252 Indian Jews from NE India’s Bnei Menashe community immigrate to Israel

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TEL AVIV

A total of 252 Jews, including infants and elderly, from India’s north-eastern Bnei Menashe community on December 15 landed at the Ben-Gurion airport.

They include 50 families, 24 singles, four infants under the age of two, and 19 people over the age of 62. The Israeli government approved their immigration in October.

“Some 90 per cent of them have completed their aliyah (immigration) permit process and soon all of them will be taken to a Shavei Israel absorption centre in the Nordiya moshav close to Netanya,” a Bnei Menashe community member present at the airport told agencies.

Shavei Israel is a non-profit organisation which has led the movement to bring back Jews looking to immigrate to Israel.

“They will complete their quarantine period at the moshav (an agricultural commune) and spend some three months there going through the formal absorption process, including learning Hebrew. Following that they are likely to be settled in the north in the Nazareth Illit area,”, he said.

Some 2,437 people from the Bnei Menashe community have so far immigrated to Israel from the north-eastern states of Manipur and Mizoram since 2003, the ministry of Immigration and Absorption said.

There have been intense debates around the Jewishness of Bnei Menashe in the past, but in 2005, the then Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, recognised them as descendants of Israel paving the way for their immigration to Israel.