Sha'arei Rahamim Synagogue — Bene Israel

The story

The Sha'arei Rahamim synagogue stands on Baalei HaTosafot Street in Neighborhood Dalet, and is listed in the synagogue list of the Religious Council in Beersheba. In the associations registry of the Ministry of Justice there is registered on the same street an association by the name "The Sha'arei Rahamim Synagogue (Bene Israel) Beer Sheva" — and the name in the parentheses is the name of a community. Bene Israel is the largest Jewish community of western India. According to the tradition of the community, its forefathers were survivors of a ship wrecked near the Konkan coast, to the south of Mumbai: seven men and seven women were saved, and all the holy books that were with them were lost in the sea. The families of the Bene Israel sat for many generations in some two hundred villages in the Konkan region, engaged in the pressing of oil, and adopted Marathi as their spoken language. The name that stuck to them in the mouths of their neighbors was "Shanwar Teli" — Sabbath-keeping oil pressers, because on the Sabbath day their presses stood still. In the year 1897 the community was invited to the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and its leaders refused to take part. Before the immigration, in the middle of the twentieth century, the community numbered some twenty-four thousand souls, and most of them immigrated; today it is estimated at some eighty-five thousand people in Israel, some three thousand in the Mumbai area, and some five thousand in the rest of the world. And according to the report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora of the year 2012, which surveyed the life of the community in Israel, the largest concentration of Bene Israel in the country is found here, in Beersheba.

• Communities
• Beersheba