Tears And Sackcloth

The Jews In India

80 per cent of India's 4,480 Jews live in Bombay

8 is the number of synagogues in the city; many of its landmarks were built by Jews, including Flora Fountain, Sassoon Docks, Sassoon Mills

60,000-odd Indian Jews have migrated to Israel in the last six decades

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For two millennia, they faced persecution everywhere. Everywhere but here in India, where for the first time in their painful history, the Jews found a place where they felt safe, a multicultural society in which they were at home.
But not any more. Not since that fateful Wednesday, November 26, when two terrorists entered Nariman House—a dilapidated, white, five-storey structure in south Bombay's Colaba area—that housed a Jewish spiritual centre known to the city's Jewish community as Chabad House.

By the time the hostage drama ended 48 hours later, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg who ran the centre, his wife Rivkah and four other Jews staying there were dead. The only ones to emerge alive were the rabbi's two-year-old son Moshe and his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who saved his life.

The fact that Jews were specially targeted by the terrorists—of the 22 foreigners killed during the siege of Bombay, eight were Jews—was a message not lost on India's 4,480 Jews, 80 per cent of whom live in Bombay.

The majority of Bombay's Jews are Bene Israelis who, according to legend, were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast 2,000 years ago, and went on to adopt typically Konkan livelihoods like oil-pressing, and even Maharashtrian family names. Many of them moved to Bombay as the city grew into a bustling trading centre, and six of the eight synagogues in the city were built by them. Cochin and Calcutta were other cities with significant Jewish communities. Indian Jews, from Bombay as well as other cities, have distinguished themselves in various professions—law, medicine, engineering, civil service, business, IT, the armed forces, cinema.

Bombay's Jewish community, like those in other Indian cities, has shrunk greatly since 1948—some 60,000 Indian Jews are believed to have emigrated to Israel over the past six decades—but they have left their unique imprint on the city and its signature landmarks, like Flora Fountain.

"This is the only country where we escaped persecution of any sort, but now there is a sense of fear among us," says author Esther David. "We've been brought up not to call attention to ourselves," she adds, "but now I'm cautious, scared and worried. Are we becoming more visible?"

Certainly there was nothing about Chabad House that screamed for attention. In '06, the Holtzbergs raised funds to buy it and set up the Mumbai headquarters for the Chabad Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews, a New York-based ultra-orthodox sect that runs Jewish spiritual centres all over the world.

When the Holtzbergs first arrived in Bombay in '03 with the purpose of serving the local Jewish community as well as visiting Jewish tourists and businesspeople, they found a well-established local Jewish community playing an active role in the city's vibrant culture. Apart from the Bene Israeli Jews, the Baghdadi Jews—Jewish merchants who fled deteriorating conditions in Iraq—had come to Bombay in the early 19th century, contributing much to how the city looks today. Commercial interests drew their leader David Sassoon to India in 1832. Sassoon, and his sons after him, built the David Sassoon Library, the Sassoon Docks, the Sassoon Mills, the Jacob Sassoon School and the grand Magen David and Knesset Eliahu synagogues, as well as Flora Fountain, named after David Sassoon's daughter-in-law. Although there are no Sassoons left in India, the very face of this city is a memorial to them.

230 Years Since Chassidic Aliyah Push

by Ezra HaLevi

(IsraelNN.com)

Sunday marks 230 years since the first Chassidic Aliyah (immigration to Israel), when three leading rabbis and their students arrived in Israel on Elul 5, 5537 (1777).The group of settlers was led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, Rabbi Avraham of Kalisk and Rabbi Yisrael of Polotsk. The men, though leaders of Chassidism in Russia, rallied 300 of their students to make the perilous journey to the Land of Israel.All were disciples of Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch. They were also joined by Chabad founder but he was instructed by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk to remain in Moholiev, on the Dneistre River, as they passed though the city, in order to remain behind to serve as the leader of the Chassidic community in White Russia and Lithuania. The group faced many perils on the way to the Holy Land. One of the boats they used sank, and with it 30 Jewish passengers died. They eventually reached the Land of Israel on the fifth of Elul.They established a Jewish community in Tzfat, but were harassed and attacked by the Ottoman Turks and Arabs, and were forced to resettle in Tiberias (T'veria).Rabbi Schneur Zalman retained close contact with the settlers and arranged for much-needed funds to be sent to them. They faced extreme difficulties as the students lacked trade skills and knowledge of the basics of state-building, but Rabbi Menachem Mendel refused to give up.In the spirit of the rabbis' penchant for using gematria(the numeration of the Hebrew letters of words for expounding upon their meaning and significance), Sunday's 230-year anniversary is equal to twice the word Aliyah - perhaps connecting their early Aliyah and that of today.
Reasons For the Move
Examining the reason for the rabbis’ move,Rabbi Eliezer Melamed writes:
“It is difficult to understand what exactly caused Reb Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk to make the move to the Holy Land. He was, at the time, at a peak: He was the most important of the Maggid’s students; he wielded great influence over his followers; they loved him and he loved them as well. So great was his authority that even the leading students of the Maggid, themselves fit to be great spiritual leaders, answered to him. Then, suddenly, he decided to take a group of followers and travel to the land of Israel with the intention of staying there for the rest of his life.“Some believe that the ongoing persecution at the hands of his opponents, the ‘Mitnagdim,’ caused him such hardship that he decided, in order to divorce himself from the quarreling, to move to the land of Israel. And, indeed, because he succeeded in disseminating Chassidism in areas bordering on Lithuania and even enjoyed a following inside Lithuania, Rabbi Menachem Mendel became the main target of the attacks of the Mitnagdim. Public denouncements and excommunications were issued specifically against him, and it was due to such persecution that he was forced to leave his home in Minsk. All the same, it is difficult to accept that as mighty a personage as he would be deterred by such things. What’s more, he was succeeding and his influence was forever expanding.“It would appear that, in truth, his thirst for closeness to God, and his great longing for the Holy Land - the land wherein God rests His Divine Presence - shook his inner being so strongly that no worldly enjoyment could compare to living in the land of Israel. In addition, by settling in the land of Israel, Reb Menachem Mendel wished to transcend all factional discrepancy, and map out a path for mending the whole Jewish people.”
Rabbi Menachem Mendel instructed his students to avoid arguments with the local Sephardic Jews already living in Tzfat. His son was arranged to marry the daughter of a local Sephardic family, a practice Rabbi Melamed says “was not at all accepted in those times” by Ashkenazic Jews.

Paved the Way
“As a result of his move to the land of Israel Reb Menachem Mendel forfeited his central position in the Chassidic arena,” Rabbi Melamed writes. “His younger students and friends became the leaders of the movement, and founders of dynasties, while his name was forgotten by many. Yet, it would appear that, thanks to Reb Menachem, the land of Israel became engraved in the consciousness of the Chassidic movement. Leading Chassidic sages, his students and his friends, were appointed with the task of collecting donations in order to support the Jewish settlers in Israel. As a result, they and their followers became attached in one way or another to the land of Israel.

European Jews searching for an assertive voice

...The Chabad-Lubavitch movement gained influence across the continent, in some places setting up or sponsoring activities and institutions that paralleled those run by established Jewish communities. In Budapest, a Chabad-backed congregation was officially registered by the government as the revived incarnation of a prewar stream of Hungarian Jewry.