By country · Israel & the Levant
Around 85,000 Jews of Indian origin live in Israel — the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta. This is the story of a diaspora that ran in reverse.
For two decades, Israel's elderly have been cared for by Malayalis from Kerala — India's oldest foothold in the Israeli workforce. Now a post-war labour deal is turning that quiet community of a few thousand into a pipeline of tens of thousands.
A bilateral framework is set to raise the number of Indian workers in Israel toward 50,000 by 2030, filling construction and caregiving jobs left by barred Palestinian labour. The numbers, and the controversy.
