Video: Dancing in Jerusalem

This was the last song written for my new album, The Promise. I needed a groovy, let’s-all-make-aliyah theme song that would describe the various major redemption moments of the past century. The opening line quotes the Ethiopian Crown Prince Ahmad when he finally gave permission for the Jews to leave. My heart is Dancing in…

Return of the Chinese Jews

By MICHAEL FREUND, JPOST— Last week, the small and unassuming mikve (ritual bath) in Hod HaSharon witnessed the unfolding of a remarkable scene in the annals of Jewish history. One by one, six young Chinese men, all descendants of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, immersed themselves in the warm and purifying waters before a…

Here comes another lost tribe

BY MICHAEL FREUND— Thousands of kilometers to the east, in the furthest reaches of northeastern India, a long-lost community continues to nourish its age-old dream of returning to its ancient homeland, the land of Israel. The Bnei Menashe, or “sons of Manasseh,” are descendants of one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel, which were…

The power of Aliyah

by Yoram Ettinger In 2010, a surge in the Israeli Jewish fertility rate is a long-term, unique, global phenomenon, while fertility rates decline sharply in the Third World in general and in Muslim countries in particular. In 2010, there is a 66% Jewish majority in 98.5% of the area between the Jordan River and the…

Exiles of Jerusalem in Spain

by Michael Freund, JPost.com  King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella must be turning over in their graves. Five centuries after Spain’s Catholic monarchs sought to erase all vestiges of Jewish life in their realm through mass expulsion and forced conversion, a growing number of their victims’ descendants are seeking to return to their Jewish roots. It…