New York — The Jewish community equates demographics with survival, so it’s only natural that we obsess over our numbers.
Communal officials have been eagerly awaiting the findings of the new National Jewish Population Survey (see page 8), to see whether closer to 5 or 7 million Jews live in this country and whether assimilation is up or down.
The 1990 study found an intermarriage rate of 52 percent, sparking intense reactions, from self-criticism, to new social and educational projects, to acknowledging the inevitability of the trend and seeking outreach to the intermarried. The fear is that if the Jewish population is shrinking, so will our religious, social and political strength.
Meanwhile, Israel — locked in a struggle with its neighbors for its right to exist as a Jewish state — is well aware that its Arab population, now about 20 percent, is increasing more rapidly than its Jewish.
It’s only a matter of time, then, for the Jews to be outnumbered. If present trends hold, in a few decades Israeli Arabs could do quietly, at the polls, what Arab countries failed to do for so many years in wars.
For more than 50 years, Israeli leaders have been preaching a message we don’t want to hear: aliyah. The best way to ensure the Jewish state, they say, is to fill it with Jews.
But we may be willfully ignoring a plausible solution to our ever-worrisome dwindling Jewish population.
Why do we and the rest of the Jewish world turn deaf ears to the thousands of people — maybe far more — in India, Peru, Africa, Japan, Spain, Burma and other exotic places who claim to be part of our people and yearn to settle in Israel?
Keeping the laws
Many say they are remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes, a notion historians deeply doubt. Some were converted to Christianity along the way.
But whatever their lineage, they identify now as Jews, pray in Hebrew and keep the laws of Moses, often despite persecution. Isn’t it time we took them seriously?
In recent years, their voices, and those of credible advocates, have grown louder.
Israel’s chief rabbinate, a key factor in legitimizing Ethiopian Jewry more than a decade ago, has recently investigated and ruled favorably on members of the Bnai Menashe of India as well as a small tribe from Peru, and helped them through the conversion process. Hundreds of these people now live in Israel.
Supporters are urging far greater attention to these and other “lost Jews,” insisting they represent a credible resolution of the dilemma over world Jewry’s declining demographics.
Moshe Cotel, a rabbinical student and active member of Kulanu (Hebrew for “all of us”), a group dedicated to finding and assisting lost and dispersed remnants of the Jewish people, said the prevalent Jewish communal response, or non-response, to these groups is part racial, part economic and part based on fear of diluting the purity of the Jewish people.
“It’s hogwash to lament the demise of the Jewish people when there may be millions of people who want ‘in’ and we refuse to deal with them,” he said.
“There is a tidal wave of conversion to Judaism coming in the next decades,” he said, “and we’ll either learn to surf or we’ll drown in it.” But with few exceptions, Cotel said, this issue isn’t on Jewish leaders’ radar.
Cotel was part of a beit din, or religious court, comprising four Conservative rabbis (three from the United States, one from Israel) who traveled to Uganda last February to conduct some 300 religious conversions for the Abuyadaya, a community of 600 native Ugandans who have been observing Mosaic laws for more than 80 years.
“These people are practicing Jews and we owe it to them to help them in every way we can,” said Cotel.
Demographic ‘reservoir’
Hillel Halkin, a well-known writer and translator who has lived in Israel for three decades, has written a fascinating new book about the Bnai Menashe, some 5,000 people in a corner of northeastern India who live as observant Jews and claim a link to the biblical tribe of Menashe.
The book, “Across The Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel,” describes how Halkin’s skepticism was reversed after visiting the community, which began in the 1970s and has been guided for the last two decades by Eliahu Avichail, an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem.
Over the years Avichail has helped some 600 of the Bnai Menashe settle in Israel, where they underwent formal conversion. Another 100 arrived in September and more of their brethren want to join them.
Michael Freund is a former New Yorker living in Jerusalem who has come to espouse the cause of the Bnai Menashe. A Modern Orthodox Jew who served as deputy director of communications and policy planning to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Freund has agreed to succeed Avichail as head of Amishav, the organization championing the Bnai Menashe.
He believes that groups like the Bnai Menashe and the descendants of the Marranos “constitute a large, untapped demographic and spiritual reservoir for Israel and the Jewish people.”
While Freund opposes proselytization, citing traditional Judaism’s hesitancy about it, he said that since groups like the Bnai Menashe have taken “the first step in our direction, it is time that we reach out and help them as they undergo the process of returning to the Jewish people.”
One of the legitimate concerns about taking in “lost Jews” is the possibility that millions of people with no ties to Judaism, living in poverty, could seek to emigrate for Israel’s greener pastures.
Advocates for the “lost Jews” recognize that criteria must be established to prevent Israel from becoming overrun by immigrants. However, they say that is a far cry from dismissing those living as Jews, especially when there are too few Jews in Israel — or, for that matter, anywhere.
Freund says there is a more disturbing factor in our reluctance to take seriously the claims of “lost Jews.” He believes many Jews have become “so cynical about their own faith that they find it difficult to fathom that anyone would want to voluntarily join the ‘tribe.’”
But after meeting with converts from around the world, he said he has been deeply impressed by their “sincerity, conviction and love of Torah and the Jewish people…. I think we need to cultivate this phenomenon rather than ignore it.”
The Israeli establishment has run hot and cold on these groups. At times the interior ministry has been reluctant to pursue claims or issue visas.
But this spring, 72 new immigrants arrived in Israel from Peru after undergoing conversion by a beit din appointed by Israel’s chief rabbinate. They joined some 150 of their brethren from villages near Lima who settled in Israel in the last decade.
Freund and other advocates would like to see the issue of “lost Jews” become a national mission for Israel and world Jewry, coordinated and carried out in a planned rather than haphazard way.
With aliyah from the former Soviet Union slipping and no serious increase expected from the West, with Palestinians insisting on their right of return and a growing concern about Jews leaving Israel, we owe it to ourselves, as well as to these highly motivated “lost Jews,” to take them seriously. That requires not only exploring their claims and practices but our own image of what it means to be a Jew.
At a time when demographers here debate the status of patrilineal Jews and half-Jews and someone born of a Jewish mother who practices Buddhism, do we have a place in our hearts, and peoplehood, for a Ugandan tribesman or Indian farmer who prays to the God of Moses and Israel every Shabbat, longing for Jerusalem?
The answer — and whether we take the question seriously — may tell us a great deal about the survival of the Jewish people in the 21st century.
Gary Rosenblatt is editor and publisher of The New York Jewish Week.
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