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India’s Bnei Menashe community in crisis as ethnic violence burns synagogues and displaces hundreds
(JTA) — For the past several years, life was good for Lalam Hangshing as president of the Bnei Menashe Council, the governing body for Jewish communities in the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram.
While living at his parents’ house, he and his wife enjoyed the clean air and beautiful scenery of Manipur, a state in northeast India home to close to 3 million people. Miles away, Hangshing rented out a newly-built four-story home to a film production company.
Everything changed on May 3, when rioting broke out between the ethnic majority Meiteis and the tribal minority Kukis, a violent conflagration that had been building up for years. Local groups say Meiteis began targeting Kuki institutions and razing homes to the ground, and Hangshing — also the general secretary of a Kuki-led political party — feared his house was next.
“When the problems started on the third of May, with military precision, the mobs went straight to [Kuki] houses,” Hangshing said. “They ransacked them and vandalized them and they burned each and every house in Imphal city within one and a half days.”
According to Shavei Israel, an NGO that helps “lost tribe” Jewish communities immigrate to Israel, over 1,000 members of the community, or 20% of their total, have been displaced. One community member was killed, and another was shot in the chest and is hospitalized. Two synagogues and mikvahs, or ritual baths, were burned down.
(Degel Menashe, an Israeli NGO that is dedicated to supporting the Bnei Menashe and has a longstanding feud with Shavei Israel, said one synagogue was burned.)
Hangshing is Kuki, as are the thousands of other Bnei Menashe Jews in Manipur. On May 4, Hangshing left his home and over a month later, has yet to return.
He spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from Delhi, more than 1,000 miles from his home. His four-story house has been completely destroyed, but his parents’ home is somehow still standing. He worries about family possessions, such as religious books belonging to his father — who had helped found Manipur’s Jewish community — and a favorite set of golf clubs left behind, all in danger of being looted or destroyed any day now.
Another estimated 292 Bnei Menashe families have fled to Kuki-majority hill areas within Manipur or to the nearby state of Mizoram, according to Shavei Israel.
In Mizoram, over 100 Jews initially took refuge in the Shalom Tzion synagogue in Aizawl, in the houses of other Jewish families or at hotels, but most have moved to a paramilitary camp nearby. Community leaders say the refugees are not facing any immediate danger and have enough food and supplies thanks to the tens of thousands of dollars in aid rolling in from Shavei Israel and Degel Menashe.
“They basically just fled with their documents, and they have prayer books, their tefillin and ritual items, and the clothes on their back,” said Asaf Renthlei, a Mizoram Jewish community member and Degel Menashe volunteer. At relief camps, he said, community members have observed Shabbat every week since they fled.
“This is one of the gravest crises the Bnei Menashe in India have ever experienced,” said Michael Freund, who has been chairman of Shavei Israel since he founded the organization in 2002.
Over 100 Bnei Menashe have taken shelter in a synagogue in Mizoram. (Shavei Israel)
“A state gone rogue”
Violence broke out in Manipur state in early May when tribal groups launched a protest against the Meitei’s demand for Scheduled Tribe status, which is traditionally reserved for minority tribes such as the Kukis and ensures certain rights to education, government jobs and other privileges. The Kukis (which make up about 16% of the population and are majority Christian) say that the Meiteis (who make up 53% and are majority Hindu) already have outsized privilege and political representation.
The May 3 protest was only the spark that has ignited a conflict based on long-standing grievances against the Kuki minority, said Sushant Singh, a senior research fellow at India’s Centre for Policy Research.
“At the core of it, it is about Meiteis claiming that they are the original inhabitants of the state, Kukis are illegal immigrants, and… [the Meiteis] have been forced to occupy only 10% of the land,” Singh said. “And because of the special privileges that tribes have in India, they cannot go and occupy the land occupied by Kukis.”
As the conflict enters its second month, over 100 deaths have been recorded and an estimated 40,000 people have been displaced; some entire villages are destroyed and over 200 churches have been burned, as well as the two synagogues in the Imphal area. A statewide internet blackout has been in place since the beginning of May.
While both Kukis and Meiteis have participated in the violence, Kukis have “suffered the most,” and state police and security forces have joined Meitei groups in targeting Kukis, Singh said. Human Rights Watch has called on India to investigate police violence in Manipur, which local groups have disputed.
“It has essentially been a state gone rogue acting against a minority community,” Singh said.
Though the government has called for a ceasefire and established a peace committee, those efforts to quell the violence have been unsuccessful. The military has implemented security measures and evacuated Kukis further into the hills and Meiteis into the plains, but Singh said this has only reinforced geographical divides, instead of facilitating a solution that could allow the two groups to live alongside one another in the future.
Citing the government’s failure to protect them, Kukis have called for separation from the state of Manipur. As the conflict stretches into its second month, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet to comment on the crisis in his country’s northeast.
“The army has been called in but they are very ineffective because it’s a civil war. They can’t take sides. They just stand around and when the firing gets too heavy, they stand aside so it’s left to us to fend for ourselves,” Hangshing said.
According to one organization, two of the community’s synagogues have burned down and another Torah scroll was torched. (Shavei Israel)
An appeal to Israel
The Bnei Menashe identify as descendants of a “lost tribe” group, tracing their origins to the Israelite tribe of Menasseh. In 2005, a chief rabbi of Israel affirmed their identity as a “lost tribe” group with historic Jewish ties, but researchers have not found sufficient evidence to back the claim. Bnei Menashe Jews began immigrating to Israel in the 1990s, and because of their “lost tribe” status, they all undergo formal Orthodox conversions upon arrival. Around 5,000 remain in the states of Manipur and Mizoram today, and about 5,000 have already immigrated to Israel.
Many have struggled to gain entry into Israel over the past two decades, and they are now asking the Jewish state to expedite the immigration process to help them escape the violence. But despite recent celebrations surrounding the opening of a new Indian-Jewish cultural center in central Israel, to which Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog sent recorded blessings, Jerusalem has yet to publicly respond to the situation.
Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, visited India last month on a planned trip aimed at strengthening ties between the two countries. He did not comment on the matter, and his visit was cut short due to a military operation in Israel.
“I think under [Benjamin] Netanyahu, particularly in this stint as prime minister, there are very few expectations. He is very close to Mr. Modi’s government, so I don’t think anybody expects anything from Netanyahu,” Singh said.
The Bnei Menashe’s “grey zone” religious status, in the words of Renthlei, makes their immigration to Israel more complicated for them than most. Before the Bnei Menashe can even apply to immigrate, they must face a panel of rabbis — who usually come all the way to India — for interviews.
“It’s not like Ukraine. The Ukrainians are Jewish without any doubt. But the Bnei Menashe, we are in some gray zone of not exactly not Jews, but not exactly Jews also,” Renthlei said. “It’s unlikely that the Bnei Menashe would just be able to make aliyah, even in this situation, unlike the Ukrainians.” Thousands of Ukrainian Jews have immigrated to Israel since Russia’s invasion began in February 2022.
The Jewish Agency for Israel, which helps facilitate immigration, and the UJA-Federation of New York have provided funding to Shavei Israel to help displaced persons, representatives from Shavei said. The Jewish Agency, the ministry of aliyah and integration, and the Israeli consulate in India did not respond to JTA’s requests for comment.
“We’re too small to matter, I suppose,” said Isaac Thangjom, director of Degel Menashe. Thangjom, who lives in Israel, has been in contact with officials in the ministry of aliyah and integration.
“They are very concerned, but they haven’t given me any explicit answer despite my proddings,” he said. “Their responses have been very tepid.”
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Ever the restless spirit, Tel Aviv-born architect and designer Ron Arad is still reinventing himself and his art
When the announcement was made on June 12 that Ron Arad, 75, has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), it marked another step in the Tel Aviv-born architect, artist and designer’s remarkably varied journey. Arad’s mother was the painter Esther Peretz-Arad and his father Grisha was a sculptor and photographer. After industrial design studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Arad traveled to London to become an architect, and has remained based there ever since. Yet although he won early fame with his piquant, witty concepts for chairs, Arad has proven anything but sedentary over the past half-century. Indeed, a 2010 retrospective at London’s Barbican Art Gallery was titled “Restless.”
Despite this seemingly permanent shpilkes (restless agitation), humane consideration for the pathways of others has been a constant in Arad’s public projects. His design for Beit Shulamit (2025), a cancer treatment center at the HaEmek Medical Center in Afula, northern Israel, intended to serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in Israel and Palestine, deliberately freed patients and visitors from “horrible hospital corridors,” Arad told an architectural periodical. Patients walking around the site are given views of nature outdoors at every turn, in a facility that is the first to offer specialist cancer treatment for residents of West Bank conflict zones, including the cities of Jenin and Nablus. Named in honor of Dr. Shulamit Katzman, a pediatrician, the building’s gently curved lines embrace the public.
This awareness of social cohesion is also present in an Arad sculpture on the Tel Aviv University campus. “Kesher” is dedicated to the estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died from adverse conditions in transition camps on the Sudanese border while trying to emigrate to Israel between 1979 and 1990. Composed of dynamically soaring, interwoven metal tubes, the artwork, wrapped around two live palm trees, a ubiquitous symbol of the Middle East, evokes an expedition. A repeated figure-eight symbolizes the endless continuity of the immigrants’ route and the resolve that it communicates.
In England, Arad assisted the National Health Service (NHS) in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A flock of UK Jewish celebrities posed for photos wearing Arad-designed cotton masks, including actor Stephen Fry, comedian David Baddiel, and television host Natasha Kaplinsky. Despite lively colors, the masks, intended to be sold for fundraising, retained a somewhat tragic aura, like the grotesque permanent smile of Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Man Who Laughs.
Potential tragedy inherent in triumph likewise radiates from another Arad project, the Totzeret HaAretz (ToHA) tower, an office skyscraper in central Tel Aviv which was inspired by the shape of an iceberg. Its angular glass, built as the polar ice caps are rapidly melting and the fate of the passenger liner Titanic’s collision with an iceberg is particularly relevant, the ensemble when complete will include an 80-floor companion tower, Tel Aviv’s tallest building.
Similarly, Arad is aware of the agony of defeat as well as artistic victories he has experienced over the years. When his codesign for a National Holocaust Monument Ottawa in Canada failed to win a competition, Arad published the concept anyway. The result is a highly literary, theological rumination on the impact of the Shoah on modern Jewish history. Ever conscious of the pedestrian’s progress, Arad’s design featured concrete walls framing 22 narrow passageways, one for each country in which Jewish communities were decimated. These walls, spaced around a meter apart, would have allowed only one visitor to fit through at a time. The solitude would have been lessened by an architectural allusion to the covenant of the pieces (Brit Bein HaBetarim), the first of a series of covenants between God and the Patriarchs. In this narrative, God revealed himself to Abram (later Abraham), promising that his descendants would inherit the Land of Israel.
Less loftily or weighty with destiny, Arad’s chief promise as an artist is to his own creativity. He was so inspired by a melody by the American Jewish songwriter Jonathan Richman about shedding personal inhibition and pretension by accepting new, unfamiliar surroundings and contexts, that in all seriousness he informed an interviewer in 2005 that he wanted Richman’s tune, “I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar” to be played at his funeral. Another impeded project where dancing might have been at least delayed was a London Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre design, initially approved in 2017, but later bogged down by objections about its proposed site, Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. However, in January, a Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, officially clearing a legal hurdle blocking the construction of Arad’s UK Holocaust Memorial; the recent conferral of a CBE by Charles III, known to take particular interest in Jews and Holocaust victims, represents further establishment endorsement of Arad and his work.
Despite this authorized approval, Arad looks likely to remain an offbeat spirit, drawing inspiration from a wide range of predecessors, including the Czernowitz-born Austrian Jewish creator Friedrich Jacob Kiesler who innovated with 1965’s “Shrine of the Book” in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among other texts. Kiesler was also responsible for an unbuilt architectural concept, the Endless House, a biomorphic, continuous form with no beginning, end, or even boundaries between floor, wall, and ceiling. Some Arad projects resemble completed versions of things Kiesler and his fellow Jewish surrealists might have only dreamed of.
When it is built, Arad’s Holocaust Memorial will pay tribute to several minority groups targeted by the Nazis, in addition to the Jews. The Learning Centre is intended to explore antisemitism, but also extremism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice in today’s society. Much of it will be underground, drawing visitors down narrow stairs into the exhibition space and learning center, in yet another example of Arad’s obsession with peregrinations, like a modern-day architectural Benjamin of Tudela, a medieval Jewish traveler. Ever shedding past identities, Arad told the 2005 interviewer that the living person he most admired was Bob Dylan, for “reinventing himself and for reinventing us.” In a comparable way, Ron Arad has also reworked his own optic to express modern Jewish identity in a variety of forms, as an excursion hampered by tragedy and ominous echoes at times, but also with the possibility of quick-witted celebration.
At last year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Arad presented a bronze sculpture titled “I doubt therefore I think” (Dubito Ergo Cogito). Inviting museumgoers to sit on it, the artwork likely referred to a time-honored Jewish tradition of doubt as the mitzvah of questioning. This mitzvah has accompanied Arad’s career-long odyssey in the arts.
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New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu
A newly established Jewish-Arab political party debuted Tuesday and is joining the crowded field vying to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s next election, slated for October.
Makom Lekulanu, which translates to A Place for Us All, ( is led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, co-founders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizing group. Other Standing Together leaders will also join the party, including Haifa City Council member Sally Abed; Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist; Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council member; and Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, well-known peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
According to Daood and others who spoke at a press conference in Nazareth publicly launching the new party, Makom Lekulanu’s platform will focus on many of the same issues that Standing Together has organized around for years: peace, social justice, soaring violence and crime in Arab communities, the cost of living and climate justice.
Party leaders say they are running not only to oppose Netanyahu and his coalition, which currently includes far-right extremists National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but to offer a fundamentally different vision.
“We are doing this because this is the last moment to save our society,” Daood told the modest crowd, many of whom were clad in the telltale purple that has become synonymous with Standing Together. “We are being abandoned, murdered; our future is going up in flames. And I know that in order to repair things, it is not enough to say only what we oppose. We also have to say what we support.”
“So today I am saying: no to Netanyahu, to Ben-Gvir, to Smotrich,” she continued, to enthusiastic applause. “But I am also saying yes. Yes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, yes to national and civil equality, yes to social justice.”The press conference took place at the scenic Rose Cafe in Nazareth, a choice that underscored the message its founders are trying to send. This is not, they insisted, a Jewish party with token Palestinian representation or an Arab party with a couple of Jewish allies, but what Daood called “a truly shared party, one of genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
According to Abed, this means tearing down the arbitrary dividers that have been built around Jewish and Arab leadership.
“I have always been told, ‘You will be responsible for Arab society, and we will be responsible for Jewish society,’” she said. “But I want to lead and take responsibility for all of society, together with my Jewish partners.”
“That’s what A Place for Us All will be: taking responsibility for all of society, together, on the path to ending the occupation, to peace and to real equality.”
A decade organizing
The party grew directly out of Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement founded in 2015. Since the Oct. 7 attack, and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Standing Together has become one of Israel’s most visible anti-war and anti-occupation organizations, growing its membership more than tenfold and emerging as a prominent voice on the international stage as well.
Inside Israel, the movement has organized ceasefire protests and rallies calling for a hostage deal, protected aid convoys headed for Gaza from right-wing attacks, raised funds for bomb shelters in Bedouin communities and provided protective presence for Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.
For Zeigen, the decision to join the slate is rooted in personal loss as well as political conviction.
“For years, I worked with people battling poverty, marginalization and trauma — the overwhelming majority of them as a result of institutional abandonment,” he said at the press conference. “On Oct. 7, I experienced that abandonment firsthand. My mother, Vivian Silver, did not survive the massacre at her kibbutz.”
“Out of the devastation of losing her, I made a decision,” he continued. “I left my job as a social worker, and since then I have dedicated my life to one thing: Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Zeigen described his grief now intermingling with another emotion: fear for the future his children will inherit.
“That is why I insist on turning despair into action,” he said. “Because I refuse to accept bereavement as fate — not for Jews and not for Arabs, not for Israelis and not for Palestinians.”
The new party’s leaders have been careful to stress that Standing Together is a separate entity from A Place for Us All. In a joint statement issued ahead of the launch, Daood and Green said the movement would remain active and independent, with a “full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political” between Standing Together and A Place for Us All. Both Daood and Green said they will take unpaid leave from their leadership roles in the movement in order to run.
Daood said the move into electoral politics is a natural progression of what she and Green have helped create over the last decade.
“For 10 years now, we have been effecting change right where it was needed most. We know how to build this kind of power on the ground,” Daood told the Forward. “Now we want to take that power and translate it into votes so that we can effect change from within the Knesset.”
While rumors of a political run have swirled around Standing Together for months, Green said he and Daood felt they had finally reached a now-or-never moment.
“I truly believe we are at a critical juncture,” Green explained. “This is the point where the Israeli people either keep going down this path of ethnic cleansing and endless war and occupation and terrible quality of life, for both Palestinians and Jews living here — or we can turn around, right now, and go in the other direction, in the direction of life and peace and security for all.”
“The right wing in Israel very much understands we are at this juncture,” he added. “And they have been very clear about what they are offering. I could not live with myself if I didn’t offer an alternative to Israeli voters.”
Seeking an edge
A Place for Us All will face an uphill battle from the start.
Any party led by Standing Together’s founders is likely to intensify the criticism the movement already faces from right-wing Israelis who have branded them as traitors for speaking out against the occupation and the suffering in Gaza. Posters featuring images of Gazan children have been torn down, and activists, Green included, have been harassed by right-wing agitators, in some cases outside their own homes.
A Place for Us All is also already drawing criticism from within the Israeli left, where some fear that the addition of a new party could split an already fragile anti-Netanyahu camp. In Israel’s electoral system, any party that fails to cross the electoral threshold — currently set at just over 3% of the vote — receives no seats, meaning it cannot take part in the post-election negotiations that determine who will build the 61-seat coalition needed to form the next government.
Green strongly rejects this concern.
“Every poll makes clear that winning without Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible,” he argued. “The only path to replacing Netanyahu is to maximize turnout among Jewish and Palestinian citizens and ensure that they vote for the same political bloc.”
According to Green, only one in four Palestinian citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 is currently planning to vote. “But with our party running, that statistic jumps up to two out of four,” he said.
If the scene outside the cafe was any indication, the party’s message may already be resonating with at least some of the young people it hopes to bring into politics. As the press conference unfolded, groups of teenagers passing by stopped to cheer on the speakers.
Inside, excitement was also running high. At one point, activist Galit Mass-Ader openly wept as she embraced Ghadir Hani who is joining the party’s list.
“For me, this is a decision that has been years in the making. I’ve been working for peace and coexistence nearly my whole life,” Hani told the Forward. “But since October 7, there have been so many difficult moments of pain and despair.”
“This party is the exact opposite of that,” she said. “It is the embodiment of hope — hope that belongs to both Jews and Palestinians, and to all those who are ready to reject the old, stale politics in favor of a new, shared political system.”
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Trump says Syria would do a ‘better job’ of fighting Hezbollah than Israel
(JTA) — Syria would be better at tackling Hezbollah in Lebanon, U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday, as Israel’s presence in Lebanon continued to be an Achilles’ heel in the fledgling U.S.-Iran deal set to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday.
Trump said Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated group who has fashioned himself as a modern statesman after taking power in 2024, could be more effective and less destructive than Israel has been.
“If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he will do the job, Syria will do the job,” Trump said in Evian, France, on the sidelines of the G7 Summit.
Trump accused Israel of taking too long to oust the Iranian proxy group from Lebanon, just one day after he said that he himself might intervene by speaking directly with Hezbollah.
Trump also said Tuesday that “regime change” had never been the goal of the war with Iran and described Iran’s current leadership as “rational,” “smart” and “strong.” The president said the deal would prevent Iran from acquiring, building or developing a nuclear weapon.
The Iran deal to end months of hostilities between Washington and Tehran was digitally signed on Sunday, according to Trump’s vice president, JD Vance. Its terms have not been published, but officials have said that it also includes an end to hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, even though Israel is not a party to the agreement. Separate talks have been held in Washington between Lebanese and Israeli officials toward a peace deal that Hezbollah has so far rejected.
Israel has insisted that its army will remain in southern Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah attacks against communities in northern Israel. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday that the deal with Washington was contingent on an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and a halt to the fighting, according to the state-affiliated Press TV.
Trump addressed the issue of Hezbollah on Tuesday in France during a meeting with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, whose country has been among those playing a mediating role between the U.S. and Iran.
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed, and you do not have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for someone,” Trump said.
“There are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they are not all Hezbollah, and I suggested to Israel that Syria should take care of Hezbollah, and to be honest with you, I think they will do a better job at it,” he stated.
Trump downplayed any tension between himself and his ally in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though he admitted that he had been upset by Netanyahu’s decision to attack Hezbollah in Beirut on Sunday just hours before the Iran deal was announced.
At one point in his remarks Tuesday Trump described the relationship as “unbelievable” and “effective,” and when asked if there was tension between the two leaders, responded “no,” even as he gave examples of how Netanyahu’s handling of Lebanon has frustrated him.
“I didn’t like that two hours before we were signing the agreement … that there was an attack in Lebanon, it was right in Beirut. I did not like it, I let them [Israel] know it,” Trump said, adding that the Hezbollah drone attack on Israel that prompted Israel’s retaliation was minor.
“You can do too much also,” Trump said, explaining that he “was not happy” with how Israel conducted itself in Lebanon, where it should have been “able to do the job faster. It just goes on and on [in a way that] throws a negative light on the big deal.”
Still, Trump said he did not think that Lebanon would derail the agreement with Tehran, describing it as a “minor war.”
Lebanon aside, Israel is concerned that the Iran deal strengthens the Islamic Republic, which it had hoped would be overthrown as a result of the war, and that the deal would allow it to continue to pursue a nuclear and ballistic missile weapons program. That the deal allows for more money to flow to the heavily sanctioned regime has only fueled that concern.
“This deal is a wall to a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, rejecting the idea that U.S. funding was a part of the agreement. “We are not investing any money. We have no obligation to invest any money in Iran,” he said.
Trump underscored the danger to the region and to Israel should Iran become a nuclear power and said the war and this deal prevented that. Echoing comments he has made before, he said, “Without me, Israel would not exist right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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