Oct

5 2023

to
Oct

8 2023

B'nei Menashe Photo Exhibition by Dorit Lombroso

6:00AM - 9:00PM  

Alpert Jewish Community Center 3801 E. Willow Street, One Sommer Way
Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Jewish Federation Campus
Long Beach, CA

The Zena and Pauline Gatov Gallery at the Alpert JCC presents
B’nei Menashe
Photos by Dorit Lombroso
In partnership with Degel Menashe
 

Exhibition: October 5 – November 29

Gallery Hours: Open to the Public

This photo exhibition explores the daily lives of the B’nei Menashe who are believed to be descendants of one of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel. There are so few of them — some five thousand in Israel, to which they have come from a remote corner of India, and a similar number in the Indian northeast, still awaiting their Aliyah — that many knowledgeable Jews and Israelis are not even aware of the B’nei Menashe’s existence, let alone of the story behind it.

And yet it is a remarkable story, however one looks at it. If, as the B’nei Menashe themselves believe, and as an impressive body of evidence lends support to, they are mysteriously descended from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, one of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel to have disappeared in the eight-century B.C.E. Assyrian exile, they are the first known case in history of such a group returning to the parent body from which it was torn nearly three thousand years ago. And if, as the skeptics maintain, they are a purely 20th-century phenomenon, their discovery of Judaism, and their steadfast adherence to it in a far-flung part of the world where no Jew ever tread, testify dramatically to the power of the religious quest and to Judaism’s capacity to serve as its destination.

 

It is a gripping tale and Dorit Lombroso’s photographs of B’nei Menashe life artfully convey the romance of it. But the lives led by the B’nei Menashe are real ones. In India they are those of a poor and struggling community in the states of Mizoram and Manipur, the latter the current site of ethnic violence that has left hundreds of B’nei Menashe displaced and homeless; in Israel, those of new immigrants from an undeveloped part of the world to a country that has welcomed them as fellow Jews but whose quick-paced, technologically-driven way of life is a challenge for them to adjust to.