Bharat Rakshak

About three years ago, when an Israeli ambassador to India was asked about the India-Israel defence relationship – he had shied away from giving a direct answer. The Congress-led UPA government was in power and New Delhi and Tel Aviv used to take great pains at avoiding the discussion on the most-obvious element of the relationship: defence.

So, this week, when Israeli Ambassador Daniel Carmon addressed the media and declared openly: “The defence cooperation for many years has been central pillars of the relationship. The changing world, changing parameters, changing needs are always something that is on the top of our agenda and always on our radar,” it came as a surprise. He also referred to the tests of the Barak 8 missile, both in India and Israel, as shining examples of joint ventures in the defence sphere.

That is the change in the relationship, as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj heads to Israel and Palestine on January 17 and 18.

The two sides have now come out into the open about their mutual strategic interests, and not just talk about the issues of agriculture, water and renewable energy.

Officials say the change in the relationship has come after the Narendra Modi government came to power.

The book is a complete study of the St. Thomas in India legend—its origin, history, and political ramifications—and is named after the main, 24-chapter essay by Ishwar Sharan. It also includes 28 independent, penetrating articles by senior journalists and scholars, and exposes in detail the anti-Hindu bias in India’s secular English-language media

An appendix to the book documents the pronounced Christian bias of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and popular on-line reference portal Wikipedia. Both encyclopedias carry fanciful, non-factual entries for St. Thomas the Apostle in India that they refuse to correct or change.

And last but not least, the book documents the destruction of the original Kapaleeshwara Shiva Temple by the Portuguese and its replacement by the San Thome Cathedral Basilica Church on the Mylapore beach in Chennai.
..

In Catholic universities in Europe, the myth of the apostle Thomas going to India is no longer taught as history, but in India it is still considered useful.
..
In reality, the missionaries were very disgruntled that the damned Hindus refused to give them martyrs (whose blood is welcomed as “the seed of the faith”), so they had to invent one.
..

JE Menon wrote:Haaretz published my letter. Kudos to them

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/this ... y/1.692829

RoyG wrote:Brilliant find Vishvak.

The skeleton of St. Thomas buried near Chennai is his skeleton when he was young. The one buried in Rome is his skeleton when he was a lot older.

KERALA, INDIA – Cochin, a large port city in southwest India, boasts not one but two streets named “Jew.” There is the trinket-lined Jew Street in the pretty, touristy Mattancherry neighborhood, known by some as “Jew Town,” which is home to India’s oldest functioning synagogue, Paradesi. And nine kilometers away in crowded downtown Ernakulam, amid the wholesalers hawking plastic flip flops and fried banana chips, is the second Jew Street. Hidden behind a pet fish and flower shop, is another, less visited synagogue whose ark is empty, its Torah scrolls gone — along with the congregation — to Israel.These are just two of the seven synagogues in the coastal state of Kerala. (Another one, the striking Parur synagogue, is located 25 kilometers away on another Jew Street.) Despite these symbols, one thing Kerala does not have much of anymore is Jews. Today, there are only 26 Jews left in Cochin — though some don’t speak to, or even recognize, the others.According to some accounts, the first Jews arrived in Kerala as merchants in the 11th century B.C.E. and sent ivory, monkeys and parrots from here back to King Solomon’s temple in the Kingdom of Israel. Other narratives suggest they showed up later, after the destruction of the second temple, settling in Cranganore, the ancient capital of Cochin.When the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited India around 1170, he reported that there were about 1000 Jews in the south, “all of them black.” He was referring to the Malabari Jews, so named after the Malabar coastline. Starting in the late 16th century, the Malabaris were joined by other, lighter skinned Jews arriving from Portugal, Spain and elsewhere in EuropeThe communities, by most accounts, never mixed well or at all, either because of racism, as the older community claims, or personal and cultural differences, as the others explain.
Welcomed by the local rulers and populations, the communities thrived until the late 1940s, when both Israel and India gained independence within months of each other, spurring a mass exodus in both communities from here to the Holy Land.At 93, Sarah Cohen is Cochin’s oldest Jew. Depending on what time of the day one catches her in her little home-turned-embroidery-and-trinket-store in Jew Town, she can sometimes seem a little confused.But when asked how many Jews remain in Cochin today, she doesn’t hesitate: “Six,” she says. This is because she doesn’t count the Malabari Jews downtown.She does count herself and the members of the Hallegua family three doors down — not enough for a minyan at the famous 1568 Paradesi Synagogue down the streetThe last Jews of Mala, approximately 300 of them, left for Israel in early 1955. Before doing so, documents show, they signed an official agreement with the local municipality entrusting it with the care and conservation of the cemetery as well as the synagogue. The synagogue, it was stipulated, should never be used as another house of worship or turned into a slaughterhouse.

JE Menon wrote:Some years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Sarah Cohen and sampling the traditional Jewish wine she made at home then. My late sister's best friend was the daughter of the Synagogue caretaker, from the Hallegua family.

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is currently producing a batch of 10 Heron TP armed drones for the Indian Air Force. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are capable of carrying 2,000 kgs of weapons payload and can also be armed with air-to-ground precision missiles.An Israeli military official confirmed the order by the IAF for 10 armed Heron UAVs at the DefenceExpo 2016 in Goa. The IAF has requested Israel to speed up the manufacturing and delivery of these state-of-the-art UAVs for quick induction into the armed forces. The Heron TP Armed Drones are scheduled to be delivered to India before the end of 2016. The Heron TP is the latest version developed by IAI from the Heron series.India finalized deal of 10 armed Heron TP for $400 million. It will add to already existing fleet of unarmed Herons of Indian air force.

After last year's abstention at UN Human Rights Council, India is back to voting against Israel. The Unesco resolution not only declares Temple Mount Islamic, it seeks to disinherit Jews of their faith

Jerusalem, more so the old city, is intrinsically associated with Jewish faith, society and culture. It is the fulcrum around which Judaism, the original Abrahamic faith, waxed, waned and waxed again. Given the centrality of Jerusalem in defining the Jewish identity, even of those Jews who declare themselves as ‘secular’, it is only natural that this Biblical city should be the capital of today’s Israel, a speck on the map of West Asia although it straddles the region like a giant, not the least because it is the only open, vibrant, plural democracy across the Maghreb and Mashreq.

Apart from the large number of lesser Biblical era antiquities that dot Jerusalem, indeed as they do all of Israel and the West Bank, what sets Jerusalem apart is Temple Mount, identified as Mount Moriah and Mount Zion. Jewish tradition and scripture inform us that this was the site of the First Temple, built by King Solomon in 957 BCE, and the Second Temple, built on the ruins of the first by Zerubbabel in 516 BCE.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, the Romans sacked the Second Temple. Much later, during Umayyad rule, two Islamic structures were superimposed on the Temple Mount: The Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the first seeking to establish the supremacy of Islam over non-Islamic land, the second appropriating the ‘rock’ where the first of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, was born.

Through the ages Jerusalem has been a contested city, especially eastern Jerusalem. For Jews and Christians, it is the holiest land; Muslims claim it as their second holiest site and hence demand eastern Jerusalem, if not all of it, as theirs. Claims and counter-claims apart, what is indisputable is that Temple Mount is first and foremost a Jewish religious, cultural and heritage site.

The twists and turns of history and ravages of time have left little of the two temples apart from its Herodian walls now surrounded on three sides by cobblestoned Byzantine lanes. Since Jews are prohibited from praying on the mount or at the ‘rock’ where the sanctum sanctorum of the two temples once stood, they pray at the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall. Around the world, Jews pray facing the direction of this wall that stands witness to the limitless suffering inflicted on Jews through the ages.

This bit of the past and the present of the Temple Mount’s history, severely abridged, is necessary to contextualise a resolution adopted by the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Programme and External Relations Commission at its 199th session last Friday, April 15. The resolution was moved by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, all members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which fashions itself as a sharia’h-compliant parallel United Nations.

In what is possibly the swiftest rewriting of history, the resolution strips the Temple Mount and other Biblical sites of their Jewish heritage and declares them as solely Islamic. The Jerusalem Post describes the hideous caricaturing of history by the Unesco worthies pithily: The resolution’s “language ignores

Jewish ties to its holy religious site of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem’s Old City... It refers to the area solely as Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall Plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza”.

Strangely, last year in October, Unesco had “backed away from reclassifying the Western Wall as solely a Muslim holy site, but is now using language that refers to it as such”, the Jerusalem Post reports, adding, “April’s resolution reaffirms that the Mughrabi Ascent, which starts at the Western Wall Plaza, is an integral and inseparable part of Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif”.

The Unesco resolution calls on Israel to “restore the status of the Temple Mount to what it was prior to September 2000 when the secondintifada broke out”. At that time, according to the resolution, “the Jordan Waqf had full control of Al Aqsa Mosque/ al-Haram al Sharif including maintenance and restoration work and regulating access”. At present, the site is “under the full authority, but not full control, of the Islamic Waqf”. Israel controls access to the site.

Commenting on the absurdity of the demand, a top Israeli official told me, “This resolution coincides with Jordan declaring it will not install cameras on Temple Mount to monitor the events there. A few months ago there was a demand to install cameras there, as a move to mediate between the sides and to bring calm to Temple Mount. The Palestinians demanded to monitor the ‘Israeli provocations’ and we happily agreed to install them all over the compound so that every violation or provocation will be documented (including in the mosques).”

Not surprisingly, the Palestinians and their patrons in the OIC realised that installing cameras would result in self-incriminating evidence of their provocations on Temple Mount. “There would be footage every time they prepare themselves for a conflict with the Israeli side, including collecting rocks inside Al Aqsa itself. The cameras would have exposed all of this and due to recent Palestinian pressure, the Jordanians have decided not to install them.”

The 58-member board of Unesco approved this odious resolution with 33 votes in favour, six against and 17 abstentions. Ghana and Turkmenistan chose to be absent. Among those who voted for the resolution were South Africa, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Spain, Russia, France, Guinea, India, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, North Korea, Senegal, Slovenia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Chad, Togo, Vietnam.

Those who voted against the resolution were the US, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania. Members who abstained from voting were Albania, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Greece, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda, Paraguay, South Korea, St. Kitts & Nevis, Serbia, Trinidad & Tobago, Ukraine.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the resolution with the contempt it deserves: “This is yet another absurd UN decision. Unesco ignores the unique historic connection of Judaism to the Temple Mount, where the two temples stood for a thousand years and to which every Jew in the world has prayed for thousands of years. The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and has again proven that there is no low to which it will not stop.”

Soon after the resolution was adopted, Irena Bokova, who heads Unesco and is likely to become the next UN Secretary-General, distanced herself from this travesty. That’s understandable, given the absurdly untenable claims made by the resolution, wishing away history with the sole purpose of delegitimising Israel and denuding Jerusalem of its Jewish past.

In a letter to the Director-General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Bokova has said that the decision to thus define the Temple Mount was a political decision and that she was opposed to it. “This decision was made by the economic council and the management council of UNESCO which are both management bodies, and was not made by me,” she wrote.

What should bother us in India is that our representative at Unesco has gone and voted against Israel and in support of negating Jewish history. Was the vote a Pavlovian response by a Foreign Office bureaucrat in Paris? Or was it a conscious decision of the BJP Government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore status quo ante after the notional departure of an abstention?

Either way, the vote reaffirms the view that much of foreign policy remains hostage to the perversities of the Congress decades when red-ragging Israel was considered the best means of appeasing Arabs abroad and Muslims at home. It was expected that Modi’s hawk eye would spot the clause in the 2014 draft BRICS declaration, no doubt worked in by bureaucrats faithful to the Congress, that controverted India’s traditional position on the Israel-Palestine issue. But those were very early days and the clause went unnoticed.

Next came the vote against Israel at the UNHRC on a resolution on Gaza in July 2015. That too could be explained away as bureaucrats defying the regime change that had happened two months ago, or getting the better of the new Government that was elected to smash the status quo and break with the past. A year later, when India abstained from voting against Israel at the UNHRC, it was seen as course-correction, signalling an end to pandering to Arabs in the hope of pleasing Muslims at home. Less than a year after that historic abstention, it’s back to the past with a bang.

Two points need to be made to drive home the fact about India’s unwholesome vote in Paris which may find favour with Israel-haters but has left Modi’s core support base wondering who’s calling the shots. Clarity is definitely needed on why India voted in support of exterminating the very idea of Jewish identity and faith. Intriguingly, the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson has not commented on the Unesco vote yet, although it is believed the Government is in receipt of a letter of trenchant protest from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

The first point refers to India voting for a resolution, moved by OIC member-states, that rewrites history in the most grotesque manner. Did the Government believe this would soften OIC on the Kashmir issue? If it did, it clearly believed wrong. For even as India was voting for the Unesco resolution in Paris, the OIC member-states were voting unanimously for a scathing anti-India resolution on Kashmir at the 13th Islamic Summit in Istanbul. As expected, the Government of India officially denounced it. This has created a peculiar situation: In New Delhi we deplore the OIC and debunk its resolution, in Paris we merrily waltz with the organisation that promotes Islamic supremacy by voting in support of their resolution.

Second, the April 15 Unesco resolution has set a frightening precedent with enormous mischief potential. In theory, this moment onward anything and everything is possible. Imagine a clutch of Islamic countries moving a resolution at Unesco declaring Ayodhya an Islamic heritage city, the Ram Mandir as Babri Masjid, and the Ram Chabutra-Sita ki Rasoi area as Babur Plaza. Let there be no doubt that such a resolution would secure sufficient votes, including those of China, Brazil, France and Spain, possibly also Russia and the US, to pass muster. Which way would India vote?

There is no percentage in believing this won’t happen. There is even lesser percentage in doing what we did in Paris.

(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)

Haresh wrote:Would you be able to assist with a little matter??

I have a friend who is Jewish and he is intersted in establishing relations with the Indian community, both Sikhs and Hindu's in the UK

Haresh

At Unesco, India votes to deface Jewish heritage

Sunday, 24 April 2016 | Kanchan Gupta | in Coffee Break

After last year's abstention at UN Human Rights Council, India is back to voting against Israel. The Unesco resolution not only declares Temple Mount Islamic, it seeks to disinherit Jews of their faith

Jerusalem, more so the old city, is intrinsically associated with Jewish faith, society and culture. It is the fulcrum around which Judaism, the original Abrahamic faith, waxed, waned and waxed again. Given the centrality of Jerusalem in defining the Jewish identity, even of those Jews who declare themselves as ‘secular’, it is only natural that this Biblical city should be the capital of today’s Israel, a speck on the map of West Asia although it straddles the region like a giant, not the least because it is the only open, vibrant, plural democracy across the Maghreb and Mashreq.

Apart from the large number of lesser Biblical era antiquities that dot Jerusalem, indeed as they do all of Israel and the West Bank, what sets Jerusalem apart is Temple Mount, identified as Mount Moriah and Mount Zion. Jewish tradition and scripture inform us that this was the site of the First Temple, built by King Solomon in 957 BCE, and the Second Temple, built on the ruins of the first by Zerubbabel in 516 BCE.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, the Romans sacked the Second Temple. Much later, during Umayyad rule, two Islamic structures were superimposed on the Temple Mount: The Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the first seeking to establish the supremacy of Islam over non-Islamic land, the second appropriating the ‘rock’ where the first of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, was born.

Through the ages Jerusalem has been a contested city, especially eastern Jerusalem. For Jews and Christians, it is the holiest land; Muslims claim it as their second holiest site and hence demand eastern Jerusalem, if not all of it, as theirs. Claims and counter-claims apart, what is indisputable is that Temple Mount is first and foremost a Jewish religious, cultural and heritage site.

The twists and turns of history and ravages of time have left little of the two temples apart from its Herodian walls now surrounded on three sides by cobblestoned Byzantine lanes. Since Jews are prohibited from praying on the mount or at the ‘rock’ where the sanctum sanctorum of the two temples once stood, they pray at the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall. Around the world, Jews pray facing the direction of this wall that stands witness to the limitless suffering inflicted on Jews through the ages.

This bit of the past and the present of the Temple Mount’s history, severely abridged, is necessary to contextualise a resolution adopted by the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Programme and External Relations Commission at its 199th session last Friday, April 15. The resolution was moved by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, all members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which fashions itself as a sharia’h-compliant parallel United Nations.

In what is possibly the swiftest rewriting of history, the resolution strips the Temple Mount and other Biblical sites of their Jewish heritage and declares them as solely Islamic. The Jerusalem Post describes the hideous caricaturing of history by the Unesco worthies pithily: The resolution’s “language ignores

Jewish ties to its holy religious site of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem’s Old City... It refers to the area solely as Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall Plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza”.

Strangely, last year in October, Unesco had “backed away from reclassifying the Western Wall as solely a Muslim holy site, but is now using language that refers to it as such”, the Jerusalem Post reports, adding, “April’s resolution reaffirms that the Mughrabi Ascent, which starts at the Western Wall Plaza, is an integral and inseparable part of Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif”.

The Unesco resolution calls on Israel to “restore the status of the Temple Mount to what it was prior to September 2000 when the secondintifada broke out”. At that time, according to the resolution, “the Jordan Waqf had full control of Al Aqsa Mosque/ al-Haram al Sharif including maintenance and restoration work and regulating access”. At present, the site is “under the full authority, but not full control, of the Islamic Waqf”. Israel controls access to the site.

Commenting on the absurdity of the demand, a top Israeli official told me, “This resolution coincides with Jordan declaring it will not install cameras on Temple Mount to monitor the events there. A few months ago there was a demand to install cameras there, as a move to mediate between the sides and to bring calm to Temple Mount. The Palestinians demanded to monitor the ‘Israeli provocations’ and we happily agreed to install them all over the compound so that every violation or provocation will be documented (including in the mosques).”

Not surprisingly, the Palestinians and their patrons in the OIC realised that installing cameras would result in self-incriminating evidence of their provocations on Temple Mount. “There would be footage every time they prepare themselves for a conflict with the Israeli side, including collecting rocks inside Al Aqsa itself. The cameras would have exposed all of this and due to recent Palestinian pressure, the Jordanians have decided not to install them.”

The 58-member board of Unesco approved this odious resolution with 33 votes in favour, six against and 17 abstentions. Ghana and Turkmenistan chose to be absent. Among those who voted for the resolution were South Africa, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Spain, Russia, France, Guinea, India, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, North Korea, Senegal, Slovenia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Chad, Togo, Vietnam.

Those who voted against the resolution were the US, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania. Members who abstained from voting were Albania, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Greece, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda, Paraguay, South Korea, St. Kitts & Nevis, Serbia, Trinidad & Tobago, Ukraine.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the resolution with the contempt it deserves: “This is yet another absurd UN decision. Unesco ignores the unique historic connection of Judaism to the Temple Mount, where the two temples stood for a thousand years and to which every Jew in the world has prayed for thousands of years. The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and has again proven that there is no low to which it will not stop.”

Soon after the resolution was adopted, Irena Bokova, who heads Unesco and is likely to become the next UN Secretary-General, distanced herself from this travesty. That’s understandable, given the absurdly untenable claims made by the resolution, wishing away history with the sole purpose of delegitimising Israel and denuding Jerusalem of its Jewish past.

In a letter to the Director-General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Bokova has said that the decision to thus define the Temple Mount was a political decision and that she was opposed to it. “This decision was made by the economic council and the management council of UNESCO which are both management bodies, and was not made by me,” she wrote.

What should bother us in India is that our representative at Unesco has gone and voted against Israel and in support of negating Jewish history. Was the vote a Pavlovian response by a Foreign Office bureaucrat in Paris? Or was it a conscious decision of the BJP Government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore status quo ante after the notional departure of an abstention?

Either way, the vote reaffirms the view that much of foreign policy remains hostage to the perversities of the Congress decades when red-ragging Israel was considered the best means of appeasing Arabs abroad and Muslims at home. It was expected that Modi’s hawk eye would spot the clause in the 2014 draft BRICS declaration, no doubt worked in by bureaucrats faithful to the Congress, that controverted India’s traditional position on the Israel-Palestine issue. But those were very early days and the clause went unnoticed.

Next came the vote against Israel at the UNHRC on a resolution on Gaza in July 2015. That too could be explained away as bureaucrats defying the regime change that had happened two months ago, or getting the better of the new Government that was elected to smash the status quo and break with the past. A year later, when India abstained from voting against Israel at the UNHRC, it was seen as course-correction, signalling an end to pandering to Arabs in the hope of pleasing Muslims at home. Less than a year after that historic abstention, it’s back to the past with a bang.

Two points need to be made to drive home the fact about India’s unwholesome vote in Paris which may find favour with Israel-haters but has left Modi’s core support base wondering who’s calling the shots. Clarity is definitely needed on why India voted in support of exterminating the very idea of Jewish identity and faith. Intriguingly, the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson has not commented on the Unesco vote yet, although it is believed the Government is in receipt of a letter of trenchant protest from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

The first point refers to India voting for a resolution, moved by OIC member-states, that rewrites history in the most grotesque manner. Did the Government believe this would soften OIC on the Kashmir issue? If it did, it clearly believed wrong. For even as India was voting for the Unesco resolution in Paris, the OIC member-states were voting unanimously for a scathing anti-India resolution on Kashmir at the 13th Islamic Summit in Istanbul. As expected, the Government of India officially denounced it. This has created a peculiar situation: In New Delhi we deplore the OIC and debunk its resolution, in Paris we merrily waltz with the organisation that promotes Islamic supremacy by voting in support of their resolution.

Second, the April 15 Unesco resolution has set a frightening precedent with enormous mischief potential. In theory, this moment onward anything and everything is possible. Imagine a clutch of Islamic countries moving a resolution at Unesco declaring Ayodhya an Islamic heritage city, the Ram Mandir as Babri Masjid, and the Ram Chabutra-Sita ki Rasoi area as Babur Plaza. Let there be no doubt that such a resolution would secure sufficient votes, including those of China, Brazil, France and Spain, possibly also Russia and the US, to pass muster. Which way would India vote?

There is no percentage in believing this won’t happen. There is even lesser percentage in doing what we did in Paris.

(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)

" Turkey will prevent Hamas from using the country as a base from which to work against Israel. In turn, Israel has rescinded its demand that Turkey expel Hamas' command center from the country. Senior Hamas member Salah al-Arouri, who was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenagers Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach in Gush Etzion in the summer of 2014, is no longer in Turkey, and the authorities there have promised that he would not be allowed to return. "

The coastal Indian city of Cochin was once home to a thriving Jewish community; immigrants came for the spice trade and ended up settling there. But in 1955, the community largely vanished as its residents departed en masse to the newly founded state of Israel. Now, it’s a struggle to preserve the structures and relics of Jewish heritage that remain.

JE Menon wrote:Haaretz published my letter. Kudos to them
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/this ... y/1.692829

Prem wrote:Preserving what’s left of a once-thriving Jewish community in India
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/preservi ... ity-india/
Watch the Video

The coastal Indian city of Cochin was once home to a thriving Jewish community; immigrants came for the spice trade and ended up settling there. But in 1955, the community largely vanished as its residents departed en masse to the newly founded state of Israel. Now, it’s a struggle to preserve the structures and relics of Jewish heritage that remain.

Rivlin’s visit is expected to pave the way for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel.

Israel President Reuven Rivlin will visit India from November 15 to 20, accompanied by a delegation of “unprecedented size” comprising businessmen and university officials, sources told The Hindu.


Mr. Rivlin and President Pranab Mukherjee will witness the signing of several agreements with the focus on cooperation in agriculture, water and education, though other agreements on security and defence cooperation were not ruled out.

Mr. Rivlin’s tour, which includes stops in Delhi, Chandigarh and Mumbai, is a return visit to Mr. Mukherjee’s trip to Israel. Both Presidents are expected to travel to Chandigarh together to attend an ‘Agrotech’ summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry there and they will be accompanied by chairperson of the Israel-India chamber of commerce Anat Bernstein.

Modi’s visit

Mr. Rivlin’s visit is expected to pave the way for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit. He will be the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel.

Although Mr. Modi announced plans to visit Israel early in his term, Mr. Mukherjee’s visit necessitated that according to protocol, the Israeli head of state would have to visit India before Mr. Modi could go.

In January 2017, India and Israel will mark 25 years of establishment of full diplomatic relations, and Mr. Modi and his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, are expected to exchange “high-level” interactions during the year. The two leaders had their first bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014.

The government is yet to announce Mr. Rivlin’s visit but Mr. Netanyahu said he would travel to India “in the next two weeks” during a Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday.

In the run-up to the visit, and the high-level exchanges expected next year, the government has sent out several tacit signals.

At a meeting in Himachal Pradesh on October 18, Mr. Modi likened the Army’s strikes across the LoC as “no less than the Israel Army”, in a complimentary reference to the Israeli Defence Force actions in Palestine and Lebanon that took many by surprise.

A week later, in a dramatic turn, India changed its vote at UNESCO on a pro-Palestine resolution that questioned Israel’s claim and criticised it for excavations inside the walled city. While in April this year, India voted in favour of the motion, in October it changed its vote to an abstention.

A visit to Palestine this week by Minister of State M.J. Akbar for the first ever Joint Commission meeting was also seen as a move to smooth ruffled feathers over both the UNESCO vote as well as the coming visit of the Israeli president.

Diplomats say there will be a flurry of visits by ministers from Delhi and Jerusalem in the next few months. “I think from now and through the 25th year celebrations in 2017, we may see a ministerial visit nearly every month between India and Israel,” said a source privy to the plans, adding, “This is by far the most intense period of engagement between our countries.”

Karthik S wrote:http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/i ... 296734.ece

Rivlin’s visit is expected to pave the way for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel.

Israel President Reuven Rivlin will visit India from November 15 to 20, accompanied by a delegation of “unprecedented size” comprising businessmen and university officials, sources told The Hindu.


Mr. Rivlin and President Pranab Mukherjee will witness the signing of several agreements with the focus on cooperation in agriculture, water and education, though other agreements on security and defence cooperation were not ruled out.

Mr. Rivlin’s tour, which includes stops in Delhi, Chandigarh and Mumbai, is a return visit to Mr. Mukherjee’s trip to Israel. Both Presidents are expected to travel to Chandigarh together to attend an ‘Agrotech’ summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry there and they will be accompanied by chairperson of the Israel-India chamber of commerce Anat Bernstein.

Modi’s visit

Mr. Rivlin’s visit is expected to pave the way for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit. He will be the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel.

Although Mr. Modi announced plans to visit Israel early in his term, Mr. Mukherjee’s visit necessitated that according to protocol, the Israeli head of state would have to visit India before Mr. Modi could go.

In January 2017, India and Israel will mark 25 years of establishment of full diplomatic relations, and Mr. Modi and his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, are expected to exchange “high-level” interactions during the year. The two leaders had their first bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014.

The government is yet to announce Mr. Rivlin’s visit but Mr. Netanyahu said he would travel to India “in the next two weeks” during a Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday.

In the run-up to the visit, and the high-level exchanges expected next year, the government has sent out several tacit signals.

At a meeting in Himachal Pradesh on October 18, Mr. Modi likened the Army’s strikes across the LoC as “no less than the Israel Army”, in a complimentary reference to the Israeli Defence Force actions in Palestine and Lebanon that took many by surprise.

A week later, in a dramatic turn, India changed its vote at UNESCO on a pro-Palestine resolution that questioned Israel’s claim and criticised it for excavations inside the walled city. While in April this year, India voted in favour of the motion, in October it changed its vote to an abstention.

A visit to Palestine this week by Minister of State M.J. Akbar for the first ever Joint Commission meeting was also seen as a move to smooth ruffled feathers over both the UNESCO vote as well as the coming visit of the Israeli president.

Diplomats say there will be a flurry of visits by ministers from Delhi and Jerusalem in the next few months. “I think from now and through the 25th year celebrations in 2017, we may see a ministerial visit nearly every month between India and Israel,” said a source privy to the plans, adding, “This is by far the most intense period of engagement between our countries.”