Old and New Links Between Israel and India
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
November 28, 2008
Midway through Wednesday afternoon, Ani Anighotri was doing his multitasking thing, cruising the Internet while chatting with a friend about a recent business trip to his homeland, India, from his home in Georgia. Then an e-mail message popped onto his screen and ended the jocular conversation. The subject line said, “Attack in Mumbai.”
The accompanying message told Mr. Anighotri of reports of random shooting in Mumbai. He went to a Web site and found an account of a second, similar assault. Then, turning on an Indian cable television station, Mr. Anighotri saw a fire set by terrorists blazing in the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, the same hotel in which he had stayed just three weeks earlier.
By Thursday morning, Mr. Anighotri had discovered another subtler point of connection. It was now clear that besides hotels, a café, a train station and two hospitals, the terrorists had invaded a Jewish outreach center, operated by the Chabad Lubavitch movement. Mr. Anighotri absorbed the news as the co-chairman of an 80-member group in the Atlanta area called the Indo-Jewish Coalition.
In its modest way, the coalition attests to the deepening bonds between Jews and Indians, whether in Israel, India or the United States; and this week’s events demonstrate perhaps the most visceral and grisly element of connection, though far from the only one.
“I am seeing that there is some natural affinity being developed between India and Israel and Jewish people,” said Mr. Anighotri, 48, who owns technology and consulting companies. “Because both these countries and people have been affected by this kind of terror — killing of civilians, something despicable that is happening year after year.”
Cedric Suzman, who until recently was co-chairman of the Atlanta group, echoed the sentiment. “In times like this, you suddenly realize that you’ve built bridges,” Mr. Suzman said in a telephone interview. “So instead of recrimination and accusation, you have a huge coming together of sympathy and understanding.”
The affinity of which both men spoke extends well beyond the shared experience of being the target of Islamist terrorism, or the resulting military and security ties between India and Israel. The softer tissue of human experience — culture, religion, values — also binds Indians and Jews.
“The best way to explain it is that I was telling my daughter, ‘If you have to marry outside India, marry a Jew,’ ” said Shoba Narayan, a writer in Bangalore who has visited Israel with her husband, an investment banker. “The cultures are so similar — the commitment to education, the ability to delay gratification, hard work, the guilt, the fatalism. And I think this is because we are both old cultures.”
Indeed, a Jewish community known as the Bene Israel has lived in India for more than 2,400 years, fully tolerated by the surrounding Hindu and Sikh populations. Yet in its first decades after independence, India was also a frequent critic of Zionism and at least a partial ally of the Soviet Union.
With the end of the cold war, and of a reliable flow of Russian weapons and spare parts, India turned to Israel as a supplier of arms and military expertise, said Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Israel now sells more than $1 billion in arms annually to India, including the Falcon early-warning system and sea-to-air missiles.
In a less obvious way, too, soldiers have forged ties. About 30,000 Israelis visit India each year, many of them on lengthy vacations after having finished their army service. They, in turn, have brought back to Israel the food, fabric, music and mysticism of India, particularly its Hindus.
The popular Israeli band Sheva has incorporated Indian instruments and chordal structures into its music. Yoga classes proliferate in Israel. Hindu food, with its emphasis on vegetarian dishes, has been easily adapted for kosher cuisine. An annual festival called Boombamela celebrates all things Indian, if with a somewhat naïve, New Age tilt.
For American Jews of the baby boom generation, the fascination with India began with spiritual searches during the 1960s. Over time, Buddhist meditation became a staple of the Jewish renewal movement and a book by Rodger Kamenetz, “The Jew in the Lotus,” a revered text. By the past decade, enough Jews were practicing some Buddhism to give birth to a new proper noun: Jew-Bu.
Even more recently, the term “Hinjew” has emerged. It does not reflect a religious amalgamation, which would be nearly impossible given Hindu polytheism, as much as it does the cultural common ground of American Jews and Indian Americans who have grown up and gone to school together.
In suburbs like Great Neck on Long Island or West Windsor, N.J., the same top-flight public schools that attracted Jews moving out of cities in the 1950s have more recently drawn Indian immigrants.
“Some of us in the Indian-American community feel our Jewish-American friends set a very good example of being good citizens,” Mr. Anighotri said. “Their activism, their social values, their family values, the educational values. Many of them are professionals and entrepreneurs, and that’s what we see in the Indian community as well.”
The comfort level between Jews and Indians has allowed for a specific strain of self-mockery, too, which might be some psychic balm in this time of atrocity. As an imitation news story on the Web site SatireWire put it:
“Hinjew leaders today conceded the merger of Hinduism and Judaism has not worked out as planned, as instead of forming a super-religion to fight off the common Islamic enemy, they have instead created a race of 900 million people who, no matter how many times they are reincarnated, can never please their mothers.”
Source: NYT
December 3, 2008 4:43 pm | 
