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Jewish filmmaker recounts his harrowing arrest in Nigeria

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When Jewish rights activist Rudy Rochman went to Nigeria with two other filmmakers to document that country’s Igbo Jewish community in July he could not have foreseen the ordeal that he would experience when he and his crew were arrested and spent three weeks in prison.

Their goal in visiting the Igbo community was to film an episode for their documentary project on the stories of Jewish communities around the world “also referred to throughout history as the lost tribes.”

“You have many communities across Africa, Asia, South America, even Spain and Portugal, and so our series focuses on each season being in a different region of the world. Season one being in Africa, and there are different countries that we’re going to. One of them being in Nigeria to visit the Igbo Jewish community,” said Rochman.

The narrative of the Igbo Jews is they descend from the Tribe of Gad. One of the children of Gad had travelled to the southern region of Nigeria and created a tribal outpost. And later on when tribes were split up, the whole tribe went to this region.

“There’s no historical proof of this,” Rochman said. “But I can prove for example that 600 years ago when white people where coming from Europe to proselytize to spread Christianity they were writing documents and also letters back to Europe saying they were witnessing Jewish life. That there were circumcisions, that there was speaking of Hebrew, that they had mikvahs, that they had kosher laws.”

“Each different community has their own elements of proof,” Rochman added, explaining they found the Cohen DNA within a group of the Lemba in Zimbabwe.

“For me what’s fascinating about the Igbos is how they are treated within society and how you can actually detect systemic anti-Semitism.”

Two days after being in Nigeria he and the other two filmmakers were arrested.

On the second day there at night, they started to see on their phones viral posts and blogs that they were agents sent from Israel to fight a regional political war that stemmed from three Nigerian ethnic groups fighting.

The vast majority of Igbos today are Christian, only a few thousand form the Igbo jewish community.

“We came to do a video on that Jewish community. However, the Igbo’s are persecuted by the majority,” Rochman said.

Rochman’s group was accused of being connected to a small group of Igbos who have been trying to separate from Nigeria. The Jewish community has nothing to do with them, but the government doesn’t understand that they had nothing to do with separatist group but sees them as all one.

They were taken into custody by the government. It was supposed to last an hour it eventually lasted three weeks, during which they were in prison.

“They tried to get information from us. They’re very paranoid. They think that anyone that’s coming here that has anything to do with the Igbos must have something to do with the secession movement, which we clearly don’t.”

“We were in survival mode the whole time there.”

It was life threatening. “The first week we barely at anything. In fact the first six days, we didn’t eat a thing. We didn’t shower. Even when we showered we were showing with the buckets they use to clean themselves when they go to the bathrooms because they don’t have toilet paper. And we would fill this bucket up with water and dunk it on our heads. And after the first week, they moved us to a second cage with two Boko Haram militants. One of who had supposedly killed 70 people in a terror attack.”

“Constantly even while there whether with the guards, whether with the inmates, you don’t know if you’re getting out in a day, in a month in a year in several years. So the entire time there we’re trying to really fight for our survival.”

He had literally no connection with the outside world, and felt completely disconnected.

His only connection was on the sixth day when they saw ambassador of Israel.

“When I was in a room being held before interrogation, I took a book and I ripped out pieces of paper from the middle of the book, I stole one of the pens and I wrote letters to my family on this paper and whenever the ambassador would come very few days I would slip it into his pocket and it was a way to reach out and have communication,” Rochman said.

They only understood they were being released the morning it occurred.

Even with the horrible ordeal that he survived, Rochman still plans to return to Africa to continue the series. Just not Nigeria.

“I would if I wasn’t banned but I’m definitely going back to Africa to the other countries that we need to go to. It’s not really about the danger. Our experience of three weeks is a drop in the bucket of experiences compared to what our Jewish brothers and sisters face there.”

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