![]() Some go north, see a train for the first time and get as far as Assam, a neighboring Indian state. A group of believers then sets off on foot for the Promised Land, thinking it might be just over the horizon. Roll forward to 1952, and a local headman falls into a trance, has a vision and announces that God has told him the Mizos are the lost tribe. They called themselves Chhinlung, after the cave, and over the years they made their way south through Thailand, settling for good in a pocket of hills astride what is today Burma, India and Bangladesh. According to local legend, the Mizos' Jewish connection goes back more than 1,000 years to a remote cave in China where the scattered remnants of the lost Jewish tribe of Menashe were holed up. The Church has ignored these claims as they don't mean anything. There is a tendency on the part of some groups to believe they are physically related to the Children of Abraham, as well as spiritually related. Zairema, former moderator of the Presbyterian church, says exposure to the Old Testament and its stories accounts for the Mizos' belief that they may be Jewish. This is a part of the world where the Word of God is revered-in both its New and Old Testaments. The names appear to have been plucked from the entire Judeo-Christian spectrum. Shops carry such names as Israel Stores, Zion Tailors, Exodus Press, Nazareth School. A main intersection is called Israel Point. One hillside is called Bethlehem, another Salem. The confusion over identity is plainly visible in the narrow and precipitous streets of Aizawl, Mizoram's capital. That is, until some of them became convinced that the Mizo people were one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. The Christian religion, brought to the jungle-clad borderlands of eastern India by Welsh Evangelicals 100 years ago, has been guardian of their souls and permeates all aspects of their lives-political, social and economic. Its isolation, fed by a 20-year guerrilla insurgency against New Delhi that ended in 1986, has made it a breeding ground for spiritual adventurers offering salvation, identity and the prospect of emigration and riches abroad. 700,000) is cut off by distance and culture from the rest of India. Still, it's not hard to see why some Mizos might believe they are connected to a faraway land. The history of the Bible makes that clear. Vanlalhruaia, a senior member of the local Presbyterian church, Mizoram's most important denomination. We are not of Jewish descent, says the Rev. Sela's tale is greeted with scorn by leaders of Mizoram's majority Christian population. When I read the Old Testament, I realized Mizos were very similar to the Jews, says Sela, so I prayed to God to tell me if we were Jewish. But wait, this gets even more intriguing: the Jews of this remote region believe they are descendants of a legendary lost tribe of Israel that, according to the Old Testament, disappeared almost 3,000 years ago. The forested hills of northeastern India must rank among the last places on the planet where you would expect to find a synagogue, let alone two. Father of nine children, four of whom live in Israel, Sela ran a roadside tea stall and prayed at the Presbyterian church before he switched to the Jewish faith in 1972. Farther up the hill, in a corrugated iron shed perched on the side of a deep ravine, Eliazer Sela, 56, chazan of the city's older Ashkenazi synagogue, leads a slightly larger congregation of 21 worshipers in evening prayers, the women separated from the men by a mosquito net. This is Yeshuran Ngaihte, 50, the chazan, or elder, of the year-old Sephardic synagogue in Aizawl, capital of India's Mizoram state on the border with Burma. Afterward he says: I was a corps cadet in the Salvation Army 10 years ago, but now I am a Jew. A small number of followers join in the responses. Follow a bare room in an unfinished concrete building on the fringes of the Golden Triangle where the hill tribesmen were once headhunters, a man puts on a prayer shawl and begins chanting in Hebrew.
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