Many of the older members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel have a strong desire to enhance their knowledge of Jewish tradition. Although theirs was the founding generation of the Judaism movement in India, they never had the opportunity there to study Jewish texts other than the Bible. Today, as retirees and pensioners, they have the available time but little or no knowledge of Hebrew, in which these texts are written.

 

Degel Menashe is therefore supporting a study group of elderly B’nei Menashe from Mizoram who live in the northern city of Afula. The group meets twice a week with a knowledgeable teacher from its community who instructs it in passages from basic texts of Judaism translated into Mizo. In the future, we hope to expand this pilot project to other localities, to extend it to the Kuki language spoken by B’nei Menashe from Manipur, and to include in it women as well as men.