Lives of the Children of Manasia

Oral history interviews with the B'nei Menashe community

By: Hillel Halkin, Isaac Thangjom

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Kuki-Mizo are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group living in the northeast Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, in the remote foothills of the Himalayas along the Burmese border, and the Judaizing movement that led to the formation of the B’nei Menashe started in their midst in the early 1970s. Many of the men and women interviewed in Lives of the Children of Manasia were among the founders of this movement. Their individual life stories, each fascinating in its way and some telling of experiences that our modern minds find difficult to grasp, narrate a collective drama that until now has been shrouded in myth and misconceptions. These stories explain how an initially small of number of people, whose immediate ancestors were illiterate rice farmers, jungle warriors, and practitioners of a traditional tribal religion, courageously found their way to Judaism; what about the latter attracted them though they had never before met a rel Jew in their lives; and how their fierce attachment to their new faith eventually brought them and thousands of others to Israel, where some 5,000 of them live today as full citizens.