Pakistan Registers First Jewish Citizen In Decades
Image by Twitter
After a three-year long struggle to change his papers to reflect his status as a Jew, Fishel Benkhald is finally receiving a new identity card and passport that recognize his religious affiliation.
“It feels like shackles have been removed from me and I feel a great sense of liberty now,” Benkhald told Fox News. Raised by a Jewish mother and Muslim father, he gravitated toward his mother’s faith as a teen, and sought as an adult to change his official status from Muslim to Jewish. In Pakistan, citizens have their religion noted on state documents.
He received help from Wilson Chowdhry, head of the British Pakistani Christian Association, who pressed United Kingdom officials to pursue the issue with Pakistani counterparts. “Other Jews have simply stated they are Jews on a census,” Chowdhry told Fox News. “None of them have their Jewish faith prescribed on an ID card or passport. This is very unique to Fishel. The obtaining of [registration] as a Jew is groundbreaking.”
Not more than a few dozen Jews are believed to still live in Pakistan, which a century ago had more than 1,000 Jews in the country.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
