User:Professionalresearcher/Navras Jaat Aafreedi

Navras Jāāt Āafreedi is an Indo-Judaic Studies Researcher and a Jewish-Muslim Relations Activistfrom Lucknow, a well known centre for Muslim scholarship. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Civilization at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Gautam Buddha University in Greater NOIDA, Gautam Budh Nagar, India. Educated at La Martiniere College, Lucknow and the University of Lucknow, he has held visiting fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Institute of Asian Studies in Australia; Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK; Tel Aviv University, Israel; and the Centre for Communication & Development Studies, Pune, India, and his lectures have been well received in Australia, Austria, India, Israel, Switzerland, UK and USA. He sits on the editorial boards of the peer reviewed journals Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies and The Social Ion, on the international advisory board of the Asian Jewish Life and the Jerusalem Press Club, and is referee to the Journal of Studies in History & Culture and the Journal of South Asian Studies. He has to his credit a number of publications which have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Russian and Turkish and the first ever Holocaust Films Retrospective in South Asia, which he held in 2009 at the universities in Lucknow (India), a major centre of Muslim scholarship. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Youth Outreach Program of the Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE), an NGO dedicated to raising Holocaust awareness and combating anti-Semitism. He has continued to screen Holocaust films at Gautam Buddha University, which he joined in 2010. He inspired the students there to write and stage the first ever Holocaust themed Hindi language play under the auspices of his NGO in 2015. He is also a member of the advisory team of "The Ten Lost Tribes Challenge: Expeditions of Discovery", a series of research expeditions to various groups around the world, who consider themselves, or are considered by others, to be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. He has consistently tried to positively change the hostile Muslim attitutes towards Jews. In September and October 2009, he organised the first ever Holocaust films retrospective in South Asia. He aspires to introduce Jewish Studies as an academic discipline and establish a centre dedicated to Jewish Studies in India. Aafreedi has emerged as the first person to make a substantial contribution to Jewish Studies in Urdu, the lingua franca of almost all South Asian Muslims. Through his numerous publications in English, Urdu and Hindi, he has brought into sharp focus the Indian Jews and the claims of Israelite presence in South Asia. He is the author of the e-book (CD-ROM), The Indian Jewry and the Self-Professed 'Lost Tribes of Israel' in India, Mumbai, 2006. Articles on his researches have appeared in different countries in fourteen languages, viz., English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Romanian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Finnish, Urdu, Hindi and Turkish. His interviews have been broadcast on American, Israeli, Italianand Australian radio channels and Indian television.