August/September 2002 Vol. 84 No.1

Northeastern India: The New (Jewish) Frontier By Sandy Carter and Bryan Schwartz The world's only substantial group of practicing East Asian Jews, the Bnei Menashe, came by way of China to live along the India-Myanmar border, hundreds of miles from any major city and even farther from their nearest Jewish neighbors. The Bnei Menashe claim that their forebears were from the Ten Lost Tribes and wandered from Israel to this remote corridor. In recent decades, more than 5,000 of these "Children of Menashe" have embraced Orthodox Jewish practice and regularly crowd into 20 mud and bamboo synagogues. However, because the region is ravaged by tribal warfare, border conflicts and drug trafficking, fewer than a dozen Western Jews have ever visited the community, which is headquartered in Imphal, the capital of the northeast Indian state of Manipur. Regardless of how they arrived, this tribe, as isolated from outside Jewish contact as any active community in the world, maintains hope that their fervent practice will lead them home to Israel.