[R-G] Between Israel and India, a Link Based on Culture and, Now, Terrorism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/us/29religion.html>
November 29, 2008
On Religion
Between Israel and India, a Link Based on Culture and, Now, Terrorism
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

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."

E-mail: sgfreedman at nytimes.com