India's "lost" Jews set for homecoming
Pastor Dale Morgan
Monday November 13, 2:55 PM Reuters
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India's "lost" Jews set for homecoming*
By Sunil Kataria
AIZAWL, India (Reuters) - Dalia Doliani Sela sits in her simple house
pouring over the Bible and learning Hebrew, dreaming of a life of piety
and a family reunion with her children in the Promised Land.
Sela is an Indian by birth, part of a community in the country's remote
northeast who says they are one of the "lost tribes of Israel", exiled
from their homeland 2,700 years ago.
"I want to be there when my last days come. Because Israel is the land
of Sarah. It's the first place where she will come," she said, referring
to the wife of the biblical patriarch Abraham.
Sela, a 63-year-old mother of 10, is among the first group of India's
Bnei Menashe community to settle in the Holy Land since rabbinical
leaders in Israel formally recognised them as Jews and carried out a
mass conversion ceremony in India last year.
"It is the Promised Land of God and we can properly carry our religious
duties over there. Here it is difficult to practice Judaism properly, so
far away," Sela told Reuters in the Mizo capital, Aizawl.
Sela is one of 218 Bnei Menashe, or the "Children of Menashe", due to
emigrate in November. She will join 1,000 of her community already in
Israel, among them nine of her own children.
JEWISH? WELL, MAYBE
The tale of how the community's ancestors supposedly came to this thin
slice of land sandwiched between Bangladesh and Myanmar is grand in its
sweep of history, but short on scientific support.
Exiled from ancient Israel by the Assyrian empire around 730 BC, a tribe
is forced east and travels through Afghanistan and China before settling
in what is now India's northeast.
Their language, history and traditions forgotten, they now look like
their Mongoloid neighbours, speak a Tibeto-Burmese language, rear pigs
and eat pork.
What's left is a name -- Manasseh, Menasia or Manmase, an ancestor whose
spirit the community invokes to ward off evil.
In 1950, a holy man from a remote village in Mizoram said the Holy
Spirit had appeared to him in a vision, to explain that the "children of
Manasseh" were in fact the children of Menashe, a forefather of the
Israelite tribe of Menashe.
The tribe was one of the biblical "Twelve Tribes of Israel", ten of
which disappeared after the Assyrian invasion.
Gradually his ideas took hold among a people converted to Christianity a
few decades before. Today, nearly 7,000 Bnei Menashe live in Mizoram and
neighbouring Manipur, hoping for their chance to join the rest of the
community in Israel.
Zaithanchhungi, a Christian woman who has researched and defended the
Bnei Menashe claims, says that many of their customs are very similar to
those of the ancient Jews.
Some of the practices involved in animal sacrifice were similar to
ancient Hebrew traditions, while an ancient song among one tribe talked
of "crossing the Red Sea," with enemies in chariots at their heels, she
said.
The search for conclusive proof of these claims goes on.
Calcutta's forensic science laboratory found no trace of a typical
Jewish genes in the male Y chromosomes of the Kuki, Chin and Mizo people
who inhabit the area, but found some evidence of a possible, but
diluted, maternal link to the Near East.
Israel's Technion institute is also carrying out research but said it
was too early to comment on results.
MIRACLE WORKER
Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based organisation which has been locating
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and bringing them home, says
the Bnei Menashe's return is a miracle.
"Next month (the group) will at last return to Zion. They will return to
the land of their forefathers -- the place from which their ancestors
had been exiled over 27 centuries ago. This is a miracle of biblical and
historic proportions," Shavei Israel's chairman, Michael Freund, said in
Jerusalem.
"This is the first time they will be coming here as Jews fully
recognised as such by the Israeli rabbinate and the Israeli government,"
he added.
The 218 newcomers will move to the northern Israeli towns of Karmiel and
Upper Nazareth -- areas which were hard hit by rockets fired by the
Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah this summer during a 34-day conflict
with Israel.
In the past, Bnei Menashe members had come to Israel in small groups on
tourist visas and converted to Judaism in a deal reached by Jewish
supporters and the country's interior ministry.
When the arrangement ended in 2003, Freund approached Israel's Sephardic
Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar for help. In March 2005, Amar formally
recognised the Bnei Menashe as descendants of the Jewish people and, in
September 2005, the 218 were converted.
But more conversions are unlikely to follow any time soon as the Israeli
government banned such mass conversions in India following complaints by
Indian authorities.
"Absolutely nothing will be done in the future to infringe upon the
sovereignty of the Indian government, nor will anything be done that
could cause any type of disruption or issue between India and Israel --
that is in no one's interests," an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman
told Reuters.
India said it had no problem with genuine Jews leaving for Israel, and
Freund said he was confident the remaining 7,000 Bnei Menashe would be
brought there.
"We are committed to finding a solution," he said.
(Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem)