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Indian Bnei Menashe Jews miraculously survived Oct. 7. Now they’re fighting wars in Israel and India.

(JTA) — In the 2000s, as the small Israeli town of Sderot endured heavy rocket fire, thousands of residents left the city. Around the same time, a new population began moving in: Bnei Menashe Jews from the northeast Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram.

More than 100 Bnei Menashe families called Sderot their home until Oct. 7. The community was deeply proud of what it created: the first synagogue and beit midrash — or Torah study hall — run exclusively by Bnei Menashe Jews. It was a dream, for many, that began halfway across the world in India.

The dream was interrupted when Hamas terrorists infiltrated many towns and kibbutzes surrounding Gaza. By the end of Oct. 7, 50 civilians in Sderot had been killed, as well as 20 police officers, according to the Times of Israel.

But none of them were Bnei Menashe Jews.

That day, about 40 people gathered at a new synagogue building given to the community by Sderot’s mayor, Alon Davidi, only a few weeks before. Rabbi David Lhungdim recalled feeling rushed by Davidi to begin high holiday services there long before the community felt ready to make the move.

But in the end, the building saved them. The new synagogue, Alfei Menashe, is located to the east of Menachem Begin Road. While Hamas terrorists patrolled that road on Oct. 7, shooting people in the street, in their cars and in their homes, the Bnei Menashe prayed.

“I told them, let’s finish our morning prayer, we have no choice,” Lhundgim said.

After the attacks, “I questioned myself, why was the mayor in a state of hurry? When it was Simchat Torah, everything was clear,” Lhungdim said. “I said, wow, this is a miracle that God gave us … Had we been praying at the old site [a caravan on Natan Elbaz Road, which does not have a bomb shelter], the terrorists would have seen us because they were on the main road and shooting everyone that they see. But because the mayor gave us the new site, we don’t need to cross the main road.”

Rivka Guite, Lhungdim’s sister, and her husband Zevulun had been visiting Guite’s mother for the holiday. Their home, located near the old synagogue where Hamas had been active, was destroyed in a Hamas rocket attack. Nothing could be salvaged from the rubble, Guite said.

But Guite is just thankful to be alive and living in Israel.

“It’s a miracle indeed. I really do not have an explanation for these things,” Guite said through a translation provided by Isaac Thangjom, project director at the Israel-based nonprofit Degel Menashe. “How many of us would have died if the old synagogue had been used?”

Now, most of the Bnei Menashe community in Sderot has been evacuated to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, where they are waiting out the war in refugee hotels. An estimated 200 young Bnei Menashe men have joined the Israeli military’s war effort, Thangjom told JTA. One soldier, Natanel Touthang, was injured by a rocket while on duty at the northern border.

“​​When I went to the reserves without being called up,” Touthang said, “I did it for my family. It sounds selfish, but I did it for my family.”

From Manipur to Sderot

The Bnei Menashe Jews are said to be descendants of the “lost tribe” of Manasseh, separated from their fellow Israelites after exile over two thousand years ago. They are part of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo ethnic groups that reside in northeastern India, western Myanmar, and southern Bangladesh.

Researchers say the group came to Judaism via Christian missionaries, who introduced them to the Bible in the late 19th century. Bnei Menashe tradition recalls the story of Met Chala, a Christian local tribal leader in Mizoram who was told by God in a dream to return his people to the land of Israel and their true religion: Judaism.

They began immigrating to Israel in the late 1980s with the help of Israeli Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail and his organization Amishav, undergoing formal conversions upon arrival. The immigration process was handed over to the Israeli nonprofit Shavei Israel in 2004, headed by Michael Freund, a former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Both Avichail and Shavei Israel have faced intense criticism and accusations of right-wing political motives from the Israeli left, as new Bnei Menashe immigrants moved to West Bank settlements upon arrival — particularly Kiryat Arba, which today hosts a community of about 700 Bnei Menashe Jews.

Shavei Israel halted that practice over a decade ago following the criticism, but some still move to settlements upon arrival to Israel to be with their families who already live there. Many have also settled in other towns within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Their settlement in the West Bank and on the border with Gaza has been less a product of political motivation than of convenience and accessibility, said Gideon Elazar, an anthropologist at Bar-Ilan University who researches the Bnei Menashe and other “lost tribes.”

“These were the communities that would accept them,” he said.

New Bnei Menashe immigrants have experienced difficulty learning Hebrew, finding profitable work and assimilating into Israeli society. Some experience discrimination and racism. Last year, Yoel Lhunghal, an 18-year-old Bnei Menashe Jew who had immigrated just a year earlier, was murdered in northern Israel. Though police found no evidence of a racial motive behind the attack, his father believes Yoel was “a victim of racism.”

The case of Lhungdim’s Sderot community is a slightly different story. The 120-family-strong community moved there on their own accord, Lhungdim said. Some came from other areas such as Carmel and Kiryat Arba — both towns where Lhungdim lived before coming to Sderot — and some directly upon arriving from India to join their families. Affordability was a major factor, as costs were lower due to Sderot’s location on the Gaza border. The area also offers work that corresponds with the Bnei Menashe community’s skills, such as fruit and vegetable packing.

Some relocated Bnei Menashe community members seen at a Western Wall tour in Jerusalem. (Courtesy of Degel Menashe)

“We want to strengthen Israel, that’s why we go to live in Sderot. And I’m proud to be from Sderot,” Lhungdim told JTA. “As a convert Jew, I would have been ready to sacrifice my life to the Jewish nation.”

Like other Israelis in towns near Gaza who survived the Oct. 7 attacks, the entire Bnei Menashe community in Sderot was relocated to hotels in Jerusalem. The more than 100 families staying there have kept busy by continuing religious education, praying at the Western Wall and enjoying free admission to local museums. Many had never before enjoyed stays at four-star hotels or had the opportunity to spend much time exploring Jerusalem.

But they are still eager to get back to their hometown. Guite and other community members have been making day trips to the south to tend to vegetable fields that have been left abandoned since the evacuation.

“The government is doing so much for us, and of course, we are only too happy to contribute and give something to Israel in forms of service,” Guite said.

The other war in India

Bnei Menashe Jews are now facing war and displacement on two fronts: within Israel, and in Manipur, where an ethnic conflict has been raging for nearly eight months.

There, hundreds of Bnei Menashe Jews are rebuilding their lives in the midst of an ethnic conflict that began in May and has no end in sight. Human rights groups say the ethnic Kukis — the group to which the Bnei Menashe belong — have been targeted by the majority Meiteis in what some have called an “ethnic cleansing.” Many Kukis have been forced out of their local valley, which is now mostly occupied by the Meiteis, to the hills, which have become Kuki territory.

Others have moved to the neighboring Mizoram state, where other Bnei Menashe Jews live.

Unlike in Israel, the hundreds of displaced community members in northeast India have no hope of returning home, as new informal territorial borders based on ethnicity have become the norm. Many are living in newly-built houses with vegetable plots on a picturesque 200-acre piece of land donated by community leader Lalam Hangshing. It has been named “Moaz Tzur,” and Degel Menashe, which advocates for the community, proudly refers to it as India’s first kibbutz.

These Jews have dreamed of immigrating to Israel for more than two decades. Thangjom called the war a “setback” to the process and will lengthen the timeline before the next slate of immigration, but conversations with the government are continuing, he said.

The war in Israel also impacted the amount of aid that Degel Menashe has been able to provide to Bnei Menashe refugees in India, as international Jewish organizations pour money into Israel.

“Since the war started in Israel, I don’t know if I’ll be able to give the same amount of help. But we are approaching our donors,” Thangjom said.

—
The post Indian Bnei Menashe Jews miraculously survived Oct. 7. Now they’re fighting wars in Israel and India. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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