Let’s Not Jump To Hasty Conclusions: A Degel Menashe Editorial

(October 27, 2023) The cancelation of the Aliyah Cabinet’s meeting this week, called to discuss the death of Yoel Lhanghal, was disappointing. The B’nei Menashe community in Israel is still shocked and agitated by what happened. It needs to feel that the government of Israel is concerned and stands behind it. Unfortunately, this was not the signal given it by the Aliyah Cabinet’s failure to meet.

Yet even if this cabinet had met to issue a formal declaration of support for Israel’s B’nei Menashe, it would not have been enough. There is a problem. Declarations will not help us to understand what it is or how to deal with it.

There is a widespread feeling in the B’nei Menashe community that Yoel Lhanghal’s murder was motivated by racism, and that anti-B’nei Menashe prejudice in Israel, until now discussed only in whispers, is pervasive. Yoel’s murder, it is felt, has raised an issue that has long been suppressed.

But how serious is this issue? The fact is that we don’t know. We don’t even know at the moment what the role played by prejudice in Yoel’s murder was. True, racist slurs were hurled at him during the quarrel that led to the assault on him, but it is not evident that this was the cause of the quarrel itself. Teenage violence is a major problem in Israel quite apart from ethnic hostility. We will have to wait for the results of the police investigation to find out.

And yet even when a police report is issued, and an indictment is served against the perpetrators, it will not tell us much about feelings toward the B’nei Menashe in Israeli society as a whole. For this, a wider inquiry is called for. This is why Degel Menashe intended to present the Aliyah Cabinet with a plan to conduct two complementary studies: one to determine how widespread anti-B’nei Menashe prejudice is in Israel, and the other to establish how such prejudice has affected the B’nei Menashe community. So far, we have only incidental evidence that is far from consistent. Each member of the community views things through the prism of his or her own experience and such experience has not been uniform. There is a need for a more comprehensive and objective picture.

Such a picture can only be assembled by means of in-depth surveys of the Israeli public and the B’nei Menashe alike. Although such surveys would have to be designed with professional help, they need not be methodologically complicated. They would give us an overall view of the situation. Fighting prejudice can be done by educational means, but before one sets out to fight it, one has to know its extent and its nature. Is anti-B’nei Menashe sentiment really the problem in Israel that, in the wake of Yoel Lhanghal’s murder, it strikes so many B’nei Menashe as being?

The answer isn’t clear. The B’nei Menashe are a very small group. Many Israelis have never even heard of them and many who have don’t have an accurate idea of who they are. Many are sympathetic. Just this past week, 3,000 of them donated 400,000 shekels to aid Yoel Lhanghal’s family. They, too, represent Israeli society – perhaps much more than do Yoel’s murderers. It‘s important to find out if this is so.

It’s understandable that the shock of Yoel’s murder should have brought the issue of anti-B’nei Menashe prejudice to the fore. If it’s been swept under the rug until now, it’s good that it’s now out in the open. Yet let’s not rush to the opposite extreme of assuming that such prejudice is rampant in Israel. This isn’t fair to Israel and it’s not fair to the B’nei Menashe, who shouldn’t be made to believe in the absence of hard evidence that the country they dreamed of doesn’t want them. Let’s do our homework before we jump to hasty conclusions. The truth may be more reassuring than some of us now think.

Aliyah Cabinet Cancels Meeting on Lhanghal Case As Police Investigation Continues Under Wraps

(October 27, 2022) A hastily called meeting of Israel’s Aliyah Cabinet, summoned this week by Minister of Immigration and Absorption Pnina Tamano-Shata to discuss the October 6 murder of Yoel Lhanghal, has been just as hastily canceled at the last moment. No reason for this was given by the ministry.

The Aliyah Cabinet, a rarely convened forum of ten ministers appointed to deal with special situations involving immigrants to Israel, was scheduled to meet on the morning of Thursday, October 27. Among those invited to participate in the session was Degel Menashe’s managing director Yitzhak Thangjom. “Naturally, I’m disappointed that the meeting was called off,” he told our Newsletter. “It would have been an occasion to discuss the problems of the B’nei Menashe at the highest level.”

Thangjom had intended to present the Aliyah Cabinet with a proposal to conduct surveys that would determine how serious anti-B’nei Menashe prejudice in Israel is. “We don’t know as much about the subject as we need to know,” he said. “Many B’nei Menashe feel that Yoel Lhanghal’s murder was motivated by racism. Perhaps it was. To be honest, though, this isn’t clear. We’re still in the dark about many things. Even Yoel’s own family doesn’t know the whole story.”

This was confirmed this week by visitors to the Lhanghals’ home in Nof Hagalil, which has continued to be besieged by condolence callers many days after the formal shiv’a for Yoel came to an end.

Condolence callers at the Lhangals’s. Yoel’s parents, Gideon and Batsheva, are on the sofa.

“The police have told us very little,” they quoted Gideon Lhanghal, Yoel’s father, as telling them. “We don’t even know if Yoel was stabbed by a knife or killed by some other weapon or blow. The autopsy findings haven’t been revealed to us.”

These remarks were at variance with earlier reports of the police’s confirming that Yoel was the victim of multiple stab wounds. The tight-lipped behavior of the police even toward Yoel’s family, our Newsletter was told by a criminal lawyer it consulted, is not unusual in such a case. “An investigation can be harmed by a premature disclosure of the facts known to the police,” it was explained to us. “This can give the accused or their lawyers an opportunity to concoct explanations, or to coordinate testimony, in advance of an indictment, which can be very damaging to the prosecution.”

The fears that have circulated of a police whitewash to exonerate Yoel’s murderers were, our source thought, unfounded. Even, he said, if the police in Kiryat Shmona, where the murder took place, had wanted to shield the local teenagers who killed Yoel, this would not be possible. The sacking last week of Kiryat Shmona police chief Nir Sasson for his mishandling of the incident has focused the public spotlight on it, thus precluding any suppression of evidence, and in any case, the investigation has been passed on to a central unit and is not in the hands of the Kiryat Shmona police station. “If it has been slow,” our source said, “this has probably been for good reasons. Yoel was killed by five or six boys attacking him at once, and the police must try to determine whether the lethal blow or blows was delivered by one of them, some of them, or all of them. From the videos of the incident that I’ve seen, this isn’t easy.”

It would be less complicated, the lawyer explained, if most of the attackers hadn’t been teenagers. He cited Paragraph 29 of the Israeli criminal code, which states that, whereas all the participants in a crime are guilty of it to the same degree, minors can be an exception when “they have served as the tool of someone else.” Since reportedly only two of the accused, the only ones said still to be in police custody, are of legal age, defense lawyers for the others might claim that their clients were their “tools” and cannot be held guilty of murder.

The Fund-Raiser for Yoel’s Family.

Meanwhile, “Helping Yoel’s Family,” a public fund-raising campaign for the Lhanghals conducted under the auspices of Giveback, an Israeli Website for charitable giving, has managed to raise nearly 400,000 shekels, 80 percent of its stated goal.

"We wish to show Yoel’s parents,” the campaign’s organizers declared, “that they are not alone, to help them economically to raise their children and meet their own needs, to perpetuate Yoel’s memory, and to pay for what legal help they will need.”

Sukkot Celebrated by B’nei Menashe In Shadow of Death of Yoel Lhanghal

(October 20, 2022) While the October 6 murder of Yoel Lhanghal continued to cast a pall over the B’nei Menashe community, its dark mood was lightened by the week-long holiday of Sukkot. Apart from building and celebrating the holiday in the traditional family sukkah, the B’nei Menashe of Israel and India took part in two major festivities. One, a National Convention of Indian Jews, was sponsored jointly by the Indian embassy in Israel and the Israeli municipality of Petach Tikva. The other was held in Churachandpur, where the B’nei Menashe Council sponsored a festive communal meal to which all B’nei Menashe were invited.

The event in Petach Tikva, which was attended by some 2,000 guests, reinstituted an annual event, lapsed since the outbreak of the Covid epidemic, that had sought to bring together all Indian Jews and their descendants in Israel.

Invitation to the National Convention of Indian Jews.

First held in 2013, the event has always been participated in by their four communities: the Cochin Jews of southern India, the Bene Israel of India’s west coast, the Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai (Bombay) and Kolkata (Calcutta) and the B'nei Menashe from Mizoram and Manipur.

A large number of B’nei Menashe, estimated at one to two hundred, turned out for the event, their participation in which took place, at the request of the Indian Embassy, under the auspices of Degel Menashe. They came from near and far, some by chartered bus and others in private vehicles, to take part in an evening that included welcoming remarks by Petach Tivka mayor Rami Greenberg and the Indian deputy ambassador Rajeev Bhodwade; classical Indian music and dance, including a performance by a B’nei Menashe troupe; Indian food, and exhibits representing the four participating communities.

The B’nei Menashe stall.

A small B’nei Menashe stall featuring traditional handicraft, clothing, and photographs, was a particular attraction, and many of those visiting it expressed their disappointment that the items on display were not for sale.

Meanwhile, in Manipur, another old holiday tradition, in abeyance for nearly 20 years, was also revived – namely, an annual B’nei Menashe get-together for a festive meal to which the entire community was invited. Sponsored by the B’nei Menashe Council, this event, too, featured singing, music, and formal remarks, plus 200 kilograms of beef donated by BMC chairman Lalam Hangshing and the B'nei Menashe Council's Israel Chapter and cooked with rice in ten large pots.

Meat and rice for close to a thousand guests.

In addressing the crowd, Lalam Hangshing recalled how his father, the late T. Aviel Hangshing, had taken part in hosting the first Israeli ambassador to India, Ephraim Dowek, thus commencing official contact between the B’nei Menashe and the government of Israel.

T. Aviel Hangshing (second from left) with Ambassador Dowek (third from left), Mrs. Dowek (second from right), and L.S. Thangjom (far left) and his wife Jolly (third from the right).

B’nei Menashe came from all over Manipur for the feast, some even sitting on the roof of a standing-room only bus chartered by the far-off communities of Kangpokpi and Phalbung. “It’s been a long time since we had anything like this,” said one of the Phalbung contingent, Ardon Kipgen. “The atmosphere was wonderful, as was the food. We absolutely must do this again next year.” None of the B’nei Menashe who flocked to Vengnuom Hall would have disagreed with him.

Yoel Lhanghal.

Yet despite the holiday celebrations, the murder of Yoel Lhanghal in the northern township of Kiryat Shmona continued to hang heavily over Israel’s B'nei Menashe. As the details of what actually happened remained unclear and subject to conflicting accounts, and the police, while releasing no official report, held back from pressing charges against the perpetrators, fears rose that no legal action would be taken and calls were made for justice to be carried out. A Facebook post, Chanchinbawm Thar suggested that: “In order to bring Yoel’s innocence to light, and his brutal murder at the hands of a gang of Israeli youths, who after killing him gave false reports to the police investigating the case that were then widely disseminated in the media, let the entire B’nei Menashe community come together to retain the best and most skillful lawyer to represent us.”

Since the only lawyers authorized to act against the killers would be state prosecutors at a trial, it is uncertain whether such an advocate could be of much help. Still, the feeling that something needed to be done, because the police and prosecutor’s office were not doing enough, was widespread as the week after Sukkot drew to a close.