Lost Israel among Christians in India

WorldNetDaily: Rabbis convert 'lost tribe of Israel' :

"... Their return to Israel had been halted in 2003 when then-Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz froze their immigration, prompting Freund to turn to the chief rabbinate so Bnei Menashe members in India can be converted and can return as legally recognized Jews, circumventing the Interior Ministry.

"According to Bnei Menashe oral tradition, the tribe was exiled from Israel and pushed to the east, eventually settling in the border regions of China and India, where most remain today.

"In the 1950s, a man named Tchelah, the chief of an Indian village, said he had a vision, which he shared with his people, that his community was the lost tribe of Menashe. Most in his town had customs similar to Jewish tradition, but they couldn't explain why. They were told by Tchelach to return at once to Israel and embrace the Jewish faith."

If my memory serves, the reason the Interior Ministry had suspended the aliyah claims of the Bnei Menashe revolved around the question of the antiquity of their claim to being Jewish. These people come from a region of India where Christianity goes back to the evangelism of the apostle Thomas. Over the centuries, of course, there were intermarriages, intermingling with other communities, and some fell away from Christianity.

Some Israeli authorities were suspicious that persons of Christian or other faiths might be claiming Jewish identity to escape India without the money and a lot of paperwork needed to emigrate elsewhere. Such a suspicion was not without foundation, especially given the reassertion of a particularly militant Hinduism in recent decades making life difficult for all minority faiths in India. By performing Orthodox conversion rites in India, the Sephardic rabbinate sidesteps the issue of their ancestry and qualifies these converts for aliyah based on the validity of their conversions.

In all likelihood, at least some of these person's ancestors were Israelites. The Parthian Empire was centered on Israelite communities carried into exile. Eventually, the Parthian Empire reached well into India. So, it should not be surprising that, in carrying out Christ's commission to seek out the lost, St. Thomas should encounter some of these Israelites in India to whom he preached the Gospel of the Messiah for whom they had been waiting.