Shavei Israel's new emissary to Krakow, Rabbi Avi Baumol, has deep Polish roots. His great-grandfather, a scion of a rabbinic family which goes back tens of generations throughout Poland, was ordained with rabbinical semicha at the tender age of just 13. His grandfather received semicha...
Award-winning professional photographer Gali Tibbon, who has focused her career on documenting groups from far flung communities around the world, accompanied Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund and 38 Bnei Menashe on their journey from India to Israel on December 26, 2013. We present a selection...
It was after 3:00 a.m. on Thursday of last week, in the small airport outside Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, and the group of 38 travelers was exhausted. Young and old, these members of the Bnei Menashe community, which traces its descent to a lost tribe of...
Elyashiv Khupchawng recalls only too well the day he chose to publicly embrace his Bnei Menashe Jewish heritage. He was a teenager and “all of my friends simply walked away from me,” he says, matter-of-factly, but with the pain clearly still burning just slightly under...
The first group of Bnei Menashe from Mizoram have arrived! 38 Bnei Menashe men, women and children flew from Mizoram to New Delhi, India and then on to Israel on Thursday, December 26, 2013. Here is our exclusive photo gallery of pictures from each stop...
A total of 38 Indian citizens from the Bnei Menashe community made aliyah Thursday, the first cohort to arrive since the Knesset approved another wave of immigration for the group. The Jerusalem Post was at Ben-Gurion Airport and filed this report....
The Bnei Menashe are coming home – and soon. The first flight of this latest group of Bnei Menashe lands this Thursday. Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund flew to India this week to accompany the 40 Bnei Menashe men, women and children, all from the...
For nearly 20 years, Harel Kingbol has dreamt of making aliyah to Israel so that his children “never face the same trouble and suffering as I did growing up,” he says. For Kingbol, the suffering started when he was 9-years-old: that’s when he had his...
As the Lufthansa jet landed in Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta), India, the ground crew unloading some four tons of boxes had no idea of the value of their contents; they seemed like the kind of ordinary shipment unpacked every day in this busy Indian...
