The Blogs: Chapchar Kut, the spring festival of the Bnei Menashe

Chapchar Kut, the spring festival of the Mizo people, is little known outside Northeast India where most Mizos live. Perhaps surprisingly to some, it is also celebrated in Israel. This year, my wife Ana and I had the privilege to be invited to celebrate with the Bnei Menashe community of Kiryat Arba.

The Bnei Menashe are speakers of several closely related Tibeto-Burman languages who identify as descendants of a Lost Tribe of Israel. Insipired by a number of Jewish-like traditions, folk songs about crossing the Red Sea and legends about a progenitor named Manmasi or Manasia, Mizo and Kuki people from India and Myanmar began converting to Judaism and making aliyah in the late 20th century. Today, about five thousand Bnei Menashe live in Israel, scattered between Kiryat Arba, Nof HaGalil, Sderot, Nitzan, Akko and a few other towns. Roughly as many remain in India, waiting for their chance to move to Israel.

Since the early 2000s, many Bnei Menashe olim have integrated into Israeli society and contributed to it in many capacities—from rabbis to entrepreneurs to soldiers who died defending their new homeland. Nevertheless, most Israelis know little to nothing about the community and its unique culture, often confusing fellow Jews of Northeast Indian background with non-Jewish labor immigrants from Thailand and the Philippines.

To help fill this gap, I’ve been working on a small research project on the Bnei Menashe’s ethnic languages in Israel, documenting their vitality, domains of use and the birth of what I consider a new Jewish language in the making. Constantly exposed to Hebrew influence, Mizo and Thadou Kuki as spoken in Israel are incorporating new words and changing—just like the Germanic dialects spoken by medieval Ashkenazim eventually became their own thing, Yiddish.

My fascination with the languages of the Bnei Menashe first brought me to Kiryat Arba several months ago. This Israeli town of seven thousand people is home to about eighty families of Bnei Menashe olim. One of them, Allenby Sela, has written and published dozens of books on Judaism and Jewish history in his native Mizo.

His work serves two purposes. On the one hand, it helps new arrivals from India convert and start integrating before they master Hebrew. On the other hand, the fact that books in a minority language from half the world away are printed and distributed in Israel has value in and of itself. It asserts the status of the Bnei Menashe as an inseparable part of Israel’s cultural and linguistic diversity.

In today’s Mizoram, Chapchar Kut is a seasonal holiday with no religious significance. On this day, it’s customary to wear black shirts with stripes and colorful skirts, offer traditional, home-cooked food to your friends and relatives and dance to Mizo tunes. The most iconic Chapchar Kut dance requires a bunch of long bamboo sticks. Hard-boiled eggs are another must at Chapchar Kut—traditionally, people stuff them in each other’s mouths, but you can get away with just exchanging them and eating them at your own pace if you’re not into that.

Bnei Menashe olim in Israel have preserved these traditions and encourage their non-Indian neighbors to participate. This year, Chapchar Kut coincided with Passover, so a rabbi was invited and retold a tale by Nachman of Breslov on the significance of the holiday, building a bridge between the Bnei Menashe’s ethnic traditions that predate their conversion and the strong Jewish identity that they have today. Other guests from outside the community included the town’s mayor with his team and a researcher from Bar-Ilan University, as well as numerous Kiryat Arba residents who were friends with or curious about the Bnei Menashe.

I’m still working on my first paper on the emerging Jewish language of the Bnei Menashe which, after consulting with Allenby Sela and another prominent community activist Isaac Thangjom, I decided to call “Judeo-Zo.” In the meantime, I’m happy to share a few photos capturing the atmosphere of my first Chapchar Kut with my new friends.