QUEST FOR LOST TRIBES LEADS RABBI TO ASIA
By Gustav Niebuhr
June 26, 1993
Like many a traveler, Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail keeps snapshots handy to show exotic places he has visited. He points out one, taken two years ago in an isolated village in eastern India, many miles off the tourist track.
It shows several local people, members of the Shinlung tribe, holding banners. Most are in Hebrew, but there is one in English. It says: "Take Us to Israel."
These people are returning to Judaism, Avichail said.
In one of the most remote areas of India?
Well, yes, if you accept the conclusions of the soft-spoken, 61-year-old rabbi, who says the 1 million-member Shinlung tribe is a living clue to one of Western civilization's great mysteries: Whatever became of the 10 lost tribes of ancient Israel?
According to the Bible (the Second Book of Kings), the tribes -- Reuben, Simeon, Gad, Dan, Issachar, Asher, Naphtali, Zebulun, Ephraim and Manasseh -- were swept into captivity by the Assyrian army when it rolled across Israel 2,700 years ago. Members of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and the Levites were taken too, but they returned. The others never did.
Where they went is a question that has tantalized religious scholars and others for centuries. The 18th-century English poet William Blake believed the lost tribes settled in the British Isles.
But Avichail believes they were dispersed throughout Asia. From Jerusalem, he runs a small, nonprofit organization, Amishav, or "My People Return," to track them down. The organization also keeps tabs on populations of long-assimilated Jews, such as the Maranos of Spain, who converted to Catholicism centuries ago; it provides religious information to members of those groups and others who wish to convert to Judaism.
Avichail, a Bible teacher in a couple of Israeli teachers colleges, said his fascination with the lost tribes dates to 1961, when he attended a lecture on the subject. Now, he said, finding the tribes "is my goal in life."
So far, he has contacted four large groups that he identifies as their descendants: the Pathans, 15 million people living in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the Kashmiris, more than 5 million of whom live in northern India; the Chiang, 300,000 strong near Tibet; and the Shinlung in eastern India and Myanmar (formerly Burma).
Those groups practice either Islam or Christianity. But in each case, Avichail said, he has found similarities between the group's customs and those of Judaism.
An Amishav brochure says of the Shinlung that "their tribal songs refer to the crossing of the Red Sea, and the name Menashe {similar to one of the 10 tribes} appears repeatedly in their literature and prayers."
The brochure also states that although most are Christian, about 5,000 have recently "returned" to Judaism -- circumcising infant boys, attending synagogue, keeping the Sabbath -- "and a growing number are requesting to return to Israel."
Avichail is not well known in the United States. Some religious leaders here voice a mixed response to his quest.
"It's charming, and I wish him well," said Rabbi Kenneth L. Cohen, of Congregation Beth Shalom in Columbia. The 10 lost tribes tend to be more the focus of legend than historical fact, he said. "But who knows what he might turn up?"
Rabbi A. James Rudin, interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, wonders how practical it is to try to restore a Jewish identity to people who lost it long ago. "There is no doubt Jews got to India; they got to Ethiopia; they got to Spain; they got to China. But whether they can be reclaimed is another matter," he said.
Robert Lande, a Silver Spring resident and a professor at the University of Baltimore's law school, said he believes many American Jews would be interested in this subject. Last Tuesday, the rabbi gave a lecture in Baltimore and took questions for hours afterward, said Lande, who hopes to find people interested in forming a U.S. chapter of Amishav.
Rudin said many people, no doubt, would find attractive the idea that there are previously unknown, historically Jewish populations in the world -- groups that might fill "the aching void" left by the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
"There's a yearning to make more Jews, to find more Jews," he said.
But a few people have worried aloud to people connected with Amishav about what could happen if the groups it has contacted decide to convert to Judaism and move to Israel.
Yonaton Benari, a member of Amishav's board who accompanied the rabbi to the United States this month, says not to worry. "People should understand, there's not an intention here of overwhelming the established, mainstream Jewish community in the U.S., Europe and Israel."
Further, he said, Amishav is working mainly to build "bridges" to the lost tribes, supplying them with religious information and resources. Conversion could be a very long process.
"It's taken 2,500 years" just to begin making contact with these people, he said. "We don't expect to change it in the next year or two."
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