Earlier this year, a momentous event took place in the history of Iberian Jewry. For the first time since the Spanish Inquisition, a descendant of forcibly converted Jews returned to Spain to conduct outreach work among his fellow B’nai Anousim (Crypto-Jews*).
Rabbi Nissan Ben-Avraham, who grew up on the island of Palma de Majorca, was dispatched to the area by Shavei Israel, the organization that I chair, with the express aim of strengthening the bonds between the Jewish people and our brethren the B’nai Anousim. Since his arrival in the region, Rabbi Ben-Avraham has been paying regular visits to Barcelona, Alicante, Seville and Palma, where he has organized a variety of Jewish educational, social and cultural activities, which have drawn many B’nai Anousim closer to their roots.
It might sound fanciful, or even far-fetched, but it is a fact that more than five hundred years after Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sought to erase all vestiges of Jewish life on the Iberian Peninsula, a growing number of their victims’ descendants are now emerging from the shadows, seeking to reclaim their eritage. The B’nai Anousim, Hebrew for those who were coerced, do not merely inhabit the pages of dusty old history books. They are a living, breathing phenom-enon…men and women from all economic, social and cultural walks of life who are eager to forge anew their links with the Jewish people. And I believe we owe it to them as well as to their ancestors to extend a hand and to welcome them home.
Was it tragedy or fate that brought Dr. Aaron Abraham and his family from India to Israel? Abraham was the family doctor for Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivki, the young couple who ran the Chabad House in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). On November 26, 2008, Islamic terrorists attacked several sites in the city, including Chabad. When Abraham learned that they had murdered five people inside the Jewish center, including the Holtzbergs, he was devastated.
Abraham's initial encounter with the Holtzbergs took place several years ago while he was working in a Mumbai hospital. Rabbi Holtzberg came in on a Friday with one of his boys who needed to be admitted. Abraham could see the rabbi was worried about leaving his son over Shabbat, “so I offered to stay with the child,” Abraham recalls. From that point forward, the Holtzbergs turned to Abraham for all of their family medical needs.
Abraham then became a regular at the Holtzberg’s Shabbat table. For over five years, he walked up to an hour each way through the crowded Mumbai streets to celebrate the Sabbath with them each week. He participated in their Passover Seders, celebrated all the Jewish holidays, and learned Hebrew and Jewish law from the Holtzbergs. “We were very close,” Abraham says in fluent English. “We were never separated.” Indeed, after the attack, it was Abraham who had to take the couple to the morgue.
As a child growing up in the small Indian village of Churachandpur near the Burmese border, Tzvi Khaute didn't pay all that much attention to Jewish tradition.
Like most kids, Tzvi was more interested in playing soccer with his friends and doing well at school.
Nonetheless, even from a very young age, Tzvi always knew that by being Jewish he was different.
"My grandfather, who was the chief priest of the village, told us that our living in India was only a sojourn and temporary, and that we Bnei Menashe are separate from the rest of the country - politically, socially and ethnically," Tzvi recalls.
His family instilled within Tzvi a deep pride in their roots as Bnei Menashe (Hebrew for "the Children of Manasseh"), who trace their descent from one of the Ten Lost Tribes which were exiled from the Land of Israel some 27 centuries ago by the Assyrian empire.
As he grew up, Tzvi began to take more interest in his heritage. He took note of the rituals of the Bnei Menashe that he would later learn were in many ways parallel to modern Jewish observance. "Shabbat was always observed as a rest day from work," he says. "We never mixed milk and meat, and chicken and cattle were slaughtered by the community priest."(Spanish test) As a child growing up in the small Indian village of Churachandpur near the Burmese border, Tzvi Khaute didn't pay all that much attention to Jewish tradition.
Like most kids, Tzvi was more interested in playing soccer with his friends and doing well at school.
