[caption id="attachment_9620" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Captain Basto"][/caption] Sixty-one years after his death in 1961, Captain Arthur Carlos de Barros Basto, the founder of the Jewish community in Porto and a passionate advocate for the Bnei Anousim of Portugal, has been posthumously reinstated into the Portuguese army. He...
[caption id="attachment_9616" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Meeting with the Polish Ambassador during Shavei Israel's 2012 seminar"][/caption] When Karolina Wantuch was 7 years old, she discovered a scroll with strange-looking letters up in her grandmother’s bedroom in their apartment in Krakow, Poland. Her mother explained to the curious child...
[caption id="attachment_9598" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The Polish group at the Western Wall"][/caption] JERUSALEM (JTA) -- After Jerzy heard about frequent vandalism at an old Jewish cemetery in his home city of Gdansk, Poland, he decided to visit the graveyard. It had fallen into such disrepair that “people would...
Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund spoke on Kol Israel's English-language radio news program about our seminar for young Polish Jews taking place this week in Israel. Click below to listen to the interview. Kol Israel in English on Poland seminar in Israel - August 22 2012...
Our seminar for the Bnei Menashe in India is continuing. Here is a new batch of pictures of Rabbi Yehuda Gin’s classes in Shavei Israel’s Beith Shalom community hall, located in the central Bnei Menashe community of Churachandpur, Manipur. [nggallery id=161] ...
Yehudit Jaksa has just finished her final exam to become a dental hygienist as she arrives for our interview. She is nevertheless poised and ready to chat and, as quickly becomes apparent, is at once both fiercely independent and quietly self-effacing. A profile of a...
[caption id="attachment_9560" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Captain Basto"][/caption] It took 75 years, but finally, at the end of July 2012, an act of grave injustice and anti-Semitism has been corrected. More than 50 years after his death in 1961, the founder of the Jewish community in Porto, Artur Carlos de...
[caption id="attachment_9541" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Lighting candles for Rosh Chodesh"][/caption] On the first day of each month, the Bnei Menashe women in northeastern India celebrate “Rosh Chodesh” (the start of the Hebrew month) by coming together to sing, pray and eat. The programs rotate among the 37...
