember much of their history, but they believed they were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Now in Bombay they numbered about 3,500 people and although in some of the coastal and inland areas their numbers were fewer, they remembered and maintained their Jewish ways.
Sadia found it difficult to get interviews within the small Bombay Jewish community. As soon as she told them her name, Sadia, they were skeptical. Why would a Moslem be calling them and trying to get information about the community, even though they had good relations with the Indian people? Eventually she made contacts in the Jewish community, made friends and traveled throughout the small Bene Israel communities. She did volunteer work at ORT, made friends with a young Bene Israel couple that was going to make aliyah soon to Israel and learned about Judaism.
When she went to India originally, her knowledge about Jews was limited. As a teenager she had attended friends bar or bat-mitzvahs. She knew they were not supposed to eat pork products, that they believed in one God and fasted on Yom Kippur. Now that she was more knowledgeable and understood her emotional connection to many Jewish customs, she wondered what it was like for her grandmother to give it all up for marriage to a Moslem.
At a Shabbat dinner with her Bene Israel friends who were making aliyah to Israel, they asked her if she was going to become Jewish? They felt she had to choose. At that point she did not feel she had to make a choice at all. Why must she? This question had not come up since she learned at the age of thirteen that her grandmother was Jewish and so technically, her mother was also. As she was growing up, her father, who was Christian, told her she could choose any one of the three religions in her background. He explained that each believed in one God and all wanted the world to be a better place in which to live.
After a year in India and her Fulbright completed, Rekhev asked Sadia to stay and travel with him. He had traveled with her to many of the smaller areas where Bene Israel people dwelled, helped her understand the language, translated some of the customs, and generally was a great friend to have in a strange and foreign land. Taken by surprise by this request, Sadia didn’t answer immediately, but told him she would think about it. When she left for India, she had a special boyfriend at home. Had he waited for her or moved on in his life while she was away? What should she do?
After all those years living as a Moslem, Nana requested that she be buried as a Jew! Did this mean she had been unhappy with her marriage? Her life? Did this mean that at some point in her life Sadia would also have to choose?
This was a captivating memoir. It was interesting to learn about the Jews of India today. Life for Jews who remain in India is challenging and fascinating.
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