The Israeli government is reported to have quietly approved a fast-track immigration of 7.000 members of a supposedly “lost Jewish” tribe, known as the Bnei Menashe, currently living in a remote area of India, writes “The Palestine Chronicle” Saturday.
Under the plan, the “lost Jews” would be brought to Israel over the next two years by right-wing and religious organisations who, critics are concerned, will seek to place them in West Bank settlements in a bid to foil Israel’s partial agreement to a temporary freeze of settlement growth.
The government’s decision, leaked in January to Ynet, Israel’s biggest news website, was made possible by a ruling in 2005 by Shlomo Amar, one of Israels two chief rabbis, that the Bnei Menashe are one of 10 lost Jewish tribes, supposedly exiled from the Middle East 2700 years ago.
He ordered a team of rabbis to go to north-east India to begin preparing Bnei Menashe who identified themselves as Jews for conversion to the strictest stream of Judaism, Orthodoxy, so they would qualify to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return.
The Bnei Menashe belong to an ethnic group called the Shinlung, who number more than one million and live mainly in the states of Manipur and Mi-zoram, close to the Burmese border.
They were conver-ted from animism to Christianity by British missionaries a century ago, but a small number claim to have kept an ancient connection to Judaism. DNA samples taken from them have failed so far to establish any common ancestry to Jews.
