Who Are The Descendants of Yaakov’s Sons Today – Part II: Ingathering Process of the Geulah

REPOST
THE INGATHERING PROCESS 
OF THE GEULAH

The history of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is littered with dreamers and doers, men who ventured and sought, invented and prophesied, drowned in their insane fictions or zealous beliefs—overcome by their faith, opportunistic, visionary. “Once declared lost, the ten tribes went on to create, time and again, the edges of the earth and the boundaries of the world,” writes historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benite in "The Ten Lost Tribes”.

“They have conjured into existence whole places, such as Arzareth and Sambatyon; charted paths of supposed migration across the face of the earth; built land bridges between Asia and Europe and the Americas; inscribed real places with meaning and rendered them intelligible. The ten tribes have provided centuries of world travelers with itineraries and meaning. Whole peoples have been imbued with meaning through reference to them. They have promised the hope of redemption and humanity’s unity.”

Becoming Moses

In the spring of 1997, shortly after Israel pulled out of its settlements in Hebron, Michael Freund was working at the communications bureau of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then serving his first stint in that office. The Diaspora Affairs adviser at the time worked across the hall, where mail to the cabinet was handled. The adviser and Freund kept what they jokingly referred to as “The Crazy File”: letters from across the globe from people who believed that they were the Messiah or who made oddball requests of the government. These were sometimes illegible, sometimes threatening, sometimes naïve and amusing.

One day, a secretary handed Freund a beat-up orange envelope, addressed to the Prime Minster of Israel. Freund opened it. The letter inside had been sent by the leadership of a community in Manipur, in Northeast India, which claimed to be a lost tribe of the biblical people of Israel. The rest of the letter was a simply worded plea to be allowed to come back to the land of their ancestors after 2,700 years in exile. They had written to Golda Meir and every prime minister since then but had never gotten an answer. Why not?

“I read it,” […] “and I thought it was completely nuts.” Then, without really knowing why, he did something crazier. He answered the letter.

Michael Freund owes much to his predecessor, mentor, and former partner Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail [… ]  Avichail represents a modern incarnation of an important branch of historical ten-tribe-ism in which the theological implications of both the losing and the finding of the tribes supersede any mundane concerns.

In this view, the Bible and the prophecies related to the Ten Tribes provide “facts” as well as messianic signs that need to be both interpreted and audaciously acted upon. The prophecies point to a “final redemption” after at least three things are achieved: the restoration of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, the unity of the land of Israel, and the ingathering of the people of Israel, including the lost tribes. In modern Israel, this is reflected in the political philosophy of religious Zionism, a theocratic idea that tries to balance belief and patriotism. Religious Zionists from the Gush Emunim school of thought, out of which Avichail grew, believe the secular modern state has accidentally helped hasten the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies by virtue of its very existence.

Ingathering of the Lost Tribes 

is but another step

To End the Exile, Avichail was determined to track down the tribes in the form of their descendants and to bring them “first back to Judaism,” as he wrote, “and then to the Jewish People and to the Land of Israel.”

In 1975, Avichail presented his amateur scholarly research and biblical sources for the scattering of the Lost Tribes to his influential teacher Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982) at Kook’s Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva. […] After Avichail had spoken on his text-based discoveries about the Pathans of Afghanistan, Kashmiri Jews, the Karen, Shinlung, Chiang-min, and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia—with evidence for these and other remnants of the exiled Ten Tribes in Japan, the Caucasus, and elsewhere—Kook had said,

“Talking is nice, but it’s not enough. 
You must act.”

Over the next 30 years, he embarked on a series of insane adventures: to Pakistan, Kashmir, Szechuan, Thailand, India, Burma, Japan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Portugal, Sicily, Majorca, Peru, and Mexico, to put his theories to the test. He found the Menashe, studied their traditions and beliefs, and began to bring a few of them to Israel. His travels often revealed what he hoped to find, and this in turn made him ever more obsessed. He made it his life’s work: Avichail founded a tiny organization consisting of his wife, Rivka, and a volunteer assistant and named it “Amishav,” my people has returned.

Next Phase –

The idea of the great redemption that had begun with the resettling of the land of Israel and the ingathering of the Lost Tribes became in Freund’s hands more like a bureaucratic maneuver, a “process” with “belief systems” within a “political reality”—as if what G–D needed was not an eccentric visionary, but a dependable, deep-pocketed accountant. Avichail insisted on staying focused on representatives of the Lost Tribes. After his experiences with the anusim, Freund wanted to expand Amishav’s brief to the descendants of Jews, known and unknown.

Why limit the work to biblical migrations when in the course of Jewish and world history so many other cataclysmic disruptive forces had caused wounds that had not healed?

Why bring only some lost Jews home?

Our next chapter in our history,  
the Baalei Teshuva of the Ingathering

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Source: Becoming Moses, about Michael Freund, the rescuer of Lost Tribes and the Ingathering of the Geulah. Michael Freund is now in the forefront of locating, verifying and bringing back to Eretz Yisrael (existential) members of the Lost Tribes.

On a lighter note: The Lost Tribe of Brooklyn