A GROUP of 7,000 Indians who believe that they belong to a fabled “lost tribe” expect to emigrate to Israel after being recognised as descendants of the ancient Israelites.

Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar has acknowledged the status of the Bnei Menashe people and will send a team of rabbinical judges to a remote corner of northeast India, next to Burma, to convert them to Judaism.

The conversions will ensure that the group who claim to be “children of the tribe of Manasseh, a son of Joseph” will be able to emigrate to Israel under the Jewish Law of Return. It will allow them to circumvent an Interior Ministry ban imposed on the Bnei Menashe Indians two years ago.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group of evangelical Christians who work for Jewish causes, has already agreed to underwrite the cost of the Orthodox conversions of the Bnei Menashe to facilitate their migration to Israel.

A rabbinical court delegation dispatched by Rabbi Amar last year to assess the Bnei Menashe claim presented its report this week. The Chief Rabbi decided not to recognise Indians from the Mizoram and Manipur regions as Jewish, but did accept evidence of their Jewish descent.

Yoel Ilan, who left Mizoram for Israel before the ban on the Indians was imposed, is delighted for his compatriots but remains cautious. “We’ve no doubt about our Jewishness,” said Mr Ilan, 35, who changed his name from Lalram Chhuana. “At last the Chief Rabbi has accepted us. But the Government may still have a say.”

Most of the two million Chinlung people living in Mizoram and Manipur say they are descendants of one of ten “lost tribes” of Israel exiled 2,700 years ago by the Assyrian conquerors.

They settled in the remote Indo-Burmese jungles after travelling through Iraq, Afghanistan and southern China.

After forsaking animism and converting to Christianity more than a century ago, most remained true to their new faith despite a fierce belief in their Jewish roots.

A handful went further and began adopting Judaism in the 1970s after seeing the traditions of their ancestors mirrored in the Old Testament.

The movement’s foundations date back to the 1950s, when two Pentecostal Christians experienced dreams in which angels declared they were the people of Israel. Others had already noticed similarities in their pre-Christian traditions with those of Jewish rites.

One was circumcision on the eight day after birth carried out, not with a knife, but with sharpened stones, just as Joshua did in the Bible. The tribe also celebrates a holiday on which unleavened bread was eaten, even though they do not normally eat bread.

Today they light Hanukah candles on makeshift menorahs. Shabbat is celebrated in the synagogue using prayer books with phonetic Hebrew and many families eat kosher food.

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