New Delhi
20 November 2007
Kochi Jews living in Israel may have welcomed the introduction of
Malayalam as a subject by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a fitting tribute on the
community completing 50 years of aliyah (immigration of Jews into Israel) but an Israeli
minister's intervention on the Law of Return has sent tremours through his own country
and Jewish communities across the world. Its aftershocks can be felt halfway across the
world, in India's north-east, home to a minuscule population of the Bnei Menashe
(Hebrew for Children of Menasseh), which claims to be a lost tribe of Jews.
Israel's Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit has suggested that time has come to change the
Law of Return, which allows Jews and those with Jewish parents or grandparents to
settle in Israel and gain citizenship. (The Knesset, or Israel's Parliament, passed the
legislation on July 5, 1950.) Instead of granting 'automatic' citizenship, immigrants must
be made to wait for at least five years before their applications for citizenship can be
considered. He has said that this time should be used for learning Hebrew, Israeli laws,
and culture. Sheetrit's proposal has generated a heated debate in Israel and drawn
criticism from some immigrant communities but the minister is unruffled.
Sheetrit defends his intervention in an exclusive interview to this newspaper. Israel, he
says, has the right just as every other country to determine who is going to be citizen of
Israel and who is not. "So I'm not preventing anyone from coming here," he says on an
official visit to New Delhi. The Israeli minister was in town earlier this month to attend
the Second Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. What Sheetrit
wants to prevent is the practice of giving Israeli citizenship "for free." Israel should not
be granting citizenship automatically to anyone, I'm against that, he asserts, before
reeling out statistics to prove a point. Israel received 7,000 new immigrants from Russia
in the year 2006; more then 50 per cent of them were non-Jews. At the same time, as
many as 32,000 immigrants from Russia left Israel in 2006. "Israel must not be giving
citizenship to people who do not want it, to people who live off Israeli benefits," the
minister is categorical. He adds that Israel should not become "a shelter for criminals"
or "trouble makers."
There are about 1,200 Bnei Menashe living in Israel as Jews and Israelis. An estimated
7,000 Bnei Menashe are waiting to travel to Israel. The Bnei Menashe believe they are
descendants of Menasseh, one of biblical patriarch Joseph's two sons and a grandson
of Jacob, the man whose name was changed to Israel. The tribe lives in Mizoram and
Manipur in the north-east of India. The tribe claims to have been exiled from Israel more
than 2,700 years ago by the Assyrian empire. Tzvi Khaute, who came on a tourist visa in
2000 and is now a citizen, is among 450 Bnei Menashe living in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish
settlement near Hebron in the West Bank. His parents and siblings want to join him in
Israel but Sheetrit's intervention may delay their journey.
Members of the Mizoram Legislative Assembly's Subject Committee, who have returned
from a recent visit to Israel, have said that the Government of Mizoram must have closer
ties with Israel to develop Mizoram's economy and find gainful employment for the Mizo
youth. Mr Liansuama, who led the delegation to Israel, told reporters in Aizawl on
November 15 that the Subject Committee is drafting a report in which all departments
would be given specific tasks to forge close relationship with Israel. He added that
Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga has discussed the issue of closer relationship with
Tel Aviv with the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi.
Michael Freund, founder and chairman of Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based group that
assists lost Jews seeking to return to the Jewish people, is not convinced by Sheetrit's
assertions. He sees "a far more sinister objective" to the Israeli minister's claims.
Freund is an advocate for the Bnei Menashe and he thinks Sheetrit's campaign is
predominantly directed against it. He writes in the Jerusalem Post that the Israeli
Cabinet decision, which stipulates that the Interior Ministry will issue entry visas for
groups regarding conversion and the acquisition of citizenship only with government
approval and in accordance with special criteria, is "a recipe for bureaucratic inertia."
"[There] is little chance of getting such an item onto the busy agenda of the entire
government. Hence, by creating a virtually insurmountable obstacle to approval, he
(Sheetrit) hopes to bury the issue once and for all," Freund writes. Disputing Sheetrit's
insinuation that anyone seeking to come here from India must be doing so out of
economic necessity rather than sincere ideological and religious convictions, Freund
says that Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar has formally recognised the Bnei
Menashe as "descendants of Israel" in March 2005 and called for them to be restored to
Israel and the Jewish people.
Freund, who is a former deputy communications director in the administration of former
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, says that the Shavei Israel brought a group
of over 200 Bnei Menashe to Israel a few months ago. "When Sheetrit found out, he tried
to scuttle the group's arrival, even as they were in transit on their way to Israel.
Fortunately, he failed," Freund recalls. He believes that the lost tribes like the Bnei
Menashe are being discriminated against because they don't fit Sheetrit's preconceived
notion of what a Jew is supposed to look like. He asserts that in the Lebanon war, many
soldiers from the Bnei Menashe fought as part of the Israel Defence Forces.
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