Indian Jews In Israel: It Wasn’t The Promised Land

Seventy-three years ago, Israel made a promise to India’s Jews it didn’t keep. It invited them to ‘return to the promised land’ but went back on its word. Sometimes with heart-wrenching consequences.

The invitation was extended, not just to India’s Jews but to Jews all over the world, when a new state of Israel was created in 1948 after the Second World War. The Israeli government was promoting the new sovereign entity as the ‘promised land’, a reference made by the Hebrew scriptures to a homeland for Jews who had been exiled 2,000 years earlier.