Foolish Governments: Israel, India

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The New York Sun

One night last week, in the wee hours, I drove to Ben-Gurion Airport, where a planeload of immigrants to Israel from northeastern India, all belonging to a group called the Bnei Menashe, was due to arrive. This group, about whose sociological and historical background I wrote a book called “Across the Sabbath River” several years ago, has been in the news because 216 of its members, all recently converted to Judaism in India, were flown to Israel to begin new lives there. The Bnei Menashe are not ethnically Indian, but rather members of a Tibeto-Burmese people known as the Kuki-Chin-Mizo — in fact, they are the only Tibeto-Burmese population living as Jews anywhere in the world, which makes them something of a curiosity.

They are more than just that, however. They are a stirring and dramatic story, for their claim that they are descended from one of the biblical “lost tribes,” the tribe of Menasseh, has in my opinion, once a great deal of wild exaggeration is deducted from it, a kernel of historical truth.

There is something wonderfully romantic in the thought that there are people in the world today, let alone people living in the remote and mostly Christian states of Mizoram and Manipur along the Indian-Burmese border, with a traceable connection, however faint, to an Israelite tribe exiled by its Assyrian conquerors 2,700 years ago.

But romanticism does not cut much political ice. The Bnei Menashe, who have in the last several decades adopted Judaism — or, as they see it, returned to it — in response to their rediscovery of their past, are today in a catch-22 situation. The 216 of them who flew to Israel last month are the last group able to do so, for the government of India has in effect barred all further Jewish conversions in their community. To formally enter the Jewish fold, the remainder of them living in India would have to travel to Israel — and Israel, in turn, has barred them from entering it unless they are already converted.

It was not always this way. Between the early 1990s and 2003, small groups of the Bnei Menashe arrived in Israel, where they were given temporary housing and sent to conversion courses, after which, once they were officially Jews, they were granted Israeli citizenship. Close to 700 of them settled in Israel in this way, and nearly all adjusted well. Many of the younger ones served in the army and many married and had children.

All this ended in 2003, when Israel’s Ministry of the Interior decided to stop issuing the Bnei Menashe visas. There were several reasons why it did. The Indian government had apparently made it known that it was unhappy with an emigration movement to Israel from a part of India where no Jews had ever lived. Concern was voiced in Israel that the Bnei Menashe were not sincere in their Judaism and were simply exploiting a lost tribes legend in order to move to a more economically advanced country.

If they were permitted to do so, they would be followed by tens and hundreds of thousands of imitators whom Israel would be unable to turn away. The antipathy for religion felt by the then minister of the interior, Avraham Poraz, of the anti-clerical Shinui party, was also a factor. “Any people living at the ends of the earth that is crazy enough to embrace Judaism,” Mr. Poraz’s position appeared to be, “isn’t wanted in a Jewish state.”

The same Jewish state, however, has a Law of Return, which stipulates that anyone born a Jew or converted to Judaism has the right to immigrate to it. What then was to keep the Bnei Menashe from converting in India and coming to Israel under the Law of Return? Only, it seemed, one thing: the absence of rabbis in India to do the converting.

And so, in 2005 an organization called Shavei Israel, which had been aiding the Bnei Menashe, organized advanced courses in Judaism in the states of Mizoram and Manipur and sent a rabbinical court from Israel to convert the courses’ graduates. At first all went well and 216 conversions took place. Yet then the government of India, which has a law on its books against “missionaryizing,” stepped in and asked the government of Israel immediately to recall the rabbis, who were all in the employ of Israel’s Ministry of Religion. The rabbis were told to pack their bags and leave, and they did.

This, then, is how things stand at the moment. There is nothing of course to prevent the 7,000 Bnei Menashe in India from continuing to practice their Judaism there, and they will no doubt do so with the same seriousness and devotion that has characterized their Jewish observance until now. Yet not only is it difficult, especially when one is not recognized by Jewish law, to live Jewish lives in an inaccessible area in which there are no Jewish services or infrastructure, the Bnei Menashe do not want to live them there. They want to live them in Israel, the land they believe was left by their distant ancestors 2,700 years ago.

There is no reason why they should not be allowed to do so. The governments of Israel and India are equally at fault and equally foolish for standing in the way of it. So far, the Bnei Menashe’s supporters have sought not to politicize the issue. No one is looking to pick a fight with either Israel or India over it. But if neither country changes its policies, the fight will have to be fought — and when that happens, neither government will find that its public image has improved as a result.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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