Related Reading
- The Four Communities of Indian Jews: An Overview
- The Bene Israel of Maharashtra
- The Jews of Cochin
- The Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai and Kolkata
- Books on the Jews of India
The story of Indian Jewish emigration to Israel is one of the most remarkable population movements in modern Jewish history. Beginning in the 1940s and accelerating sharply after Israeli independence in 1948, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta and Bombay began a decades-long journey to the Jewish state that would transform their communities from thriving entities in India to immigrant populations in a new land. Today the majority of Indian Jews live in Israel, and understanding their immigration journey is essential to understanding who they are and how they have shaped their adopted homeland.
The Bene Israel Road to Israel
For the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the dream of Israel was ancient. Their prayers, like those of Jews everywhere, included references to Zion and Jerusalem, and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was experienced by the community as the fulfillment of a hope that had been part of their religious consciousness for millennia. The first large wave of Bene Israel immigration to Israel took place in the 1950s, when perhaps eight to ten thousand community members made aliyah in a relatively short period.
These early immigrants settled primarily in the agricultural cooperative communities called moshavim established specifically for new immigrants. Several moshavim in the Sharon Plain, including Sha’ar HaAmakim and Mesilot, became closely associated with the Bene Israel community and remain centers of Bene Israel identity in Israel today. Life on the moshav was physically demanding, requiring families accustomed to urban or semi-urban life in Bombay and Pune to learn agricultural skills from scratch, but it also provided the tight communal structure that the Bene Israel were accustomed to from their experience in India.
The Discrimination Controversy
The early years of Bene Israel immigration to Israel were not without difficulty. In the 1960s, the Israeli rabbinate issued a ruling that raised doubts about the full Jewish status of the Bene Israel, citing concerns about their practice of Judaism during their centuries of isolation from mainstream Jewish life. This ruling caused enormous pain and outrage within the Bene Israel community, and a campaign of protest, including a hunger strike and demonstrations outside the Israeli parliament, eventually led to the ruling being reversed.
The episode revealed the tensions that could arise when a diaspora community with its own distinctive form of Jewish practice encountered the gatekeepers of religious authority in Israel. For the Bene Israel, who had maintained their Jewish identity through two millennia without access to the mainstream Jewish world, being questioned about their Jewishness was both insulting and deeply painful. The community’s successful campaign to have the ruling overturned stands as a testament to their political organization and their determination to claim their rightful place within the Jewish people.
The Baghdadi Jewish Exodus
The Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta and Bombay had a somewhat different relationship to Israel. Many of the most prominent Baghdadi Jewish families, including the Sassoons and their associates, had been deeply invested in British India and had more ambiguous feelings about Zionism than the Bene Israel. Their commercial empires were built on the infrastructure of the British Empire, and some within the community feared that emigration to the new state would mean the loss of the wealth and status they had accumulated over generations.
Nevertheless, the combination of Indian independence, the decline of British commercial power, and the growing antisemitism in Arab countries from which many Baghdadi families still had connections pushed the community toward emigration. By the 1970s the once-thriving Baghdadi communities of Calcutta and Bombay had largely departed, leaving behind only a small remnant. Today the extraordinary synagogues they built, the schools and hospitals they founded, and the commercial records they left behind stand as monuments to a community that made an indelible contribution to India before moving on.
India Remembered
For Indian Jews living in Israel, India remains a powerful presence in memory and imagination. The foods they prepare for Shabbat and holidays, the prayers they sing in melodies learned from parents and grandparents in Mumbai and Kolkata, the stories they tell their children about life in India before aliyah: these are the threads that connect them to a homeland they carry within themselves even as they build new lives in Israel.
The story of Indian Jewish emigration to Israel is ultimately a story about how communities navigate the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, carrying with them the most precious things: memory, tradition, cuisine, and a sense of identity rooted in a specific place and time even as they adapt to an entirely different one.