The Bnei Menashe (Hebrew: בני מנשה, "Children of Menasseh", known as the Shinlung in India[3]) is a community of Indian Jews from various Tibeto-Burmese[4] ethnic groups from the border of India and Burma who claim descent from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel,[3]: 3  allegedly based on the Hmar belief in an ancestor named Manmasi.

[3]: 3 In the late 20th century, Israeli rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, of the group Amishav, named these people the "Bnei Menashe" based on their account of descent from Manasseh.

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.

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).

According to Lal Dena, the Bnei Menashe have come to believe that the legendary Hmar ancestor Manmasi[5] was the Hebrew Menasseh, son of Joseph.

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.

[11][12] In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted them as Jews due to the devotion displayed by their practice through the decades, but still required individuals to undergo formal ritual conversion.

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.

[15] 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.

[17][18] 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.

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,[21][page needed] where it eventually settled in the northeastern states of Manipur and Mizoram.

[22] 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.

In the late 20th century, the Israeli Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail founded Amishav (Hebrew for "My People Returns"), an organisation dedicated to locating descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and assisting them in aliyah.

The younger man was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and former deputy director of communications and policy planning in the Prime Minister's office.

According to the late Isaac Hmar Intoate, a scholar involved with the project, researchers found no genetic evidence of Middle Eastern ancestry for the Mizo-Chin-Kuki men.

[35] The social scientist Lev Grinberg commented that "right wing Jewish groups wanted such conversions of distant people to boost the population in areas disputed by the Palestinians.

[25] The documentation produced formed the basis for a decision to allow the Bnei Menashe to immigrate as Jews to Israel ostensibly under the country's Law of Return, though in practice he facilitated their emigration by bypassing the regulations and legal criteria set by the Israeli Ministry of Absorption.

[36] The Israeli Bnei Menashe now recount that, after Avichail asked him to do so, Rabbi Amar dispatched three dayanim (religious judges) to Manipur to conduct interviews and investigate the claims of Israelite descent.

[38][39] [40] Most ethnic Mizo-Kuki-Chin have rejected the Bnei Menashe claim of Jewish origin; they believe their peoples are indigenous to Asia, as supported by the Y-DNA test results.

[citation needed] By 2006, some 1,700 Bnei Menashe had moved to Israel, where they were settled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (before the disengagement).

[42] By 2024 over a hundred Bnei Menashe families had settled in the Israeli city of Sderot which is located within a mile of Gaza and had by 2024 completed the construction of a synagogue and beit midrash (Torah study hall) contributed to the community by Sdeot's mayor, Alon Davidi.

"[47] He objected to the new immigrants being settled in the unstable territory of the Gaza Strip's Gush Katif settlements (which were evacuated two years later) and in the West Bank.

Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, a rabbinical judge dealing with the conversion of Bnei Menashe, accused the Knesset Absorption Committee of making a decision based on racist ideas.

[47] At the time, Michael Freund, with the Amishav organization, noted that assimilation was proceeding; young men of the Bnei Menashe served in Israeli combat units.

Biaksiama of the Aizawl Christian Research Centre said, [T]he mass conversion by foreign priests will pose a threat not only to social stability in the region, but also to national security.

A large number of people will forsake loyalty to the Union of India, as they all will become eligible for a foreign citizenship.He wrote the book, Mizo Nge Israel?

In March 2004, Biaksiama appeared on television, discussing the issues with Lalchhanhima Sailo, founder of Chhinlung Israel People's Convention (CIPC), a secessionist Mizo organization.

[51] In July 2006, Israeli Immigration Absorption Minister Ze'ev Boim said that the 218 Bnei Menashe who had completed their conversions would be allowed to enter the country, but "first the government must decide what its policy will be towards those who have yet to (formally) convert.

In October 2007, the Israeli government said that approval of travelers' entry into Israel for the purpose of mass conversion and citizenship would have to be decided by the full Cabinet, rather than by the Interior Minister alone.

Michael Freund, the director of Shavei Israel, wrote that the Bnei Menashe claim to have a chant they call "Miriam's Prayer."