On an incredible story – Rachel Nolan in NYRB:

‘Still in a rage and planning to seek vengeance on his father’s killer, inside the trunk Segundo found a Bible, written in Spanish. It would lead him on a decades-long process of conversion from his father’s Catholicism to Judaism—and from layperson to prophet. The decision to become a Jew came about unusually: he read the Bible carefully and thoroughly, excising the parts that didn’t seem to make sense, were contradictory, or lacked clear rules, until finally he decided to rip out the entire New Testament and bury it in the ground. Only the Old Testament was left. In The Prophet of the Andes, her thoroughgoing account of his journey, Graciela Mochkofsky writes of his decision to open the chest, “Looking back, it seems impossible for it to have been any other way, impossible that he would have chosen to kill instead.” By the Israeli law of return, all Jews have the right to move to Israel and attain citizenship. The law was designed for those with at least one Jewish grandparent, and others have to prove that they are truly Jewish. The undertaking is ,: How to prove one’s background and intentions, that one is not simply immigrating to a richer country for more opportunities? In 1990, as a middle-aged man, after moving first to the Peruvian Amazon and amassing a series of followers who joined him in intensive Bible study, Segundo managed not just to convert but to make aliyah—to “ascend”—and migrate to Israel. There he and his disciples joined a settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, caught up in a fight over who counts as Jewish and in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.’

(…)

‘Mochkofsky smelled a story upon reading an account by a New York–based rabbi titled “Converting Inca Indians in Peru” and—despite its inaccuracies, exaggerations, and inventions—followed the trail all the way to a 2005 meeting with Segundo in Israel. She brought the family nearly ten pounds of yucca from Argentina at the request of his daughter, who wanted to cook a Peruvian dish. By then Segundo was called Zerubbabel Tzidkiya and had developed advanced Alzheimer’s. This meant, she writes, that “our awkward exchange could not be described as an interview.” She notes that the book, though, is dominated by the voices of men, since Segundo’s wife and daughters, who at first had spoken to her, later “decided to step back.” Segundo’s son continued to answer her questions and supply her with documents and photographs.’

(…)

‘Which rules from another era still applied? It was clear that Segundo should not kill, but how should he live? He found the New Testament especially vexing: “The tone was notably different; the content contradicted things previously said and at times defied common sense.” Segundo began to gather a group of relatives to puzzle through the Holy Book with him. For a while they joined the Seventh-Day Adventist Reform Movement, which in Segundo’s opinion at the very least got the Sabbath right, since the Bible so clearly said it was not Sunday but Saturday—sábado in Spanish. The Adventists were just one of the many Protestant groups trawling Latin America then—a quarter of all Protestant missionaries landed there after 1949, when China closed its doors to them. The Protestants could not resolve his questions either. In Mochkofsky’s account, Segundo’s character emerges as stubborn and profound. “But why? Segundo wanted to know” is the refrain. Why was God one in the Pentateuch, an all-powerful oneness, then suddenly three later on? What exactly was the Holy Spirit if he, she, or it did not appear in the book?’

(…)

‘At the Bible Society, he asked where he could find someone to teach him—and they pointed him to the Jews. Mochkofsky paraphrases his thoughts: “The Jews. Of course. The Jews!” Finally, he had lit upon a people who seemed to be living as God actually wanted. The chief rabbi of Lima welcomed an interest in Judaism and Hebrew but didn’t want to help anyone convert—not Segundo, not his followers.’

(…)

‘The Israeli ambassador in Peru told the president of the Jewish Agency—a non-profit that has overseen the resettlement of over 3.3 million people to Israel since 1948—“you’ve got a group of goyim there who are more Zionist than the Jews.” The Jewish Agency didn’t ultimately follow up, but word spread and Israelis from a range of religious and political backgrounds started visiting Segundo’s group, and were moved by the simple outpost in the Amazonian Jungle. Avichail, after a visit, finally put together a beit din, a three-man council to judge if the Peruvians should be allowed to convert. In 1989, after warning that “the yoke of the Torah is quite heavy,” the council found that sixty-eight members of the community passed. It had taken decades, but now they were Jews.’

(…)

‘ Most Latin American ex-Catholics have converted to Pentecostalism, which preaches the so-called Gospel of Prosperity, quite a change in a region that saw the birth of liberation theology within Catholicism and its “preferential option for the poor.” Pentecostalism attracts followers from all over Latin America with prohibitions on alcohol, groups for intensive Bible study and community service, and lively music.’

(…)

‘After the Bnei Moshe’s official conversions, they were cleared to make aliyah. On February 28, 1990, Segundo and his followers stepped off a plane into Ben Gurion Airport and spontaneously broke into song and dance. In Israel, they became known as the Peruanim. As resettlement authorities from the Jewish Agency drove them by bus into the desert, one of the Bnei Moshe asked about the accompanying convoy of armed soldiers. “This is the way we live here,” he was told. They awoke in Elon Moreh, a settlement of five hundred people on a fenced hill surrounded by Arab towns in the West Bank. One of their former allies who had come to see them in the jungle refused to visit them there because it was built on land seized by the Israel Defense Forces from two Palestinian villages—Azmut and Deir al-Hatab. Four days after they arrived, the Associated Press reported: The tribe’s move to the occupied lands comes at a time of growing US pressure on Israel to stop building or expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and demands that Israel not settle Soviet Jews in those areas.
The Bnei Moshe had finally seen their wildest dreams come true, and stepped right into the First Intifada. As the violence escalated, one Israeli journalist asked if the Peruvians were there as “part of a ‘desperate maneuver’” that involved “using the poor from other parts of the planet as cannon fodder” against the Palestinians. Others griped that the country was already filling up with Soviet Jews who were Jewish in name only—not to mention the Falasha, the Ethiopian Jews who were received by some Israelis with kindness, by others with overt suspicion.’

(…)

‘Shavei Israel also helped other Peruvians—even those thought by the original Peruanim to be merely seeking jobs and comforts unavailable at home—convert and emigrate, until they numbered around five hundred in the settlements. Freund’s efforts have been slowed by his estranged wife’s allegations three years ago that he transferred over $14 million without her consent or knowledge to Shavei Israel.’

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‘Were the Peruanim exploited by enthusiastic proponents of settlements in Palestine, or did they exploit right-wing nationalism to get what they wanted? Or was it a bit of both? “It is a story that I often thought I’d understood and then realized I had misunderstood,” she writes, “a story that seemed to have one ending and then turned out to have another. A story that, nearly two decades later, I still find incredible.”’

Read the article here.

A few things here are intertwined with each other.

The decline of Catholicism in Latin-Amerika, the search for answers (and indeed The New Testament is not a logical sequel to The Old Testament) and important also, the Law of Return as a ‘a distant cousin to asylum seeking.’

Why not convert to Judaism while looking for a better life?