Testimonial letter from Carol Voisin
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from Carol Voisin. It is "Exhibit A-91" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 July 20, 1983 [To:] The Immigration Department United States of America To Whom It May Concern: There is considerable debate over the immigration status of Baghwen Shree Rajneesh. The question to be answered is whether or not Rajneesh is a religious leader, even though he does not speak. The Berkeley Area Interfaith Council (BAIC) considers one of our members the Deepta Rajneesh community which is located at 3024 Ashby, Berkeley, CA 94705, to be a "religious" organization. The Rajneesh community gives assent to BAIC's purpose which identifies it as a religious community. "The purpose of the Council is to bear witness to the spiritual unity of humankind and its divine source." Since the Rajneesh in our eyes is a religious community, because of their assent to the purpose of the Council, then it follows that their leader would be a "religious" leader, regardless of his capacity or willingness to speak. As the President of BAIC, I speak for the Council in supporting the Rajneesh community in their claim that Baghwen Shree Rajneesh is their religious leader. The Council and I know of him through the members of this community participating in the Council and of course through the media. I sincerely hope the qualification that a religious leader is one who must speak in order to be a "qualified" religious leader is dropped by your department. This seems to be an unfair and superimposed qualification for a religious leader and is being used to discriminate against a new religious movement. Sincerely yours, |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
