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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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Bedouin shepherds found it. A bishop sold it. An Israeli agent bought it. Now you can see it up close.
The magnificent 717-centimeter ancient Isaiah scroll on view right now at The Israel Museum, for the first time in 60 years, is drawing so many people that the museum has set strict guidelines for visitors.
To see the scroll — meaning the original, handwritten, non-facsimile, version that survived for two thousand years in jars hidden in a cave — with your own eyes, all 23 1/2 feet of it, you need to register by 8 a.m.
Once you are at the exhibit entrance, you need to wait your turn; you have to watch a film first about the incredible story of how the Isaiah scroll was found by Bedouin shepherds in a remote cave near the Dead Sea, sold to Archbishop Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, then read and evaluated by a professor whose son became Israeli military royalty, photographed by an American scholar, sent by the bishop to the U.S. for a tour of several leading universities in the hope of snaring a very high price, and then at long last, clandestinely purchased by an agent hiding that he was representing Israel from a small and seemingly innocuous ad in The Wall Street Journal. Then you have exactly 10 minutes in a temperature-controlled room with the scroll.
There is something spiritual and moving about seeing this gigantic, complete, handwritten scroll that was literally hidden in a cave for millennia. What is remarkable about it, Professor Noam Mizrahi of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem explains in a video you can watch after you check the scroll out for yourself, is first of all its age.
“It is over two thousand years old,” he explains. To be precise, the scroll was written in 125 BCE. The other amazing aspect of it is its fullness — not only are all 66 chapters there, but the Hebrew is written in a full way.
What does that mean, exactly? Consider the first line, “This is the vision of Isaiah the son of Amotz,” written in the scroll as “Yishayahu ben Amotz.” You can see with your own eyes that the original scribe wrote “Yeshaya,” and that another, later, scribe, added a letter, the ayin, so that it now reads “Yishayahu” as Isaiah is pronounced in today’s Hebrew.
It offers a glimpse into ancient pronunciation, Mizrahi explained. I would add that it also offers a glimpse into editing — writers are never done.
And maybe the Jewish people are never done discussing what the vision of Isaiah is, and what it means. This particular scroll wasn’t a museum artifact in the early days.
“It was in use for at least 100 years,” Mizrahi said — you can tell from the corrections.
But back to that fullness. This is a neatly written scroll of a text so many of us recognize — timeless, the curator Hagit Maoz commented in the video, and about peace, and justice. Maybe my vision is failing, but it was hard to make out psukim, or verses, I knew by heart.
This is not because the handwriting wasn’t neat — each aleph was distinct and perfect — but because the letters are small. I found myself cheating by taking a picture with my phone and enlarging it. Then I felt guilty for wasting a bit of my precious ten minutes on technology.
My group included a woman with a seeing-eye dog. If I could barely make out the letters, what could she see?
But the scroll is not just about seeing. It is about feeling. You can feel that this text is connected to this place. It’s the feeling of being here, of being near something written thousands of years ago by hand, something ours, something whole. There is the feeling that this is where Isaiah roamed, and this is where this incredible book — this timeless piece of Jewish literature — began.
Once the ten minutes are up, visitors are ushered into another room with a copy of the Isaiah scroll enlarged, and with key verses highlighted. There was the dream of peace, I thought as I looked at individual verses — the wolf dwelling with the lamb — and then there is the reality. The other day, I heard a young guy tell a date he had done 600 days of miluim, or reserve service.
I found myself refocusing on the true story of how the Isaiah scroll made it to the public. I couldn’t get enough of the details.
From shepherds to The Wall Street Journal
When Bedouin shepherds chased a sheep sometime in early 1947, they reached challenging terrain across from the northwest rim of the Dead Sea that no one else was willing to enter.
They heard a piece of pottery in a cave crack.
Curious, they went inside and found seven scrolls inside jars in the cave. They took them out, not knowing what they were. The museum explains that the bishop, who purchased the scrolls, consulted Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who immediately realized he was looking at an ancient Isaiah scroll and copied some sections; he told the bishop he was interested in purchasing the scrolls, both the ones in his possession and those still with the shepherds.
According to the Israel Antiquities Authority website when Sukenik learned of the scrolls’ discovery, he set out to investigate their significance. “Braving Arab-Jewish tensions, he travelled to meet the Armenian dealer at the British divided military zone of the Jerusalem border. In this clandestine meeting, the dealer held up a fragment of leather for the professor to examine. As Sukenik peered through the wire, he recognized the ancient writing.”
Incredibly, on Nov. 29, 1947, on the very same day as the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan, the historic vote which led to the establishment of Israel, Prof. Sukenik bought three of the seven scrolls.
Meanwhile, the bishop decided to get another opinion on his four scrolls, from an American scholar in Jerusalem who was the first to photograph them. By March 1948, convinced of the scrolls’ value and concerned for their safety as the War of Independence raged, the bishop had his assistant take the scrolls to a bank in Beirut, where they were held in a safe.
In Dec. 1948, the bishop headed to Beirut, picked up the scrolls, when gone to New Jersey, where he hoped to sell them.
Echoes of history
Learning of the scrolls, I couldn’t help but think of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the Paper Brigade in Vilna. As the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jewish people, great writers risked their lives to save Jewish literature and culture, to hide it for the future. It’s a repeating theme in Jewish history — the military battle and the cultural battle, continuing at the same time.
Sadly, Professor Sukenik lost a son to battle in the war.
Then the professor himself died.
But the family’s passionate connection to the Isaiah scroll was not over. The professor’s other son, Yigael Yadin, who would become both a major scholar and a military leader, was in New York in the early 1950s and happened to read a small advertisement in The Wall Street Journal offering four scrolls. He guessed that the Isaiah scrolls his father wanted had been spirited off to the United States; he wired Israel to tell the new government to find $150,000. (Here, some Jewish philanthropy helped.)
It turns out that the bishop’s representative had tried to sell — to the Library of Congress, the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Duke University, and The University of Chicago — but all refused. He failed because Jordan claimed the scrolls belonged to it because of where they had been found, while Israel claimed they were theirs because of cultural heritage.
Yadin hired an agent to conceal that Israel was the actual buyer, and the four were purchased on July 1, 1954. On July 9, the Isaiah scroll was separated and spirited to Israel by plane, with other planes escorting it for safety.
The Israel Museum built the Shrine of the Book to house the scroll, and it was opened to the public in 1955. But in 1968, the real scroll was replaced with a very good facsimile for the scroll’s continued safety.
Now, in honor of the museum’s 60th anniversary, the real thing is on view. My advice — don’t miss it.
“A Voice from the Desert: The Great Isaiah Scroll” is on view at the Israel Museum through Oct. 3.
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When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of America’s modern women’s movement, died Wednesday at her New York City home. She was 92.
For more than half a century, Steinem pushed American women to imagine lives beyond the limits society had set for them. She co-founded Ms. magazine, helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turned phrases like “sexual harassment” from unnamed experiences into subjects of national debate.
Steinem was the daughter of a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She was raised without much religion and generally described herself as secular, but she was unequivocal about where she stood when Jews were targeted: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
Her mother taught her to value her Jewish roots. Steinem told the Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage; it was her non-Jewish mother who presented Judaism to her as something positive — “She also told me Jewish men made better husbands” — and taught her about her paternal grandmother.
That grandmother was a feminist pioneer in her own right. Pauline Steinem, who kept kosher, was an educator, suffragist, delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women and the first woman elected to Toledo’s school board — and during the Nazi’s rise in the mid-1930s, she worked to rescue members of her family from Europe.
A feminist Seder became her strongest connection to Jewish ritual. Steinem participated for decades in an annual women’s Seder, calling it the first spiritually centered experience of her feminist life. What drew her to Judaism, she said, wasn’t the law — it was “the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the Shechinah.
She recognized how antisemitism and misogyny fed each other. In her memoir, Steinem recalled a cabdriver telling her that feminism was a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family. Her response to such hatred was not to distance herself from Jews, but to identify with them more strongly.
That identification outlasted her. Gloria and her sister, Susanne, donated a catalog of jewelry seized from Nazi victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — in honor of their grandmother.
Steinem continued writing and advocating for equality into her 90s. Her final book, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to publish later this month.
The post When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most appeared first on The Forward.
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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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