It Is Not Yet Lost
The Bnei Menashe in India? The descendants of the ‘anusim’ in Spain? The Levi family who turned into Li in Kaifeng, China? The organization Shavei Israel will help you reconnect with your roots and maybe even come home
The descendants of the anusim (conversos) from Spain, Portugal and Latin America; the Bnei Menashe from India; the hidden Jews from Poland; the Subbotniks from Russia and even the Jewish communities of China, Peru and Italy – the organization maintains connections with all of them in an effort to maintain the Jewish spark. “We are a small people in a small country, we don’t have many friends in the world,” says Michael Freund, the organization’s founder who has turned his vision into a life’s mission. “But on the other hand, there are these communities who were part of us, and from which, if we encourage and strengthen the connection with them, we will ultimately only benefit.”
Freund’s journey to the lost communities began in 1996, when he immigrated to Israel from New York and found work in the public diplomacy office during the first Netanyahu administration. Freund was the deputy director, and mostly dealt with communications with foreign journalists. The new immigrant’s work was calm, until he read a letter that changed his world.
“I remember the envelope to this day, made of very wrinkled, orange paper,” Freund recalls. “It was from the Bnei Menashe community, from northeast India, addressed to the prime minister, and in it they asked to return to the land of their fathers in the Land of Israel. My first response was that this seemed completely absurd – how could a tribe in a remote area on the Burmese-Indian border be our brothers? But something in the letter touched my heart, and I answered them.
“I met with them. I saw that they are very serious in their desire to join the Jewish people and to live a life of Torah and mitzvot, and I said to myself – if somebody is crazy enough to want to join us, and they do it out of honesty and a real desire, why turn them away? I learned their traditions and customs, until I was convinced that these were descendants of the Lost Tribes, and that they are our brothers.”
Freund managed to get them 100 visas to come to Israel, and to convert and receive the status of new immigrants. Today, 17 years after the first stop on his journey, Freund has managed to meet dozens of communities that claim to belong to Judaism but lost their tradition over the years.
Today, Shavei Israel is the only Jewish organization that reaches the “lost Jews” at the ends of the earth, in order to help them return to Judaism. “We are not only a research team,” organization members clarify, “we address each case on a human level, offer help, support and understanding in the search for Jewish roots, in learning Jewish history and in looking into the possibility of returning to the nation of Israel.”Freund and his team are active in 10 countries with a wide variety of special communities. The Bnei Menashe in India are the biggest of them, and approximately 2,000 of them have already immigrated to Israel. In the coming year, an additional 7,000 are expected to immigrate.
“After 2,700 years of wandering, they are coming home. It is the closing of the circle of history,” Freund adds.
The Bnei Menashe are not the only ones. The descendants of the conversos from Spain, Portugal and South Italy are slowly returning to the Jewish past that their ancestors tried to hide from the terror of the Inquisition. In 1391, anti-Jewish pogroms swept Spain, thousands were killed, and thousands of others were forced to convert to Christianity. The persecutions did not stop for the next hundred years, and they reached their peak with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Sicily alone, which was then part of the Spanish kingdom, had over 50 communities with thousands of Jews. Freund: “In recent years, more and more conversos are ‘coming out of the closet’ and trying to return to their roots and their people.”
In the search for different Jews it became clear that, in different periods, more than a few native tribes, ethnic and folk groups on all of the continents, were identified as possible descendants of the 10 Tribes. But not every community that has Jewish customs is necessarily related to Judaism. “A few years ago, I was approached by a group of Native Americans from Tennessee who declared that they were descended from the 10 Tribes. I asked to see proof, what practices they had, how they knew. They sent me baseless evidence – it was more a wish. I respect the right of every person to self-identify as they want, but that does not mean that we have to agree with them,” Freund relates. “In certain cases, these are people who want a ticket west. We try to be very careful, and to only work with those cases in which we are convinced.”
The Native Americans were less successful, but in China, in recent years, a real Jewish community has been discovered. In the Eighth and Ninth Centuries, Jewish merchants went to China on the Silk Road from Persia or Iraq, and they settled in China with the king’s blessing. According to legend, he could not say the Jews’ names – and thus Levy, for example, became Li.
The community grew, building a synagogue in 1163, with the population reaching 4,000-5,000 during the Middle Ages, complete with local institutions. Until this day, in the city of Kaifeng, there are approximately 1,000 people who look Chinese but are identified as the descendants of the Jewish community, with family trees to prove it.
Shavei Israel says that Chinese communism has succeeded in the past 70 years to erase almost any memory of this tradition. “There are still young people in this community who remember a grandfather who would not work on the Sabbath or who kept certain customs,” Freund says.
In recent years, as China has opened to the world and to the Internet, the young generation has discovered new sources of information to which they previously had no access. Freund: “All that this generation knows is that they were the descendants of the Jewish People. Today, after having been exposed to information, they began to meet once a week in order to mark the Sabbath and to learn together. In recent years, we have brought two small groups of 12 to Israel, and all of them were converted.”
Do not get it wrong: The same world Jewish communities, or maybe-Jewish, are not just waiting “to be discovered” and come to Israel. Many of the conversos in Spain and Portugal, for instance, are not interested in religion, but they are conscious of their connection to the Jewish People. Shavei Israel still believes that strengthening the connection with these communities can be helpful for public diplomacy, the struggle against anti-Semitism, and tourism.
Freund promises not to abandon his life’s work: “We must close the circle of history. It may be the best revenge for all that has been done to us in the course of the Exile – to bring the Jewish People home.”
