From India to Israel--a big change

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 For several days the blog has been showing Moshav Nevatim in the Negev desert.
Here is their Cochin Jewish Heritage Center.

Click to enlarge  and start to plan your  visit.

 The walls of the lecture and video room are covered with wonderful old photographs of the Cochin communities.
Here above are the young men of  Kehilat Ernakulam  over half a century ago.

The left photo is from 1952.
About then the Jews starting leaving India in order to immigrate to Israel.
Our guide at the museum emphasized that the different religious groups in India lived together  in sovlanut and savlanut, with tolerance and patience, and there was no anti-semitism.

And here the men are already at Nevatim, a moshav (a collective agricultural settlement) in the desert, working hard picking  apricots in the  1970s.
The Cochin Jews were also settled on four other moshavim when they made aliyah in the mid 1950s.
Nevatim had previously been abandoned and the group found primitive and difficult conditions on their arrival in 1954, and they were not used to working in agriculture.
But they were dedicated to the homeland of Israel and they took up the task of working hard to make their little patch of desert bloom.
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.)
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UPDATE Nov. 12:  A new article appeared today, very interesting:
 http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-jewish-war-hero-and-the-last-vestige-of-a-dying-indian-community/
Lt. Gen. Jacob, an old hero living in New Delhi, says "India has always been very good to us. I am very proud to be a Jew, but am Indian through and through. I was born in India and served here my whole life; this is where I want die.”
“The only place I encountered anti-Semitism was from the British in their army,” he says. “Among Indians it does not exist.”
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