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If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:
And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers. Deuteronomy 30:3-5
As reported by Associated Press, December 23, 2012:
A group of 50 Jews said to descend from one of the 10 Lost Tribes immigrated to Israel Thursday from their village in northeastern India.
The members of the Bnei Menashe community prayed in their local synagogue and then hugged their crying relatives before heading off to the airport in the Manipur state capital of Imphal, 34 miles away.
The Bnei Menashe say they are descended from Jews banished from ancient Israel to India in the eighth century BC.
An Israeli chief rabbi recognized members of the Bnei Menashe community as a lost tribe in 2005 and about 1,700 moved to Israel before the Israeli government stopped giving them visas.
The government recently reversed that policy. About 7,200 of them remain in India.
April 27, 2026 update: As reported by Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz of Israel365 News, April 24, 2026 (links in original):
More than 250 members of the Bnei Menashe community landed at Ben Gurion Airport Thursday night, marking the first wave of a government-funded operation to bring thousands of their community members from northeast India to Israel. The arrivals, bleary-eyed from their long flight, walked under an arch of blue-and-white balloons and down a red carpet at Terminal 1 while well-wishers waved Israeli flags and a recording of “Oseh Shalom” filled the hall. Men wore knitted kippahs or hats; married women wore head coverings, in keeping with Orthodox Jewish practice.
The flight is the first of three scheduled over the coming weeks, with approximately 600 immigrants expected to arrive in total. The broader operation — dubbed Miftza Kanfei Shachar, “Operation Wings of Dawn” — aims to relocate the remaining 6,000 members of the Bnei Menashe community to Israel by 2030, with 1,200 arriving in 2026 alone.
The operation follows a government decision approved in November, spearheaded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The new olim — immigrants to Israel — will initially be settled in absorption centers in Nof HaGalil, a northern city overlooking Nazareth, and in Kiryat Yam, where existing Bnei Menashe communities are already established.
Manipur has seen periodic clashes for nearly three years between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the mainly Christian Kuki community, which have killed more than 250 people, endangering the Bnei Menashe community, which has been caught in the middle of the fighting.
Sofer, who welcomed the newcomers at the airport, called their arrival a “historic moment.” Addressing the new olim directly, he said: “We are making history as we bring the entire Bnei Menashe community to Israel. There is no more fitting and moving time to welcome a plane full of olim than right after the State’s 78th Independence Day. Welcome home.”
Jewish Agency chair Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog framed the moment in broader terms. “Aliyah is the State of Israel’s growth engine, and every new oleh is a lighthouse of hope,” he said, adding that responsibility extends beyond arrival to ensuring successful absorption and opportunity for each immigrant.
The Shavei Israel organization, which traces the descendants of the Lost Tribes and has facilitated the community’s immigration to Israel, estimates that some 4,000 Bnei Menashe have immigrated to Israel since the 1990s, with roughly 7,000 still living in India. The new arrivals will undergo formal conversion before receiving Israeli citizenship.
The Bnei Menashe — literally “sons of Manasseh” — claim descent from the tribe of Menashe, one of the Ten Lost Tribes exiled by the Assyrian Empire more than 27 centuries ago, roughly 140 years before the Babylonian exile sent the tribe of Judah into its own dispersal. Their ancestors wandered for centuries through Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, and China before settling in what is today the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, along the borders of Burma and Bangladesh.
While it is extraordinary that they survived, their continued connection with the nation of Israel is even more remarkable. Through every century of wandering, the Bnei Menashe maintained Shabbat observance, kept kashrut, celebrated the Jewish festivals, and upheld the laws of family purity. They practiced circumcision. They held onto the dream of returning to the Land of Israel. In the 19th century, Christian missionaries converted many of them, yet even that rupture could not extinguish the ancestral memory passed from generation to generation.
The Prophet Ezekiel described this very moment. God commanded him:
“Take one stick and write on it, ‘For Judah and for the children of Israel his companions’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions.'” (Ezekiel 37:16)
Michael Freund, founder of Shavei Israel, who has dedicated his life to finding and returning the scattered remnants of Israel, sees in the Bnei Menashe’s arrival a direct fulfillment of that prophecy. “The return of the Bnei Menashe is a clear and explicit indication that we have entered a new stage of the Redemption,” Freund said. “The prophets talked about the return of Judah and the return of Israel. It seems repetitive unless it was intended to tell us that the tribes of Israel were meant to return separately from the tribe of Judah. The prophecy clearly states that the tribes of Israel and Judah will return separately, and that is what is happening right now with the Bnei Menashe.”
The Sages understood geulah — redemption — not as a single thunderclap but as a gathering process, incremental and purposeful. The ingathering of the exiles spoken of throughout the prophets was never meant to be only the return of one tribe. It was always meant to be the reconstitution of an entire nation. Most Jews today descend from the tribe of Judah, exiled to Babylon. The Bnei Menashe are something different — a living remnant of the Northern Kingdom, the other half of a people split apart by Assyrian conquest and now, piece by piece, being made whole again.
Thursday night at Ben Gurion Airport, as families who had spent years apart finally embraced and wept, that ancient process moved forward. Twenty-seven centuries of exile, wandering through the heart of Asia, ended not with fanfare from world powers but with blue-and-white balloons, a red carpet, and the words “Oseh Shalom” — He who makes peace — echoing through Terminal 1. The lost were found. The exiles came home.
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