Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forum'Lost’ Indian Jews come to Israel despite skepticism over ties to faith
Some 2,000 members of the Indian Bnei Menashe community live in Israel. Another 5,000 are waiting to immigrate.
By JTA | Oct. 20, 2013 | 8:01 AM | 8
A Kassam rocket had just landed across the street, but it couldnt wipe the smile off David Lhundgims face as he entered his apartment in this embattled town near the Gaza border.
Born in the rural provinces of northeast India, Lhundgim has lived in Sderot since he moved to Israel in 2007, and by at least one measure he seemed to be well-adjusted: Lhundgim didnt flinch when he heard bombs explode outside.
For him, immigration to Israel was the fulfillment of a biblical promise; explosions were but a minor nuisance.
After 2,000 years in exile we would have lost our community, Lhundgim said. All of our lives were about how to move to Israel and keep the commandments.
Its not hard to understand why Lhundgim sees his life story as one of biblical prophecy fulfilled. Until age 24, he lived in a remote corner of northeast India in a community that believes itself to be descended from the ancient Israelite tribe of Menashe. Ritual similarities to Judaism such as an animal sacrifice around Passover time strengthened those beliefs.
Today, Lhundgim is among some 2,000 Bnei Menashe that live in Israel; another 5,000 are in the pipeline waiting to immigrate. This week, the Israeli government gave approval for 899 more Bnei Menashe to come.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.553350
Warpy
(111,274 posts)either, not until they checked their mitochondrial DNA. Ditto Chinese Jews. Fortunately, not all of them want to emigrate to Israel.
You have a link?
Warpy
(111,274 posts)on the DNA Project.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)A subsequent study in 2000 found that a substantial number of Lemba men carry a particular haplotype of the Y-chromosome known as the Cohen modal haplotype (CMH), as well as, a haplogroup of Y-DNA Haplogroup J found amongst some Jews, but also in other populations across the Middle East and Arabia.[45][46] The genetic studies have suggested that there is no Semitic female contribution to the Lemba gene pool.[47] This indicates that Jewish men migrated to Africa in ancient times and took wives from among the local people after settling in new communities.
Among Jews the CMH marker is most prevalent among Jewish Kohanim, or hereditary priests. As recounted in Lemba oral tradition, the ancestor of the Buba clan "had a leadership role in bringing the Lemba out of Israel" and eventually into Southern Africa.[48] The genetic study found that 50% of the males in the Buba clan had the Cohanim marker, a proportion higher than in the general Jewish population.[49] While not defining the Lemba as Jews, the genetic results confirm the oral accounts of ancestral males originating from outside Africa, and specifically from southern Arabia.[50]
More recently, Mendez et al. (2011) observed that a moderately high frequency of the studied Lemba samples carried Y-DNA Haplogroup T, which is also considered to be of Near Eastern origin. The Lemba T carriers belonged exclusively to T1b*, which is rare and was not sampled in indigenous Jews of the Near East or North Africa. T1b* has been observed at low frequencies in the Bulgarian and Ashkenazi Jews as well as in a few Levantine populations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemba_people