Judaism in Nepal
It has been called the "world's largest seder",[7] requiring 1,100 pounds of Matzo, the ritual unleavened bread of the festival.In October 2013, Rabbi Lifshitz prevented the cremation of a religious Jewish woman from Australia who was killed in a traffic accident."The antipathy to religious ritual that many Israeli Jews have inherited from that early generation of founding Zionists, leads many of them to search for spiritual fulfillment in Nepal or India...," writes Rabbi Daniel Gordis.The French Jewish scholar Sylvain Lévi visited Nepal in 1898 and published a three-volume historical study (Le Népal: Étude historique d’un royaume hindou, 1905–1908), considered the authoritative Western account of the country for most of the 20th century.[20] Lévi later wrote a comparative study of the Jewish and Hindu religions, based on his Nepalese researches[21] The Hong Kong–based Jewish Kadoorie family has been involved with philanthropy in Nepal (as elsewhere in Asia), particularly serving Gurkha communities, and Horace Kadoorie was awarded the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu (First Class) by the Nepalese government.[26] The Times of India reported in 2014 that Indian security forces had foiled a plot by the Indian Mujahideen to kidnap Jewish tourists in Nepal to be used in exchange for the female Pakistani scientist Aafia Siddiqui held in a US jail, and that the organization had rented a hiding place in the hills of Nepal to hold their hostages captive.