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Bnei Menashe

Group of self-claimed Jews from northeast India

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The movement began in 1951, when a tribal leader reported having a dream that his people's ancient homeland was Israel; some tribal members began embracing the idea that they were Jews. Before the movement's start, the community was largely a Christian one. Members are from the Chin, Kuki, and Mizo ethnic groups, amongst others.

In the late 20th century, the Israeli rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, of the group Amishav, named these people the "Bnei Menashe" based on their account of descent from Manasseh. In 2003–2004, DNA testing of several hundred male community members did not yield conclusive evidence of Middle Eastern ancestry. In 2005, a Kolkata-based study found evidence of maternally descended Near Eastern ancestry but suggested the findings were an artifact of thousands of years of intermarriage between peoples of the Near and Middle East.

Research from Mizoram University reveals that many customs, like ritual songs and animal sacrifices, which the Bnei Menashe point to as Jewish parallels through their oral history, were already present in the region, and to this day, there’s no written evidence suggesting a connection. Israel did not formally support immigration of the Bnei Menashe until 2005, when Shlomo Amar, then Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, recognized the Bnei Menashe as a lost tribe. Bnei Menashe must obtain special dispensation from the Knesset to make aliyah.

History

Biblical background

In the time of the First Temple, Israel was divided into two kingdoms. The southern one, known as the Kingdom of Judah, was made up mostly of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simon and Levi. Most Jews today are descended from the southern kingdom. The northern Kingdom of Israel was made up of the other ten tribes (which include half of Levi). In approximately 721 BCE, the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom, exiled the leading ~20% of the ten tribes living there, and took them to Assyria (present-day Iraq).

Adoption of modern Judaism

According to Lal Dena, the Bnei Menashe have come to believe that the legendary Hmar ancestor Manmasi was the Hebrew Menasseh, son of Joseph. During the 1950s, this group of Chin-Kuki-Mizo people founded a Messianic movement. In 1951, Challianthanga (Challa), a leader in the United Pentecostal Church in Mizoram, had a vision claiming the Mizo people were descendants of the Israelites.

David Siama Hmar, a native of Vairengte near the Mizoram–Manipur border, was among those influenced by Challa’s early spiritual movement. In 1953, while residing in Thringmun, he reportedly experienced a vision of a stone inscribed with the words “Rock of Israel” descending from the sky toward Manipur. In contrast to Challa, who did not fully embrace Judaism, Siama adopted it in its entirety, becoming one of the earliest known adherents in Mizoram. Challa died in 1959, prior to the formal introduction of Judaism to the Mizo community.

While they believed that Jesus is the promised messiah for all Israelites, these pioneers also adopted the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, the celebration of holidays, the observance of dietary laws and other Jewish customs and traditions which they learned from books in the early 1960s. They had no connections with other Jewish groups in either the diaspora or Israel.

Significant pioneering research into the Judaic identity of the Manmasi people was undertaken by Thangkholun Daniel Lhungdim—a poet, educator, and headmaster based in Churachandpur. Demonstrating deep commitment to this cause, he embraced Judaism and authored the seminal work Israel Ihiuve (“We Are Israel”) in 1974. Lhungdim collaborated closely with Samuel Sumkhothang Haokip and Yosef Jangkhothang Lhanghal, both of whom were early advocates of the Judaic revival in Northeast India.

Lhungdim’s views were met with strong opposition at the local level. In 1968, he was compelled to resign from his post and leave his village. He found refuge with Chief David Jamkhosem Lhungdim of Gelmuol, who supported his research efforts and sponsored his journeys to Calcutta and Bombay in 1969 and 1973.

In a 2001 publication, Holkholun Lhungdim reflected on the early skepticism surrounding the theory that the Manmasi were descendants of a Lost Tribe of Israel. He critiqued both proponents and opponents of the theory for their biased interpretations and called for objective, scholarly investigation. Notably, he had himself been a skeptic in 1974, attributing his doubts at the time to a lack of sufficient knowledge rather than to religious motivations.

On May 31, 1972, a group based in Churachandpur founded the Manipur Israel Family Association—the first organization representing the emerging Bnei Menashe community. In 1973, Daniel Lhungdim and Israel Ginjamung Suantak visited Calcutta and subsequently Bombay, where Lhungdim met Esther David Immanuel, the first known external Jewish supporter of the Bnei Menashe. He returned with three pivotal messages: (1) Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people; (2) circumcision is a religious obligation; and (3) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

These doctrinal assertions generated internal tensions within the Manipur Jewish Organization (MJO), ultimately leading to the formation of the United Jews of North East India (UJNEI) on October 10, 1974. This new organization aimed to unify the communities that had begun practicing Judaism in earnest. A defining moment occurred in February 1976 when Lhungdim was again dispatched to Bombay by UJNEI, marking his final research trip. His return on April 21, 1976, during Chol HaMoed Pesach, symbolized the spiritual rebirth of Judaism among the Manmasi. Reinvigorated by the formal instruction he had received, Lhungdim brought back a Sefer Torah, tefillin, tzitzit, and halachic literature. For the first time, the community began to observe Judaism in accordance with Jewish law, although formal conversion (giyur) had yet to be undertaken.

After these people established contacts with other Jewish religious groups in Israel and other countries, they began to practice more traditional rabbinic Judaism in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1978, UJNEI's outreach to Jewish organizations worldwide eventually drew the attention of Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, founder of Amishav, an organization which is dedicated to finding the Lost Tribes and facilitating their aliyah. He investigated this group's claims of Jewish descent in the 1980s and named the group the Bnei Menashe.

Avichail proposed sending a young representative to Israel for formal religious training. In 1979, Gideon Rei (also known as Vankhuma Chongthu) and Simon Gin Vaiphei were selected for this mission. They departed India in January 1981 and enrolled at Machon Meir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, where they received instruction in Hebrew and foundational Jewish law. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel ruled that the Bnei Menashe would be accepted as Jews, based on the devotion displayed by their practice through the decades, but still required individuals to undergo formal ritual conversion.

History of the Chin-Kuki-Mizo people

Prior to their conversion to Christianity in the 19th century, the Chin-Kuki-Mizo people practiced animism; ritual headhunting of enemies was part of their culture. Depending upon their affiliations, each tribe identifies primarily as Kuki, Mizo/Hmar, or Chin. The people identify most closely with their subtribes in the villages, each of which has its own distinct dialect and identity.

They are indigenous peoples who had migrated in waves from East Asia and settled in what is now northeastern India. They have no written history, but their legends refer to a beloved homeland that they had to leave, called Sinlung/Chinlung. The tribes speak languages that are branches of indigenous Tibeto-Burman.

Influence of revivalism

During the first Welsh missionary-led Christian Revivalism movement, which swept through the Mizo hills in 1906, the missionaries prohibited indigenous festivals, feasts, and traditional songs and chants. After missionaries abandoned this policy during the 1919–24 Revival, the Mizo began writing their own hymns, incorporating indigenous elements. They created a unique form of syncretic Christian worship. Christianity has generally been characterized by such absorption of elements of local cultures wherever it has been introduced.

Shalva Weil, a senior researcher and noted anthropologist at Hebrew University, wrote in her paper, Dual Conversion Among the Shinlung of North-East (1965):

Revivalism (among the Mizo) is a recurrent phenomenon distinctive of the Welsh form of Presbyterianism. Certain members of the congregation who easily fall into ecstasy are believed to be visited by the Holy Ghost and the utterings are received as prophecies." (Steven Fuchs 1965: 16).

Anthony Gilchrist McCall, in 1949, recorded several incidents of revivalism, including the "Kelkang incident", in which three men "spoke in tongues", claiming to be the medium through which God spoke to men. Their following was large and widespread until they clashed with the colonial superintendent. He put down the movement and removed the "sorcery".

In a 2004 study, Weil says, "although there is no documentary evidence linking the tribal peoples in northeast India with the myth of the lost Israelites, it appears likely that, as with revivalism, the concept was introduced by the missionaries as part of their general millenarian leanings."

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Christian missionaries "discovered" lost tribes in far-flung places; their enthusiasm for identifying such peoples as part of the Israelite tribes was related to the desire to speed up the messianic era and bring on the Redemption. Based on his experience in China, for example, Scottish missionary Rev. T.F. Torrance wrote China’s Ancient Israelites (1937), expounding a theory that the Qiang people were lost Israelites. This theory has not been supported by any more rigorous studies.

Some of the Mizo-Kuki-Chin say they have an oral tradition that the tribe traveled through Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China and on to India, where it eventually settled in the northeastern states of Manipur and Mizoram.

According to Tongkhohao Aviel Hangshing, leader of the Bnei Menashe in Imphal, the capital of Manipur, when the Bible was translated into local languages in the 1970s, the people began to study it themselves. Hangshing said, "And we found that the stories, the customs and practices of the Israeli people were very similar to ours. So we thought that we must be one of the lost tribes." After making contact with Israelis, they began to study normative Judaism and established several synagogues. Hundreds of Mizo-Kuki-Chin emigrated to Israel. They were required to formally convert to be accepted as Jews, because their history was not documented. Also, given their long migration and intermarriage, they had lost the required maternal ancestry of Jews, by which they might be considered as born Jews.

Operation Wings of Dawn

In November 2025, the Israeli government approved a five-year plan to complete the Aliyah of the remaining Bnei Menashe community from India. On 23 April 2026, the first batch of approximately 240-250 members arrived in Israel as part of "Operation Wings of Dawn," with around 1,200 expected to arrive by the end of 2026 and the full relocation of about 5,000-6,000 people projected by 2030. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the decision "important and Zionist," stating it would strengthen northern Israel and the Galilee region.

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