The Mind-Boggling Story of Shlomo and Yemimah Gangte

How a young man from a village in northeast India, convinced of his hidden Jewish roots, moved his family to Israel, became an Orthodox rabbi, and turned into a national hero.

The B’nei Menashe, an estimated 4,000 of whom live in Israel today as full Jews and citizens, originated in a Judaizing movement that arose in the 1970s among the Kuki-Mizos, a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group inhabiting the federal states of Manipur and Mizoram in the far northeast corner of India. Like other Judaizers in modern history, including the Subbotniki in Russia and the Szombatosok in Hungary, they emerged from the matrix of Christianity—or, more exactly, from their rejection of a Christianity that they perceived as having betrayed its biblical, “Old Testament” roots.

In each of these cases, the rejection started with the Sabbatarian belief that Christianity had illegitimately moved the Bible’s mandated day of rest from Saturday to Sunday. But where most of the world’s Sabbatarians have remained within the Christian fold—the Seventh Day Adventists being a prime example—groups like the Subbotniki, the Szombatosok, and the B’nei Menashe ended by leaving Christianity completely and embracing all of the commandments of Judaism, starting with circumcision and observance of the biblical festivals and continuing on to a total acceptance of rabbinic tradition.

At the same time, however, the B’nei Menashe are unique.

First, their founding fathers and mothers took their first steps toward Judaism almost entirely unaided. Not only were there no Jews in their vicinity to inspire or teach them, but they were at first hardly aware that Jews existed elsewhere. Inhabiting a remote, hilly area covered largely by jungle and traversable if at all by primitive roads, they only gradually came into contact, first, with the small Jewish community of Calcutta; next, with the larger one of Mumbai (Bombay); and finally, with a dedicated Israeli rabbi, Eliyahu Avichayil, who in the 1980s and ’90s taught them the basics of Orthodox Judaism. It was Rabbi Avichayil who first began bringing groups of them to Israel, where they underwent halakhic conversion.

Second, unlike the Subbotniki and Szombatosok, whose forefathers had been Christians for centuries, many of the first Judaizers of northeast India were born into non-Christian families and baptized only as children or young adults. Christianity arrived in Mizoram and Manipur with British missionaries at the start of the 20th century; before then, the Kuki-Mizos, an amalgam of ethnically linked but frequently warring tribes, had practiced an ancestral religion of their own that revolved around animal sacrifice performed by village priests. Although this religion was ultimately rooted out by the missionaries, it lingered in some places into the 1960s and beyond. Not a few of our interviewees have clear memories of it from their childhoods.

Third, the B’nei Menashe possessed something that other Judaizers did not: namely, the conviction that they were descended from one of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel, exiled, according to the Bible, by the Assyrian empire in 722 BCE.

This conviction rested on a number of striking parallels between certain biblical stories and customs and those of the old Kuki-Mizo religion, as well as on the latter’s having had a prominent ancestor-figure called Manasia or Manmasi, identified by the Judaizers with the biblical Menashe, the son of Joseph. Hence the name taken by them of B’nei Menashe and hence, too, their feeling that their adoption of Judaism involved a return to their true selves. Rather astonishingly, three field trips of my own to Mizoram and Manipur in 1998-2000 led me to the conclusion, put forth in my 2002 book Across the Sabbath River, that the Manasia/Menashe equation might contain a kernel of historical truth.

Shlomo Gangte’s personal history, supplemented by that of his wife Yemimah who participated in the interview with him, is likewise both typical and atypical. Like most of those interviewed for the oral-history project, he was raised in a small, largely self-sufficient village surrounded by jungle; as in their case, the religion of his childhood was the old pre-Christian one; as with them, it was his unsatisfying experience with Christianity that eventually led him to Judaism. Without it, he would never have encountered the translations of the Hebrew Bible that changed his life.

But Shlomo Gangte’s story also differs considerably from that of the other interviewees. Born in 1967, he is the youngest of them, and came of age at a time when Judaism was a tiny but already going concern in northeast India, rather than an initially vague goal that its founders were struggling to articulate. However roughly, the religious trail that he took had already been blazed when he embarked on it.

His road to Israel, by contrast, was completely his own. Almost all of the other B’nei Menashe who reached Israel did so in groups organized over a period of many years by Rabbi Avichayil, and at a later stage by his successors. Shlomo and Yemimah Gangte were among the few who refused to await their turn but set out on their private initiative. Their tale of how they succeeded is one of a kind in the annals of the B’nei Menashe’s aliyah to Israel.

Finally, and most unusually, Shlomo Gangte’s journey to Judaism has taken him farther than any other member of the B’nei Menashe community has gone. He is not the only one to have been rabbinically ordained; there is another such case to date. Yet he stands out in the lengths to which he has carried his acquired Jewish knowledge and commitment, and his life’s trajectory has been truly remarkable.

In 1999, when I first met Shlomo on my trip to Manipur, I could not possibly have imagined that this smiling young man in a t-shirt and baseball cap, knowing so little about Judaism yet so eager to learn all he could, would one day grow the beard and wear the black hat and clothes of a ?aredi Jew, let alone becoming educated enough to be entrusted with the work he now does. How he became, in addition, a national hero in Israel is something I’ll leave to his interview to relate. It’s a mind-boggling story—but so, when one considers it, is the entire story of the B’nei Menashe.

The interview with Shlomo and Yemimah Gangte was conducted in their native language of Thadou by Yitz?ak Thangjom, who has worked together with me on this project and has provided the translated English transcript that, abridged and edited by me, appears here.

Definitions of words marked with an asterisk (*) can be found in the glossary at the end of the interview.

Shlomo and Yemimah Gangte

 Shlomo Gangte: I was born in Phainuom, in the Khoupum valley, in the Nungba Sub-Division of the Tamenglong district of the Indian state of Manipur, on September 12, 1967. We were twelve brothers and sisters, and I was the eleventh child. My parents named me Tai Lalmuon, which means “Zealot of the King of Peace.”

We must have been about 20 to 30 families in the village. It was a typical village for the area. It was founded by my grandfather, who was the first to settle there. The valley was flat and rectangular, like a very large soccer field, with a gentle beauty that I feel nostalgic for to this day. Two rivers flowed along either side of it, and trees grew on their banks. It was surrounded by treacherously steep mountains. Our village stood at one end of it. Most of it was farmed. In the middle of it stood a hillock with a single tree on it. Important events were held there.

We grew all that we liked and needed. We had a vegetable garden in our backyard. Thanks to the many streams and rivers nearby, fish were plentiful. At other times, we’d slaughter one of the domestic animals that we raised. We had mainly cows and water buffaloes. Since I was too young to be useful in the fields, I was assigned to tend the buffaloes. My job was to take them to pasture. Once there, I’d hop on the back of one and lie there daydreaming the whole day.

There was a dirt road on which cars started to travel when I was growing up. They were a rare sight, though. There was still no bus service. Christianity hadn’t reached our village at the time. There may have been a few families that had accepted it, but they weren’t significant enough for me to notice. When I was a small boy in the early 1970s, I had no idea what Christianity was. My father became a Christian only on his deathbed, after being told that if he didn’t he wouldn’t be given a proper burial.

My grandparents had died by the time I was born, but my father stuck to the old ways and resisted change. He was the thiempu (old-religion priest) of the village. My grandfather had been one, too. As far as I understood it, they worshipped Pathen, the one God. By the time I was growing up, missionaries were appearing in our area. They approached my father several times, trying to convince him to accept “Jesu Christa,” the redeemer of the world. My father asked them who this person was and whether he was still alive. When he was told that “Jesu Christa” had been killed by Roman soldiers long ago, he said the missionaries might as well worship the soldiers who had killed him. Why worship a dead man? I can remember hearing such conversations.

My father was a typically down-to-earth, no-nonsense man of the old days. If someone fell ill, a blood sacrifice was called for. That was the practice he’d always known. It’s hard to do away with age-old customs. I remember a rooster sacrifice. There was one having to do with rice stalks, too. I was still very small and have only fuzzy recollections of those things. I never got close enough to a sacrifice to hear what my father was saying. I remember him calling out during a bad storm,

We are well!
The children of Manmasi are well!

But I didn’t know who Manmasi* was. I don’t think he did, either.

In those days, there were no religious divisions among us. Everyone drank rice wine, which the Christian missionaries forbade. When you visited a friend, he offered you wine and food, and you did the same when he visited you. It was a good, easygoing, uncomplicated life.

My friends and I were a bunch of active, curious boys. We played a lot of kang.* We played soccer, too, and other traditional games like Lut thel thel.* I remember one strange incident. Five or six of us had been playing together toward evening. Suddenly I looked up and saw that there were many more children playing with us than that. I didn’t recognize any of them; they weren’t from our village. They played with us for a while and just as suddenly disappeared. I thought they were thilhas.* I’m simply telling you what I saw.

Every household had a gun, an old musket. We grew up learning to handle it. The first time I fired one, I wasn’t more than ten years old. There was a river at one end of the village, with lots of trees along its banks in which doves roosted. I had a friend stand in front of me and I rested the barrel on his shoulder. Another friend stood behind me and stuffed his fingers in my ears, because those old guns made an awfully loud bang. l took aim, fired, and a bird came tumbling down from a tree, It was better than any game I had ever played.

The Khoupum Valley was like a paradise, but had my brothers, sisters, and I remained there, we wouldn’t have gotten ahead in life. One by one, my father sent us all to live with my oldest brother in Churachandpur, 200 kilometers away. This brother taught political science at Churachandpur College. I was one of the last to go. We walked the whole way.

When I got there, I missed our village. I missed my mother and father. I cried a lot. I was still a small child, and my older brothers were busy with their studies and all the other things that young men their age did. That left me, the youngest, the only one with free time—or so they thought. They made me do all the chores at home. I had to be the first one up every morning to sweep the house, fetch water, kindle the hearth, put the kettle up to boil, and feed the pigs while the tea was brewing. Only then would my brothers begin to stir.

When I had done all my chores, I’d wash and we’d all sit down to the morning meal that I made, after which I had to clean up and run to school. I loved school. I was attentive in class, and since I never had time at my brother’s to do my homework, I did it there. When I finished elementary school my brother enrolled me in a high school. I continued there through my senior year, majoring in science. Unfortunately, I cared more for athletics than for having a career. I was even hired by a semi-professional soccer team, the Teddim Road Athletics Union, and played for them as a midfielder for two years. I took up martial arts. One was thangta, Manipuri swordsmanship. When you’re young, you want to learn and do everything. I also belonged to a gospel rock band called Hallelujah. We toured villages. Although I wasn’t a Christian, the boundaries were fluid in those days. I even played at Christian revival meetings, though it felt odd to be taking part in them. The church elders trusted me so much that they put me in charge of a Sunday school.

By this time, most of my older brothers had become Christians. I myself hadn’t decided yet. Being the youngest in the family, I wasn’t under any pressure. I suppose it was assumed that I would sooner or later go along. I didn’t attach too much importance to the whole matter.

Although I continued on to college, I fell in with a bad crowd. Some of my new friends were members of an underground independence movement, the Manipuri People’s Liberation Army. They were outlaws. I ferried them around on my scooter and ran errands for them. It took me away from my studies, but it was exciting to be with them and their guns, and I couldn’t resist the adventure of it. By now, I was well-known as a soccer player and on the music scene. I had lots of friends and was popular. I even acted in a few films. The roles were small but it was fun. After a while, though, I accepted a job offer from a school to teach science and English, and a year later, I met my future wife Ngaineithiem. All her friends called her Buongthe.

We met at a well. A cousin of mine was in charge of making repairs on it and invited me to watch the work. Buongthe came to bring tea and cake for the workers. I noticed her because she was lovely and friendly and liked to smile and laugh. We were married and lived in Churachandpur until the early 90s.

My wife’s family in Churachandpur were Sabbath observers, and I joined their congregation. It was called the House of Yahweh. It had about 25 households and worshiped in a large, beautiful building, with over 100 participants at an average service. It was very much like a family. Everyone cared about everyone else. There was no gossip or backbiting. Communally, it was very nice. My wife’s father was the congregation’s chairman and I was made its secretary. One of the things I did was tell Bible stories

I took them mostly from the Old Testament. Gradually, I came to realize that the Sabbath movement, too, was not being true to the Bible. It may have worshipped on Saturday, but there was no circumcision, no biblical festivals, no purity laws. But although I was already aware of the Judaism that was developing in Manipur at this time, I couldn’t find anyone to discuss it with on an intellectual level. I had heard that it was difficult to win an argument with the followers of Judaism, but they couldn’t beat me in a single debate. I don’t mean to demean anyone, but in those days the Judaism people were not my idea of what Jews should be like. Later on, as I learned more about Judaism, I found that it taught and practiced the very things I had already accepted in my heart: Shabbat, circumcision, family purity and festivals, kashrut. The Judaizing community may not have followed all of the rules, but the religion itself seemed right to me.

That’s why I had myself circumcised. Looking for someone who would perform it on me, I found a man named Kailam. who was known as the “Judaismpa,” the Judaism guy. He told me that he had performed the operation on more than 1,000 people. He showed me recommendations and assured me he was the best. I agreed to do it and he came with his equipment.

It was evening. He lay me down on a table and put his equipment beneath it. Then he gave me an anesthetic injection and cut the foreskin all around. When he wanted to stitch me up, though, he couldn’t find his needle and thread. As he fumbled around looking for it, I was losing a lot of blood. He started to panic. I tried calming him, “Everything is going to be fine,” I said. “If you can’t find it, you probably didn’t bring it.”

An hour passed and the bleeding continued. I was starting to feel weak. My landlord had a son who had come to watch the proceedings. I told him to go his house and bring a needle. He ran there and came back without having found one.

In the end, a needle was found on the premises, a large, rusty one, the kind used for sewing gunnysacks. There was no choice but to use it. By the time Kailam started to stitch me up with it, the anesthesia had worn off and the pain was indescribable. Although he was shaking with fear, he managed, thank God, to get it done. I told him not to worry. “You did well,” I said—after all, it had been my decision to do it. I was pale from loss of blood. Meanwhile, my wife had called her father, who rushed over with food and medicine. He was so angry at Kailam that he nearly gave him a thrashing. I had to explain that it wasn’t his fault.

I was the only one in the House of Yahweh to be circumcised. The Torah said I should do it. What the church said was irrelevant. I was always ready to go my own way if I believed it was the right thing to do. There were things that were forever: circumcision, Shabbat, festivals, kashrut, family purity. A table needs four legs. If one is missing, it won’t stand. There were people who didn’t understand me. There were a lot of questions in my Sabbather church, especially since I held a senior position in it.

When civil war broke out in the mid-90s, we moved to Imphal, the capital of Manipur, to get away from it. It was hard to find jobs there. I worked as a photographer, made short films, and even ran a printing press to make ends meet. Sometimes I traveled to Nepal and brought back electronic goods to sell.

There was a church in Imphal called, if I’m not mistaken, the New Testament Church. It had a library with a large collection of books from all over the world. I spent whole days there reading up on Judaism. I felt an urgent need to discover the truth, and I was finding it harder and harder to believe in Christianity. It had too many contradictions. For example, Jesus said before his crucifixion, “Verily I say unto you, the men standing here will not see death till the son of man returns”—but those men, his disciples, had all died without his returning. There were many things like that in the New Testament. I made a list of 120 of them.

It was then that I decided to go over to Judaism. I had found no fulfillment in Christianity, not even in the Sabbath movement. We joined the Jewish community in Imphal. I took the name Shlomo and gave my wife the name Yemimah; it was from the Bible and I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the sound of it. When our son Yifta? was born in 1997, he had a b’rit milah. This time it was done by a doctor. It was just our luck, though, that he used too much anesthetic and Yifta? fell into a deep sleep and didn’t wake up. We were worried sick. I kept telling myself, “If you had the faith that Abraham had when he went with Isaac to Mount Moriah, you wouldn’t be so afraid.” It was nighttime before he awoke.

All this had nothing to do with wanting to go to Israel. That hadn’t crossed my mind at the time. I wanted to study. I started with the Hebrew alphabet and learned to read the prayer book. When I progressed faster than the others in the congregation, they asked me to be their prayer leader. I started giving lessons on the weekly Torah reading. I toured villages teaching Jewish law, how to conduct prayers, and so on. I helped reorganize Judaism in Manipur and made arrangements for elections to the B’nei Menashe Council. It was only after this that there was a semblance of administrative order in the community. Still, there were also arguments about how to do things, who should be selected for aliyah to Israel, etc.—a lot of chaos.

After about five years in the community, I began to think seriously about aliyah myself. When you teach the same things over and over, they become repetitive. Nothing is new anymore. I felt a need to learn more. I had read a lot of books on Judaism, almost non-stop, but we still didn’t have a rabbi, a ritual slaughterer, or a kashrut supervisor. Without such things, a Jewish community can’t exist. I remember telling my wife that as far as Judaism was concerned, we were still in the wilderness. We had to go either to America or to Israel.

CONTINUE