JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ene israel
1897 the Bene Israel were invited to participate in the First
Zionist Congress. They refused with the explanation that the
community was waiting for “the Divine Hand” to bring them
back to Zion. The first Zionist association was founded in
Bombay in 1919. Visits of Zionist leaders such as Israel *Cohen
in 1921, the first Zionist emissary to India on behalf of the
World Zionist Organization, and subsequently of Immanuel
Olsvanger, and others, stimulated the community’s interest in
and support of the Jewish National Home.
In the second half of the 20th century the numbers of the
Bene Israel community have significantly decreased due to the
emigration of its members to Israel, Europe, and the Americas.
In the early years of the 21st century there were approximately
4,000 Bene Israel left in India, most of them living in
Maharashtra State. Other Bene Israel communities functioned
in Ahmedabad and New Delhi. Communities maintained a
number of synagogues and prayer halls, such as the Magen
Hassidim and Tiferet Israel synagogues in Mumbai (formerly
Bombay), and the Shaar Hashamaim synagogue in Thane. In
some places, there was a regular minyan; in others there were
services on Saturday mornings and not on Friday nights, or
on High Holidays only. The first synagogue in Bombay celebrated
its bicentenary in February 1996.
[Walter Joseph Fischel , Shirley Berry Isenberg , and Benjamin J.
Israel / Shalva Weil and Yulia Egorova (2nd ed.)]
In Israel
Between 1948 and 1952, approximately 2,300 Bene Israel emigrated
to Israel. As a result of sit-down strikes and hunger
strikes (see below), the Jewish Agency returned a total of 337
individuals, in several groups, between 1952 and 1954. Most
of them were brought back to Israel by the Jewish Agency after
several years. From the establishment of the state until
1969, over 12,000 Bene Israel emigrated to Israel. They were
mainly absorbed into the branches of industry in which they
were occupied in India, such as textiles and metals, as well as
into public services. They settled mainly in Beersheba, Dimonah,
Ashdod, and Eilat. Some settled in kibbutzim and
moshavim.
SOCIAL-RELIGIOUS CRISIS. The Bene Israel became the focus
of a controversy which arose in 1954 over the basic question of
the personal status of the Bene Israel regarding marriage with
other Jews. Although the Chief Rabbinate had laid down in essence
that “the sect of the Bene Israel in India is of the seed of
the House of Israel without any doubt,” several rabbis in Israel
refused to marry Bene Israel to other Jews. This standpoint
was based on halakhic decisions that had been given for Jews
from Baghdad who had settled in India, and who denounced
intermarriage with those whom they considered to belong to
an inferior caste. On first coming to India in the 18th century,
the Baghdadi Jews had prayed in the synagogues of the Bene
Israel and buried their dead in their cemeteries. However, as
they became more settled and acquired a higher status and
education, they began to keep apart and to question whether
the Bene Israel were legitimately Jewish. They considered that
association with the Bene Israel should be debarred for fear
of illegitimacy (mamzerut), since the latter were unfamiliar
with the Jewish laws of divorce (gittin), absolved themselves
from levirate marriage, and did not practice ḥaliẓah. Not one
of the rabbis outside India who returned a negative decision
concerning the Bene Israel in previous generations had ever
visited there or met representatives of the Bene Israel community
in order to obtain knowledge of their customs or information
directly from them. In Israel the controversy arose
between those who rejected the Bene Israel and those who
regarded them as Jews in every respect. In 1962, the Israel
Chief Rabbinate appointed a commission of four rabbis who
were charged with meeting representatives of the Bene Israel.
From the evidence of the leaders of the community who appeared
before the rabbis and from earlier sources, it became
clear that the Bene Israel had not been accustomed to divorce
women at all, in the same way that divorce was not practiced
among Indians other than Muslims until about a century ago.
It was only on the arrival in India of rabbis from Baghdad and
Yemen who were experts on the Jewish laws of divorce that
a number of Bene Israel had approached them. Concerning
widows the Bene Israel generally followed the custom of their
Indian neighbors and did not permit them to remarry, so that
the question of levirate marriage or ḥaliẓah did not arise. On
Oct. 18, 1962, the council of the Chief Rabbinate decided that
marriage with Bene Israel is permissible. However, the rabbi
registering the marriage was bound to investigate, as far back
as three generations at least, the maternal ancestry of every
applicant of the Bene Israel, man or woman, wishing to marry
outside the community, in order to establish to what extent
there were not intermixed in the family persons who were
non-Jews or proselytes. The rabbi concerned was also bound
to establish as far as possible that neither the parents of the
applicant nor his grandparents had remarried after a previous
divorce, and that they were not within the prohibited degrees
of kinship.
These directives aroused fierce resentment, culminating
in a stormy strike in Jerusalem in the summer of 1964, in
which several hundred of the Bene Israel from all over Israel
participated. Subsequently, the prime minister, Levi Eshkol,
issued the statement that “the government of Israel reiterates
that it regards the community of the Bene Israel from India as
Jews in every respect, without any restriction or distinction,
equal in their rights to all other Jews in every matter, including
matters of matrimony.”
To these troubling afflictions had been added the difficulties
of absorption of the Bene Israel into a society totally different
from that to which they had been accustomed in India, and
the difficulties of finding employment and of language. When
the first groups of Bene Israel encountered the difficulties of
absorption, they reacted by sit-down strikes of groups and individuals.
The presence of Bene Israel strikers at the doors of
the offices of the Jewish Agency became a regular feature of
the 1950s. In the Indian Parliament, a debate upon discrimination
against Indian Jews in Israel took place at the begin-
338 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3