Shavei Israel profile: Ilana Shaporker – From the convent to conversion
Ilana Shaporker
In 2000, Indian-born Ilana Shaporker was living in a convent in France, studying to become a nun. And she was slowly dying – both spiritually and physically. Something was calling her towards Judaism and towards Israel. Eleven years later, she would find her way home. And yet, at that point, she had never even met a Jew before.
“I wasn’t comfortable with being a nun,” she says. “Whenever we would have classes on the Torah or Bible, I would argue with the priests and lecturers. I would stand up and ask questions and they would get angry. They would say ‘this is the faith’ and that’s it.”
“I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do or where I should go,” she continues. “I just knew this was not my place; that being there was against what my heart was telling me.”
As her combativeness grew, Ilana was inexplicably hospitalized. The doctors were at a loss to explain why she had dropped from 72 to 40 kilos in a matter of months. She couldn’t hold down any food. Eventually, “I was so weak, I lost the power of speech,” she says. “The doctors decided to send me back to India. They said, ‘if she stays here, she will most certainly die.’”
She was only 25 years-old.
Ilana returned to her family home in Kerala, India, and decided that she could not continue in her path to become a nun. She renounced her vows and, astonishingly, within a few weeks, she could take a few sips of water and retain it. Her energy returned and, with the help of a local physician, she regained her health.
“I realize now that it was G-d trying to guide me,” she says referring to the illness that took her out of the convent. “But I was keeping my ears and heart closed. The moment I responded to His call, everything in me became peaceful.”
Ilana moved to the “big city,” Mumbai, and began to seek out more information about Judaism – this time, from a Jewish perspective. She met a local Indian rabbi, Joshua Kolet, who began to teach her what it meant to be a Jew. He also hooked her up with the Jewish organization, World ORT, which helped her train to become a travel agent.
One day, an Indian man walked into the travel agency in which she worked. She asked him for his name. “Elkana,” he said. Ilana had never heard such a name. “So I asked him: what religion are you? And he said, ‘I am a Jew.’”
They became fast friends and Elkana, who was observant, helped her learn even more about Judaism. Ilana decided the time had come for her to convert to Judaism.
Now, here’s where several paths converge in a way that neither Ilana nor Elkana could ever have expected. Elkana worked on occasion offering tours to Jewish travelers to Mumbai – that was one of the reasons he had stopped in at Ilana’s travel agency in the first place. Among those travelers was Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund as well as Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, who would transit through Mumbai on their way to visit the Bnei Menashe in northeastern India.
Through Elkana, they met Ilana and, in September 2005, on a layover on the way to the Indian state of Mizoram, Rabbi Birnbaum and four rabbis from Israel agreed to accept Ilana into the Jewish fold.
“At 9:00 AM, they interviewed me at the Magen David synagogue in Mumbai,” she tells us. “Afterward they said ‘we are accepting you right here and now.’ It was the best moment in my life.”
But then came a surprise. “They asked me, ‘would you like to get married today, while we are still in town?’” By 7:00 PM, Ilana and Elkana were standing under the chuppah in the very same synagogue, a startled but ecstatic new bride and groom.
Life was not easy for the new couple, though. Elkana, an industrial mechanic by training, found it very difficult to find regular work because he kept the Sabbath. “In India, you only get every other Shabbat off,” Ilana explains. Her employment opportunities also became more limited as, after her conversion, she too no longer worked on Saturdays.
Their thoughts turned to Israel where they knew they could live a fully Jewish life, where their commitment to tradition would be wholly embraced.
One of the Israeli travelers who Elkana met was Rabbi Hanoch Avitzedek, Shavei Israel’s Director of the Bnei Menashe Aliyah and Absorption Department. He became close with the couple and began interceding on their behalf with the Jewish Agency in Israel. It took three years but Ilana, Elkana and their newborn baby Yedidya were given permission to make aliyah in early 2011.
“Rabbi Hanoch and Shavei Israel were with me in every step,” Ilana says. “Even if it was in the middle of the night, if I’d call, he would be there to support me.”
This might be the happy end to the story, but the couple’s financial situation in Israel did not improve…if anything it became even more difficult. While Elkana has found employment as a machine operator at a hi-tech company in Jerusalem, his work is all consuming – some 13-14 hours a day, Ilana reports – and he never gets to see his family.
Young Yedidya Shaporker
Ilana couldn’t transfer her training as a travel agent to Israel and it is expensive to send Yedidya, now 5 years-old, to kindergarten. The young family lives in a small apartment in one of Jerusalem’s poorer neighborhoods and barely scrapes by on Elkana’s salary.
But there is hope. Through Shavei Israel, Ilana, now 37, learned about the dental assistant training program offered by Hadassah Hospital’s dental school and has enrolled for the fall semester. [We have more information about Shavei Israel students in the program here.] The one-year program offers Ilana the opportunity to learn a profession that is in high demand in Israel and that pays a very fair wage. “It will allow me to help in supporting my family,” she says. “If I do this, then my husband won’t have to work so many hours a day. He’ll be able to spend time with his son.”
The dental assistant program costs over $3,000 in tuition alone. That doesn’t include living expenses such as extra daycare for Yedidya while Ilana is in class. We have also connected Ilana with a private tutor in Hebrew, which she needs in order to succeed in her studies.
Ilana Shaporker has worked so hard to get to this point in her life – from an impoverished childhood growing up in India, to a spiritual search that took her around the globe, eventually to Jerusalem and Judaism. With your help, she can take one more step towards self-sufficiency, so that she can provide for her family, with honor and dignity. Please click our Support button to make your contribution.