Rabbinical court recognizes one of the “lost tribes” of Israel
The National Post of Canada
Source: CanWest News Service
KIRYAT ARBA, West Bank – When a rabbinical court decided that the Bnei Menashe of India were descendants of one of the 10 “lost tribes” of Israel, Indian newspapers reported many in the northern community wept tears of joy.
Sephardic chief rabbi Shlomo Amar’s decision three months ago confirmed what Pautinlun Khaute realized nearly 10 years ago in Bombay when someone asked him, a baptized Catholic, whether he believed in God and the Holy Trinity.
“My face suddenly became red,” Khaute recalled this week at the home he, his wife and their two children share near Hebron. “At that moment I said to myself: ‘There is only one God,’ that God is the God of Abraham and that my true religion is Judaism.”
Ruthie Thangjom El Ezra, 29, who came to Israel eight years ago and married an Israeli, described the Bnei Menashe’s unusual journey as “an awakening. Twenty years ago we knew nothing about Judaism and suddenly we discovered we did not belong in India.”
Once converted to Orthodox Judaism by a rabbinical court that has gone to India, the Bnei Menashe will be permitted to emigrate to the land of Abraham under Israel’s Law of Return.
“This historical breakthrough was really a miracle,” said Khaute, who is one of about 800 Bnei Menashe who have emigrated to the Holy Land since the first two members of the tribe arrived in 1981.
It is believed the Bnei Menashe, who speak several Tibeto-Burmese languages, were one of 10 Jewish tribes expelled from the northern kingdom of Israel about 2,700 years ago. After wandering for centuries though Central Asia and the Far East it is believed the children of Menasseh _ who have mixed Indo-Mongolian features _ settled along what is now India’s remote border with Burma. It is one of the central themes of Judaism that the exodus of the lost tribes was a catastrophic event and that they will one day return to the Promised Land.
The only other lost tribe to be recognized recently were Ethiopia’s Falashas. Believed to be descendants of the tribe of Dan, the Falashas number about 80,000 in Israel today after secret airlifts from Ethiopia between 1984 and 1991.
“The lost tribes of Israel is a very special, mystical subject about which there is not a lot of information,” said Michael Freund, chairman of Shavei Israel, which seeks to assist “lost” Jewish communities. “I admit I was skeptical at first. It sounded more like the realm of fantasy,” Freund said. “But I have been to India many times and there is a compelling case to be made. I now wholeheartedly believe they are descended from the Israelites.”
Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum was one of three rabbinical court judges dispatched to India to examine the Bnei Menashe claim. `I have brought with me 20 issues to be discussed here and the only issue anyone wants to talk with me about is the Lost Tribes and the Bnei Menashe,” Birnbaum said over the telephone from Mexico. “This has really moved the community of world Jewry in a positive way,” he said.
But the Bnei Menashe claim has not been without controversy. A Knesset committee asked Pautinlun Khaute three years ago why the Bnei Menashe who emigrated had all settled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rather than within the internationally recognized pre-1967 borders of Israel. Not long after that the Israeli Interior ministry ordered that no more Bnei Menashe would be granted entry visas.
After Amar’s ruling, which supercedes the government order, there were some published comments that the Bnei Menashe were economic immigrants who were encouraged to come to Israel to boost the country’s population. `It has been a little controversial,” Khaute acknowledged. “God helped Rabbi Amar make the right decision even though some on the left and the right have been murmuring that this was incorrect. Governments do not have the authority to make such decisions. I know that in my soul I am 100-per cent Jewish. I believe in the Torah.”
Birnbaum, who has been to India five times to investigate the Bnei Menashe, asked: “Who is a Jew? It is a very sensitive question. When I met them in India the connection was clear. There have also been questions about why they have come to live beyond the Green Line. We sent them to places where there were Jewish communities ready to accept them and absorb them socially and spiritually.”
The Bnei Menashe were only converted to Christianity by British missionaries around the turn of the century. The traditions they had before then were subsequently diluted, but not erased. However, among the vestigial connections with Judaism found by the visiting rabbis were similar burial rites, animal sacrifices, circumcision and the fact husbands and wives lived apart when the wife was menstruating.
As a result of Amar’s landmark decision as many as 7,000 more Menashe now studying Hebrew and the Jewish religion in 32 synagogues and two Shavei Israel-sponsored education centres in India may soon emigrate to Israel. However, whether anymore of the one-million Christians in the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, who have many of the same roots, may wish to convert is a subject of conjecture.
“Realistically, if God wills it, within 10 years all those now studying to be converted should all be here,” said Khaute, who lives among 100 Bnei Menashe families in Kiryat Arba. “After that I expect the increase to be in leaps and bounds.”
Birnbaum was firmly of another opinion. “I am sure that all those that have kept the customs will come to Israel,” he said. “But I am also sure that it will only be this group and no more. Over the last 10 years we see the same names of the same families. We have the circumcision records, too. Those families may have a few children but there will not be new families.”
Asked about whether there were more lost Jewish tribes out there, the rabbi said: “From a religious point-of-view, it may be that we will find more of them. But we go in small steps. I have no details today about other groups but we have not lost hope.”
Michael Freund of Shavei Israel said one of the more interesting possible connections was between some Jewish religious practices and some of those of the ferociously conservative Sunni Muslim Pushtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I am not aware of any desire or effort on their part to return to Judaism or Israel, so we are not pursuing it,” Freund said.
“But it is an interesting curiosity.”