The Ground Keeps Shifting

by Audrey Lichter

Having just returned from nearly a month of travel in India and Portugal, I had intended to write about the historical experiences of their Jewish communities.

In India, Jews lived peacefully among their Hindu neighbors for centuries. They built beautiful synagogues and prospered in the land. The ancient community of the Cochin Jews — also known as the Malabar Jews — traced its roots back nearly 2,000 years. Yet after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, most made Aliyah. Over time, Jews from other parts of India followed, immigrating to Israel, the United States, and Europe. Today, just over 3,000 Jews remain in India. Many of the once-vibrant synagogues are now maintained by a handful of Jews or preserved by the state as museums — sacred reminders of a thriving community that once was.

In Portugal, by contrast, we walked the Jewish quarter of Lisbon and stood at the sites connected to the Inquisition — places where Jews were persecuted, forcibly converted, burned, and ultimately expelled in 1497 under the authority of the Portuguese Inquisition. Portugal, too, was once home to a flourishing Jewish community. Its history remains marked by the brutality of expulsion and forced conversion.

There is much to say about both of these countries — about tolerance and tragedy, continuity and rupture. But as I sat down to write, the ground shifted yet again. News broke that Israel and the United States are at war with Iran.

For Jews, it often feels as though the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet. We are a people on the move. This is a new awareness for many of us who grew up in relative security over the past fifty years in America. Stability, which once felt assumed, now feels uncertain.

How this moment will unfold for Jewish communities in Israel and throughout the diaspora remains to be seen. But one thing seems evident: the Jewish world is changing once again.

Our enduring question remains the same — how do we see beyond the next horizon? How do we adapt without losing ourselves? How do we ensure that Jewish life not only survives, but thrives, wherever the ground settles next?

How do we ensure that Jewish life not only survives, but thrives, wherever the ground settles next?