Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

“Lost” Indonesia Jews Recruited to Fulfil Biblical Prophecy

Posted on 16. Nov, 2021 by Paul Sochaczewski in Curious Travel

 

“Lost” Indonesian Jews Recruited to Fulfil Biblical Prophecy
Small clan taken to Israel to hasten Second Coming.

 

KISAR ISLAND, Maluku Islands, Indonesia

This is a story of serendipity and remarkable zeal born of one woman’s lifetime religious quest.  It is a tale of unasked for fame for simple people, and of journeys they had never imagined.  All because a determined woman from a distant tribe received a sign from God and suddenly appeared in the orbit of a few unassuming villagers.

The main players in this faraway adventure:

• Herlewen Hermanus Mauky, the elder of a clan living on the tiny and isolated eastern Indonesian island of Kisar. Hermanus, who died in 2012 at the age of 93, was referred to on this predominantly Christian island as “Hermanus the Jew.” Mr. Hermanus, curiously, never claimed to be Jewish.
• Paulus Mauky, Herlewen Hermanus Mauky’s nephew, a humble man upon whom the mantle of “the Kisar Jew” has been bestowed.
• Rumondang M. Sitompul, a woman on a mission. She is an evangelical Christian from the western Indonesian island of Sumatra, a distance from Kisar similar to that of Los Angeles to Miami.  She has made it her life’s work to fulfil Biblical prophecy by locating the world’s “lost” Jews and transporting them to Israel in an attempt to hasten the Second Coming of Christ.

* * *

I got interested in the Jews of Kisar from reading a few lines in a book in which journalist Elizabeth Pisani mentioned meeting a man in Kisar named Hermanus, who “is said to belong to the Lost Tribes of Israel,” and who was whisked off to the Holy Land by “a busybody Christian from Jakarta in the hope of hastening the Second Coming of Christ.”

This seemed like a suitable quest, one which involved arduous travel and little likelihood of success. The only certainty was that I’d probably get a dinner-party anecdote out of the trip. All told, plenty of reasons to go.

 

* * *

Kisar island was previously accessible only by boat. Now Susi Air (a private airline owned by Susi Pudjiastuti, the popular Indonesian minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries) flies from larger airports to Kisar several times a week, an example of the dramatic improvement in domestic transportation options making life easier for people living on many of Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

My friend Boetje Balthazar, a native of Kisar who lives in Jakarta and works in the oil and natural gas industry, and I took motorcycle taxis to the simple home of Paulus Mauky, the senior member of the Clan of Lost Jews.

Paulus, 52, was open and welcoming.  His home is simple — cement floor, unpainted plaster walls with a few family photos hanging on nails, and faded curtains in doorways. He has curly gray-black hair and smiles easily. The grave of his uncle Hermanus, who died in 2012, sits prominently in his front yard. Next to the grave stands a waist-high concrete platform. The stones cemented on top represent the tribes of Israel, Paulus says. “It used to have a menorah sitting on top, but the kids broke it.”

Years earlier, Ibu Ondang, as Rumondang M.Sitompul is known, convinced Hermanus, Paulus, and two other relatives that it was their obligation as Jews to travel with her to Israel.  She explained such a journey would help her achieve her life-mission —  searching the world for “lost” Jews and bringing them to the Holy Land in order to fulfill the Biblical prophecy that the Second Coming of Jesus (and the subsequent Rapture) can take place only after all Jews have gathered in Israel.

We talk about Paulus’s trip to Israel, his excitement and trepidation about flying, the buzz of visiting strange countries, and his biggest apprehension of all — what have I gotten myself into? He returned from the Holy Land with a few souvenirs.  Ibu Ondang  sent him a CD with 3,000 photos of the trip, but it’s misplaced somewhere in the house. No matter, he doesn’t own a computer and has no way to view the pictures.  He has Ibu Ondang’s phone number somewhere, but again it doesn’t matter since he has no cellphone.

I sense Paulus is a bit overwhelmed by the attention, perhaps unsure of my motives.  For a start, I’m a foreigner, and foreigners are rare visitors.  I am accompanied by Boetje, a respected elder of Kisar, which means that I have symbiotic stature. I take copious notes, scribbling in a school exercise book with Batman on the cover, certainly curious behavior.

A few hundred meters away he shows us the construction that locals call the synagogue.

It’s a spotless new bamboo structure, paid for by Ibu Ondang, who has furnished it with a shofar (a traditional Jewish ram’s horn bugle) and colorful banners featuring Old Testament quotations.  A bright golden menorah stands in front.  Ibu Ondang later told me she has purchased a much larger menorah for the site, some seven-meters (23-feet) tall, which is languishing in the shipping company’s warehouse in Kupang, hundreds of kilometers distant, awaiting delivery instructions.

The “synagogue” has never hosted a Jewish religious service.  A local evangelical preacher uses it for weekly services of the Bethel evangelical congregation, which Paulus sometimes attends.

* * *

I admire Ibu Ondang’s boundless energy to scour the Earth for “lost” Jews. While some people pursue achievable quests with a clear timeline or definition of success — graduate university, write a book, make puff pastry, visit Rome, taste civet coffee —  Ibu Ondang’s quest is unlikely to be completed during her time on Earth.  But she’s engaged in an all-consuming journey that she believes will reward her at some unimaginable time in the future.

 

 

* * *

I met Ibu Ondang in downtown Jakarta at a modern café next to a movie theatre in an upscale shopping mall. She wore an elegant, black, folk-patterned dress with a stylish gray turban that could have reflected Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or even Hollywood antecedents. She wore a gold necklace featuring the propitious Hebrew word chai (חי ), which means “alive” or “living” — it is the root word of the well-known toast l’chayim, “to life.” She was accompanied by her daughter, son, and a family friend.

Ibu Ondang seems to have a regular stream of visions that shape her life and have guided her in developing her evangelical church — the Bethesda House of Prayer.

Her on-gong vision is to “search for lost Jewish tribes and ask them to come out.” This quest, which started two decades before my visit, has taken her to China, Japan, South Africa, India, Madagascar, Myanmar, the United States, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and to the far corners of her native country of Indonesia. Ibu Ondang, 54, is independently wealthy and uses her own funds for this “special calling.” In pursuit of her goal she estimates she has visited some 80 countries and has made the pilgrimage to Israel 80 times.

Her Kisar Vision, as I’ll call it, began one night as Ibu Ondang was flying in a chartered plane between the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea and her home in distant Jakarta.  “I looked out the window and saw a huge flame, like a searchlight, coming from a tiny island far below,” she said. On her return to Jakarta she asked her son to try to identify the source of the light.  “Timor,” he said, referring to a huge island about the size of Sicily.  “No, it was a tiny island,” she said. Finally, based on input from Ibu Ondang and the pilot, her son triangulated the location as Kisar island, which sits to the north of the eastern tip of Timor Leste. It is four times closer to Australia than to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

Not one to prevaricate, Ibu Ondang flew to Kisar.  She arrived at Kisar’s airstrip (the clean and functional airport building is about as big as a suburban living room) with no advance planning other than a dream that she was destined to visit a sacred site and meet spiritual people.  She looked around for transportation.  The arrival of a small aircraft at Kisar usually results in a couple of motorcycle taxis and maybe a public van available to carry passengers to their destinations. In this instance, a lone car, one of the few on the island, was waiting.

“The driver asked me where I wanted to go,” Ibu Ondang recalled, as we enjoyed espresso and pastries. “I told him I had no idea, only that I had a vision that a holy man would be waiting for me.”

“Oh, that would be Hermanus the Jew,” the man replied.

The driver was Yohanis Tahinlaru, also a member of the Jewish clan.

And, like in a Hollywood movie, when they arrived at his village Hermanus was waiting in front of his house to receive Ibu Ondang. “He hugged me and cried. He was very emotional,” she told me, “like he had been waiting a long time for my arrival.”

One potential stumbling block was that Hermanus didn’t identify as a Jew.  “He didn’t have a religion but told me he believed in a higher power,” Ibu Ondang said.  “We didn’t have a common language but communicated through a spiritual language.”

Hermanus took Ibu Ondang to sacred places on Kisar that few outsiders are allowed to visit. On one holy hill she blew the shofar she had brought with her.  “This is a confirmation from the Bible, this is someone sent by our heavenly father,” Ibu Ondang recalls Hermanus saying.

Ibu Ondang said she wanted to take Hermanus and three other members of his family to Israel. Besides Hermanus the group included Paulus Mauky, Yohanis Tahinlaru — the serendipitous driver who had met Ibu Ondang at the airport, and another family member, Jery Mauky.

Imagine.  Hermanus at the time was around 90-years-old. He had never been further than the provincial capital of Ambon. He had never been on a plane.  He spoke a local dialect and only had a few words of Bahasa Indonesia, the national language.  And while he might indeed have been a spiritual man, he never identified as a Jew.

And there was a mundane but serious problem.  Neither Hermanus nor his relatives had Indonesian identity cards, and without identify cards they couldn’t get passports.  Yet Ibu Ondang managed to weave her way through Indonesian bureaucracy and got the men passports in one month, surely a record, which she accomplished, she says, “with god’s help.”

There was a final hurdle.  The local government official refused to let them go.  According to Ibu Ondang the local authority said “Hermanus belongs in Kisar, and we’re afraid he won’t come back.” While indeed that might have been her intention, Ibu Ondang promised that she would bring him, and the other three Kisar residents, back to the island; she established a bank guarantee for that vow.

 

 

 

 

* * *

Although 87 percent of the people of Indonesia identify as Muslim, the country has no state religion.  Among the minority religions, some ten percent of the country identify as Christian; Kisar itself is largely Protestant. Indonesia has no formal diplomatic ties with Israel, and according to a 2017 BBC World Service poll, 64% of Indonesians viewed Israel’s influence negatively. Nevertheless, the two countries maintain quiet trade, security, and tourism contacts.  Indonesian visitors generally enter Israel with a group tour that begins in Jordan or Egypt.

Ibu Ondang took her Kisar pilgrims on a long and tiring journey.  Grasping their shiny new dark green passports (embossed on the front with the Garuda, the mythical Hindu golden eagle that is the coat of arms of Indonesia), they flew to the city of Kupang. Then to Jakarta. Then to Singapore. And on to Jordan.

During the trip the miracles and visions continued. According to Mrs. Ondang:

• The first time Hermanus set foot in Jerusalem the earth shook.
• At the grave of Abraham and Sarah in Hebron, Hermanus wept uncontrollably. When he touched the wall of the tomb the vibration was so strong that Ibu Ondang felt it from several meters away.
• Holy men made a special effort to meet him.
• Local officials said he must stay in Israel.
• Hermanus confessed his sins and asked to be baptized — in the “real” Jordan river, “not the tourist place.” When he was baptized they noticed three beautiful birds that had not been seen before.

* * *

So, are Hermanus and Paulus and the others of their clans Jews?  And if so, how did their ancestors wind up in Indonesia?

Ibu Ondang says they are remnants of the Tribe of Gad, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Hermanus is said to have speculated that a large fleet of ships from either India or China sailed through Indonesian waters centuries ago and deposited a Jewish man and woman at each place they stopped.

Another, more likely theory, is that during various visits in centuries past a few Portuguese and Dutch merchants and soldiers of Jewish descent settled in Kisar (and other parts of Indonesia), married local women, and started a now-barely visible lineage of Jews, a fraction of the estimated 20,000 descendants of Jews still living in Indonesia. Ayala Klemperer-Markman, author of The Jewish Community of Indonesia, notes that “the history of the Jews in Indonesia began with the arrival of early European explorers and settlers, and the first Jews arrived in the 17th century.  Most of Indonesian Jews arrived from the Netherlands, Middle East, Northern Africa and Southern Europe.  [Practicing] Jews in Indonesia presently form a very small Jewish community of about 100-500, of mostly Sephardi Jews.” Various sources identify small Jewish communities scattered throughout Indonesia, but none mention the Jews of Kisar.

Paulus doesn’t know whether he is Jewish.  He has no idea about his family’s history.  Other people I spoke with on Kisar are similarly vague about the origin of these Lost Jews.

Perhaps they are simply Crypto-Jews, mis-identified people given a new, tenuous backstory.

To Ibu Ondang such questions are irrelevant.  “This is not about the religion of Judaism but about the descendants of Israel.”

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