A Yemenite brit

Last Friday lunchtime Naomi and I were invited to a Yemenite brit. A brit is
when a male child is circumcised 8 days after birth. It is a ritual carried
out by a mohel who is often a Rabbi. It is an occasion for celebration among
Jews that another male child is welcomed into the community. Whatever the
health implications of circumcision, this is in fact a religious ritual not to
be flouted.
When they brought in the baby and began the ceremony, the men gathered
around(the women usually hide, especially the mother) and in this case they
sang and chanted the prayers. Their chanting sounded very Eastern to us, like
Arabic or Indian. Quite different and distinct from what we are used to, even
though the basic prayers were the same, they were hardly recognizable. This
is more of a folk ceremony than an official one, there is no organized
religious authority that tells them what to sing, it is something that they
have celebrated from time immemorial.
In this case the Yemenite father is married to a woman from Russia via
Australia. Such is the melting pot of Israel for the Jewish people, that
groups that have been separated for a thousand years are reunited in flesh
here. This is their third boy, and his whole large Yemenite family attended.
It was noteworthy how small the grandparents are, and the current generation
are "normal" size, giants compared to them. That is because they had terrible
nutrition in their native Yemen. They were very badly treated by the Yemeni
Arabs, they were persecuted and murdered at will. They were forced to walk in
the street not on the sidewalk, even into modern times, and often dwelled in
caves because they were mostly forbidden to own property.
>From the 1880's -1920s Some of the Yemenite Jews made their way to Eretz
Israel over the desert all the way from Yemen, although many died or
were killed en route. After the State of Israel was founded in 1948 a
concerted effort was made to bring them here, and many thousands were
transported by plane in 1951 in an operation called "magic carpet." Most of
them had never seen a plane before. Just like the more recent Ethiopian
immigrants they came from a very primitive background, but they have now
fully integrated into Israeli society.
Israel exists mainly for them and similar groups, who unlike us (from the
West) had no other choices. They were desperately poor and deprived, and
would probably have ceased to exist as a coherent group by now if they had not
been rescued in such a dramatic fashion just over 50 years ago. So I am
pleased to say that we enjoyed sharing this celebration with them, it was a
mitzvah!