(RNS) — Last year, Jeremiah Hnamte closed the family’s manufacturing business in the city of Aizawl, in northeastern India. The family moved into a rented apartment and sold their land and possessions, all in preparation for moving to Israel in the near future.
The Hnamtes are members of the Bnei Menashe community, a few thousand people concentrated mostly in two hilly northeastern India states, Mizoram and Manipur, near the Myanmar border, who believe they’re descendants of a 2,700-year-old biblical lost tribe.
Making aliyah, Hebrew for migrating to Israel, has been the Bnei Menashe’s dream for decades, but they do not qualify under the Israeli law of return, which requires people to have at least one Jewish grandparent in order to be considered for citizenship. Since 1989, though, through special government permissions, about 4,000 Bnei Menashe have been able to make aliyah, but just as many people have spent years, in some cases generations, attempting to move to Israel.
In November this year, however, the Israeli government announced that the entire Bnei Menashe community — estimated to be 5,800 people — would be allowed to immigrate by 2030. The new immigrants will be settled in Nof HaGalil and other northern cities, where other Bnei Menashe have already set down roots.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the move “an important and Zionist decision that will also strengthen the North and the Galilee.” The country’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said it would strengthen “our hold of the north and the future of the state of Israel.” About 1,200 people are expected to make aliyah next year.
A few weeks after the Israeli government’s announcement, an Israeli delegation, including at least eight rabbis from the Israeli Rabbinate, which governs the country’s Jewish public life, visited Aizawl. In the course of a week, they conducted background checks on more than 1,500 people, quizzing families on their practice of Judaism.
The Bnei Menashe are ethnically part of the Kuki-Mizo-Chin tribes, a Tibeto-Burman group of about 2 million to 3 million people concentrated in Mizoram and Manipur, and across the border in Myanmar, with a tiny population in Bangladesh. As the British penetrated the hills in the late 19th century, Welsh and American Christian missionaries converted most in the region over the next few decades.
The idea that Mizos have a biblical connection with Israel began in 1951, when a Pentecostal minister from the Mizo population had a vision: All Mizos, he said, were Israeli and must return to the Israeli homeland. Close readings of the Bible led the group to think of themselves as Israeli, said Hnamte, whose grandfather was one of many who tried to make their way to Israel on foot. “But they did not know how or where the land of the Israel is. They just wanted to go,” he said.
The Bnei Menashe movement was formalized only in the 1980s, with the arrival of Eliyahu Avichail, an Orthodox Israeli rabbi who dedicated his life to looking for the “10 lost tribes” of the biblical kingdom of Israel who had been exiled by the Assyrians in 720 BCE. Drawing on biblical prophecies, some Jewish traditions see the return of the lost tribes as a harbinger of the messiah. It was Avichail who made arrangements to take the first few members of the community in 1989.
Since the 2000s, a nonprofit called Shavei Israel began facilitating the migration of Bnei Menashe in batches of hundreds. The immigration was reportedly made possible in part due to a 2005 ruling by Shlomo Amar, then the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, who according to news reports at the time recognized the Bnei Menashe as a “seed of Israel,” a term for those who are considered Jewish not by religious law but by ancestry. (A 2015 report in Haaretz, however, said “no such ruling had ever been explicitly made.”)
Proselytizing is illegal in India, so when a delegation of Israeli rabbis arrived in Aizawl in 2005 to convert the Bnei Menashe, their operation was halted. The Bnei Menashe — the name means “sons of Menashe or Manasseh,” as they believe they are descendants of the lost tribe of Menashe/Manasseh, Jacob’s grandson — now undergo an Orthodox “reconversion” process after they emigrate.
The Bnei Menashe’s Jewish ancestry has been controversial in India. According to most historical accounts, the Kuki-Mizo-Chin tribes migrated from the Tibeto-Burman regions of southwest China thousands of years ago and gradually moved to the Indo-Burman hill ranges along the eastern end of the Himalayas. After the British left, the hills and their populations were split among the post-colonial nation states, and these interrelated tribes became minorities in their respective countries, often treated as outsiders.
Since 2023 the Kukis have been embroiled in ethnic clashes with the mostly Hindu Meitei community in Manipur, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people and the displacement of more than 50,000. While large-scale fighting has subsided, tensions and sporadic incidents continue, giving emigration a deeper urgency. Many of the Kuki Bnei Menashe from Manipur have been living in camps for the internally displaced.
Several Mizo and Kuki leaders have endorsed the idea of their Israeli ancestry but remain staunch Christians.
In 2005, PC Biaksiama, a Mizo scholar who studies Christianity, told a local newspaper that the rabbinical decision “is an instrument of our greatest enemy, Satan, to burst asunder Mizo society and its religion. Christianity is at stake here and we should never take what is happening now lightly.”
Biaksiama now believes that their communities must have migrated to China from ancient Israel, but he sees the move to Israel as outrageous. “Christianity is so well entrenched in the Mizo mind that Mizo nationalism and Christianity cannot be separated,” he said. “And Judaizing is anti-Christian. … What the Menashe people are doing is not right. I pity them because they are of the same blood as we are.”
The approval of the Bnei Menashe migration has come as the Knesset held a special session in October to address “the tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country.” In the previous decade, an average of 40,500 Israelis left the country each year. But, according to Israel’s central bureau of statistics, the number doubled, with more than 80,000 of the country’s 10 million citizens leaving in 2023. Preliminary estimates show that this level of emigration has continued into 2024 and 2025.
According to The Washington Post, “Israeli sociologists and demographers say that most of those in this growing cadre of émigrés are well educated, high-earning, secular, left-leaning and deeply critical of the direction leaders have been taking the country.” The numbers spiked, the Post said, “amid tumultuous protests against the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and even before the Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza.”
The plan will require a special budget of 90 million shekels ($27 million) to cover the costs of the flights of these immigrants, their conversion classes, housing, Hebrew lessons and other special benefits.
In Churachandpur, a Kuki stronghold in Manipur and the center of the Bnei Menashe community where most of its members live, Hatnem Haokip, a young English schoolteacher, said there is a sense of anxiety about the upcoming aliyah. “Right now, no one has sold anything. If they are selected, they will be selling their properties.”
“We’ve stopped everything,” said Loz Hnamte, Jeremiah’s 39-year-old son, who works as a moto vlogger. “I have partnerships with three motorcycle brands right now, but I haven’t taken any sponsorships beyond January,” he said, because that is when he hopes to hear from Israeli officials when they would be allowed to migrate. His family is prepared to leave any day, but until then, he said, they are somewhat “still doing our everyday, normal work.”
