CHURACHANDAPUR, Manipur – This dusty, smoky and dark town is much smaller and quieter than Imphal, the capital of the North Eastern Indian state of Manipur, but it has a jewel in its crown – a colorful monthly magazine called Cholla, Hindi for ‘get a move on’ [identical to the Arab 'yalla']. The magazine is bilingual – English and Hindi, and features stories and informative articles about life in Manipur and the region, news about the Kuki tribal people, international news, sports, entertainment and a personals section called Heart To Heart [with a logo of cupid's arrow through a heart]. It also features stories and news about the Bnei Menashe communities in Manipur, especially when someone is given permission to make aliyah. And it’s all run single-handedly by a Bnei Menashe Judaism-practicing Kuki called Bennny Khongsai. Continue reading →

IMPHAL, Manipur – We leave Churachandupur and head towards the airport for our flight to Assam province, due west. We’re not going to spend any real time in Assam or meet any of the Bnei Menashe there, but the road we were going to take to Mizoram for the next leg of our journey has been closed by the authorities, so we have to fly to Assam and then drive to Mizoram through a mountain range. The whole North East region is seeing sporadic violence between assorted militants and the security forces, who are on high alert everywhere. Leave it to Israelis to trek their way through a war zone. Last night two drivers from the Manipur irrigation and flood control department were found dead on the outskirts of Imphal. Continue reading →

CHURACHANDAPUR, Manipur – Friday morning we get up at 05:30! We leave Imphal with a tfilat haderech [prayer for the traveler] and a parasha about the life of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Amen. Yishar Koach. I didn’t know that the first piece of real-estate the Jews bought in Canaan was a piece of land that Abraham bought so that he could bury Sarah. The first piece of land in Eretz Israel was a grave.

As we head out of Imphal we drive past an army base. On the base’s entrance is a large sign: Prove your identity. I love the English here. The group is getting more disciplined with every passing day [I'm grudgingly becoming more disciplined too]. We are told to get up at 05:30, so we’re up at 05:30. Shacharit [morning prayer] is at 06:00 [I do yoga]. By 6:30 the bags need to be packed and outside our hotel room doors. Breakfast is between 6:30 and 7:30, and in this time we also need to make sandwiches for lunch. For breakfast we have omelettes, salad, tuna, cereal and banana shake. This group is so disciplined that we’re even shaving time off – everyone is ready to go before 07:30, and Mosh is happy. Continue reading →

LOKTAK LAKE, Manipur – We head to a huge lake called Loktak [Lok is lake in Indian so it's actually Lake Tak]. The lake is huge, some 25 km long and 20 km wide. During WW2 Japanese forces swarmed into Manipur from this direction.

This expedition is not all about meeting with Bnei Menashe, it is also going to interesting places that most regular tourists have never been to are not on the tourist map. This is something that Mosh from Shai Bar Ilan tours has done for a living for decades, pioneering routes for Israeli travelers to places that were closed to them. Mosh has gone into every corner of this world to seek out adventures and learning opportunities for Israeli tourists. The Geographical Company he worked for first took Israelis to Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain fell, and he’s also taken Israelis to Yemen, Tunisia and Morocco, as well as further afield in places like China. I think he’s one of those people you meet in life that you think to yourself, ‘wow, this person has an interesting job’. Continue reading →

SAJAL, MANIPUR – Another Shavei Israel Beit Shalom visit, this time in Sajal, Sadar Hills, Manipur. As usual, dozens of people wait outside to greet us, and as we disembark our group starts to sing: Hevenu Shalom Aleichem [We bring peace upon you]. My group is so cute: everything we give the Bnei Menashe “is from Israel”: balloons “from Israel,” chocolates “from Israel,” embroidery with passages from the Tanach “from Israel.” Continue reading →

IMPHAL, Manipur – This city’s entrance looks like a shanty town, and the rest of the city is not much better. There are heaps of garbage on most street corners which can’t be burned fast enough before they’re refilled. We are the only tourists here, and the locals make us aware of that; I don’t think many of them have seen people like us around here before. There are toilets outside, horses and dogs eating from trash, people picking through the garbage, and a thick, stifling, smelly air in this, the state’s capital. The Bnei Menashe here tell us that they are fed up with life here and want to immigrate to Israel as soon as possible. I don’t blame them. The Indian government clearly does not view this place as a priority region for development.

Continue reading →

From Nagaland we head south into the state of Manipur, bordered on the east by Burma. We enter Manipur at the Mao border crossing. It takes about 3 hours to drive 25km on these roads, which are incredibly bumpy and windy. We’re heading towards Imphal, the capital of Manipur state. Manipur is crossed by a large mountain range and we’re heading down it towards the lowlands.

PHOTO: Israel Weiss Photography weisssi@bezeqint.net

We drive past forests and rice terraces [our guide says that if we are not used to eating a lot of rice, we'll get some stomach problems, but that some chocolate helps]. Manipur was described by India’s first prime minister as the Jewel in India’s crown because of its beauty. It is filled with mountains, forests and rivers. Just in case I haven’t mentioned it before, there are 21 people on this expedition – eight men with their wives, three men who left their wives at home, a single woman and me. Continue reading →

Until 100 years ago the Bnei Menashe, like other peoples in the North East of India were animists, i.e. they believed that nature and animals had spiritual qualities. They practiced their own ancient religions and had their own time-honored customs, including ritual sacrifice. At the end of the 19th Century Christian missionaries got to them, and with these missionaries came evangelical fervor. According to the story here, in the 1950′s two men from the Kuki clan each had separate visions telling them that they were the lost Israelite tribe of Menashe and must return home to Israel. When they awoke from their sleep, they started spreading their vision amongst the Kuki, and slowly people started calling themselves Bnei Menashe and the practice of Judaism started competing with Christianity.

Photo: Israel Weiss

Speaking to the Bnei Menashe here in Kangpopki, I am told something that I didn’t fully grasp before, but which is quite startling: ALL of the Kuki in North East India, as well as elements of the tribe in neighboring Burma, totaling some 3 million people, are considered, by the two men who had the visions and the current leadership, to be Bnei Menashe. Continue reading →

This is going to be a very personal blog post.

KOHIMA, Nagaland – As the ceremony at Ben Hur’s home was winding down and the last songs were sung, Eyal the guide suggested we should all sing Hatikva. The group didn’t need much convincing and we all turned to the right, to what Ben Hur said was the direction of Jerusalem. I love my anthem, and it almost never fails to move me. This time, and in this setting, it was even more so. Hatikva brings tears to my eyes and strength to my heart, and I let myself feel the hope in the song, the happiness of singing it knowing how hard it is to live as an Israeli, what an absolute miracle we are every day; and I let my eyes well up with tears. Continue reading →

So much has happened today, both for me personally and for the group. A lot of new information has come my way, and with it many more questions. For instance, experts back home in Israel say there are about 7,200 Bnei Menashe in Nagaland and that the vast majority of them want to convert to Judaism and immigrate to Israel.

Well, today I heard from a retired Nagaland government spokesperson, and who is now the advisor to the Kuki Cultural Committee, who said that there are some 30,000 people belonging to the Kuki tribe in this area who are Bnei Menashe, and that they all want to come. So who’s right, how many are there? Well, if the latter is true, then the whole story just got infinitely bigger and more complicated. One of the criticisms against those converting the Bnei Menashe and lobbying for their aliya is that these people are doing it because they want to settle the Bnei Menashe in Judea and Samaria and thus minimize somewhat the Arab demographic gap in the West Bank, i.e. using the Bnei Menashe as a tool for the political purpose of bringing more Jews to the West Bank. Continue reading →

KOHIMA – We board “the best bus we could find” in Dimapur and take the long winding road up the mountain range towards the Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. This is a fascinating and beautiful part of North East India. It is here that British and Indian forces stopped the advancing Japanese army in 1944. We are heading up into the Naga Hills on the one side and the Chin Mountain Range on the other. The Chin is an extension of the Himalayas. The group’s spirits are up – finally we are out of all these airports and in the open country. Quite often the group will spontaneously break into song. Although I don’t know all the words, I recognize the religious songs, and it’s amazing to hear these Hebrew verses in the rain forest of Nagaland, North East India. Also, one of the participants says it’s good to be praying and singing when driving along a mad, winding, back-road where trucks, buses, cars and cabs all mingle because there are no lanes, and there is no order [it feels like a video game: every time our bus passes a truck I feel like we've won ten points and get to play on, until game over]. Continue reading →

DIMAPUR – Our group has now flown from Israel to Amman, from Amman to Delhi, from Delhi to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to Dimapur, the commercial capital of Nagaland in the North East.

I have to say that for a group of twenty middle aged and older religious folks I’m amazed at the energy and spirit of this group. Everyone is helping everyone else. Friendships have been formed and the atmosphere is really upbeat, despite the long haul out here and the delays. Continue reading →

Delhi airport has been overrun by paramilitary forces. Oh wait, no, these soldiers actually work here. I’m used to seeing civilians working at airports worldwide, with police and army units providing security. Well, at Indian airports, the soldiers do everything. There are soldiers printing out your boarding pass, other soldiers checking your boarding pass, still others ushering you from place to place, frisking you, soldiers at the scan machine, metal detector, and there was even an officer who offered to write down my name and address on the little tag you tie to your hand luggage. What beautiful handwriting for a colonel. I can only assume that the Indian government needs to find jobs for all these people, and what better outfit to run a logistical nightmare like a busy international airport than an army? This is also the only place in the world where I have seen military men wearing gold rings with pink stones on them.

Quite the same story at Calcutta’s airport, except that here, in addition to all the military and paramilitary [who can tell the difference], there are so many other uniformed employees mulling about that I get the impression they are just creating work for each other. There are about a dozen workers with walkie-talkies criss-crossing the floor of the departures hall at Calcutta airport. And at several moments, like fish in an aquarium swimming on their own and then colliding, violently, briefly, they remove their walkie-talkies from their mouths and argue with each other over who is actually moving these people and to where, until they are joined by a third walker-talker who has come to sort it all out. They are creating confusion for themselves to solve. “Job well done, let’s go for lunch,” I imagine them saying after a particularly busy day solving all this chaos.

Due to a maddening airport worker’s strike, we were delayed at Ben Gurion Airport for three hours before our flight to Amman, Jordan.

Some observations about Jordan:

For me it was the first time flying out of Amman, and seeing where else Royal Jordanian can take you in the Middle East was a tantalizing, yet ultimately disappointing thought. Like many Israelis I know, the thought of traveling to places like Oman, Muscat, Damascus and so many other places is an ingrained hope; maybe one day. Eyal says there is a sociology professor at Haifa University who came up with the theory that the reason so many young Israelis travel to India and Thailand after the army is that they’re in essence looking for the concept called ‘the East’ – with it’s exotic and mystical locations. And because ‘the East’ is so close to us – in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad – but yet, we cannot experience it in these places, we are forced to search for it further a field. Don’t know what I think of that theory yet.

It was also my first time flying an Arab airline, and hearing the captain speak Arabic first was interesting. While walking through the airport with our guide Eyal, I noticed how the Jordanian airport security warmed to him when he spoke Arabic to them. I think it’s really important that Israelis learn to speak Arabic. We live in an Arabic neighborhood for God’s, and Allah’s sakes, we should be able to talk to our neighbors one day when they agree to talk to us. Quite funny how Jordanian airport security men talked back to Eyal in Arabic even though he was wearing a kippa on his head.

What was quite funny was how the security guard at the metal detector frisked every man’s kippa and even tried to look under a few when the men on my expedition walked the detector.

The flight from Ben Gurion Airport in Lod to Queen Alia International Airport in Amman takes roughly 25 minutes. It takes longer to get on the plane, find your seat, place your carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment, watch the little security video and get an explanation from the air stewards about the emergency exits – than it does to fly there. Flying there basically entails taking off, gaining altitude, and then in an arc, beginning a descent. Up, over and down – and you’re there. And from Amman you can fly anywhere in the Middle East.

Picture by Israel Weiss

The Jordan Times was reporting the following stories:

The International Labor Organization reports that unemployment in the Arab World in 2006 stood at 11.8%, twice as much as in the rest of the world. If that’s true, and those numbers were not likely to have changed much in a year, then not only the Arab world has a big problem, because as we have seen, unemployment, discontent and radicalism in the Middle East is not confined to that region alone.

There is a campaign, launched in Jordan but spreading out in the Middle East, which would codify national laws here to make it easier to prosecute and punish people convicted of insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammed. The campaign, called “Messenger of Allah Unites Us” aims to codify conventions [some lax, some strong] that would criminalize insults such as, according to many Muslims, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed’s turban as a bomb, which caused an international uproar two years ago. Once the convention is finalized it will be presented to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, and then the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

On a tangential note, Petra is hosting the Fourth International Moderation in Islam conference.

There is violence in Jordan’s schools, so much so that the Education Ministry has established a hotline for citizens to report acts of violence.

There are 190 gas stations in Amman, the capital. Last week a fuel shortage was created when gas station owners refused to sell gas to people because the price had been dropping steadily for several weeks, and the owners were incurring losses. The gas station owners are putting pressure on the government to regulate changes in fuel prices and to steady it out, stagger it, and perhaps only have one gas price reduction per month, instead of just lowering the price at the pump whenever the price of oil on the markets drops. I’d love to see them try that in Israel – they would get crucified.