Community presence Jewish In Indonesia there are not as many records as the presence of the six religions adhered to by Indonesian society.
Apart from the minimal population, their presence is also not prominent. The Jewish community of Tondano, North Sulawesi, can be said to be the only one that is often featured in the news.
Now, after the Indian Jewish community of Bnei Menashe was invited to Israel, the Tondano Jewish community was also invited to return to the land of Benjamin Netahyahu. Rabbi Yaakov Baruch told about this invitation.
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“The offer is there but not formally, only informally,” said Yaakov via short message, when contacted CNNIndonesia.comWednesday (26/11).
Yaakov apparently prefers to remain in Indonesia because he wants to take care of the Jewish community here, which is indeed small in number.
Present since the era of colonialism
The presence of the Jewish community in the country long before independence. It is recorded that they came together with spice traders to a number of islands.
In the religious journal of Gajah Mada University in 2012, Leonard Chrysostomos Epafras wrote in “The Historical Reality and Dynamics of Archipelago Jewish Identity” that Jews came when the Portuguese entered Southeast Asia, including the Dutch East Indies.
“We have information based on reports from Catholic missionaries from the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits), regarding the presence of the Jewish community in Malacca. This report includes those from the prominent missionary Francis Xavier (1506-1552), during his visit to Malacca in 1547, he met the Sefardi Jews (Sefarad means Spanish) and their synagogue,” wrote Leonard.
Part of their motive for settling in India and Malacca was an effort to avoid the Inquisition Court, namely the religious court in the Catholic Church which fights apostasy. The targets were primarily Jews and Muslims, who had previously been forcibly converted to Christianity. The most active Inquisitions were in Spain and Portugal.
When the Dutch came with the same aim of trading, the Jewish community continued to grow. Through the Dutch East Indies Trading Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) which was formed on March 20 1602, they came to Indonesia to trade.
In fact, the largest stake in this trading company was held by Isaac Le Maire, a trader and investor of Jewish descent from Wallonia (now Belgium).
Due to the increasing number of Jews coming to the Dutch East Indies, in 1857, two rabbis who lived in The Hague and a rabbi from Rotterdam, namely Bernstein, Ferares and Isaacsohn, signed a petition to the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The three of them supported the request of one of the Jewish figures, Israel Benjamin, to go to the Dutch East Indies to establish a strong Jewish community like the one that had been established in the West Indies, aka Suriname.
According to Jeffrey Hadler in his research at the University of California entitled Translations of Antisemitism: Jews, The Chinese and Violence in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indonesia, Benjamin was one of the first people to raise the fact of the presence of the Jewish community in the Dutch East Indies, the forerunner of Indonesia.
However, to the Dutch Royal authorities, the three rabbis stated that the Jewish community in the Dutch East Indies would not be able to establish a strong Jewish community. The reason is that low social status, said the rabbis, will hinder self-help efforts.
The three rabbis finally encouraged the Kingdom of the Netherlands to allocate funds for a survey of the Jewish community in the Dutch East Indies which was initiated by Benjamin.
“The Jewish community there deserves a special synagogue and cemetery,” Hadler wrote, quoting the rabbis.
Even though he had received recommendations from a number of professors from universities based in Leiden and Delft, Benjamin failed to go to the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch government refused Benjamin’s request. The trip was cancelled.
Four years after Benjamin’s failure, a Jerusalem rabbinical envoy named Jacob Halevy Saphir (1822-1886), arrived in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1861. In his book, Saphir reported the presence of about twenty “Ashkenazi” Jewish families (Jews from central and eastern Europe) from the Netherlands in Batavia, in Surabaya and in Semarang, but expressed concern for their future because they did not observe Jewish traditions and many were married to non-Jewish women.
Saphir also argued that at his request, the Amsterdam community sent a rabbi to the islands who tried to organize community life in Batavia and in Semarang. However, the rabbi died before completing his work, as written by Ayala Klemperer-Markman, quoted from theindoproject site, a site about Dutch people who once lived in the Dutch East Indies.
In 1921, Zionist financier Israel Cohen visited Java. He said that at that time there were around 2,000 Jews living on the island of Java. In the 1920s, the Jewish community began to appear when the Association for Jewish Interests in the Dutch East Indies and the World Zionist Conference (WZC) appeared in cities such as Batavia, Bandung, Malang, Medan, Padang, Semarang and Yogyakarta.
This organization, headquartered in London, was founded in 1920 and served as a fund-raising organization to support the Zionist movement.
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