ORT India to Back B’nei Menashe School

(May 19) ORT India, a branch of World ORT, international Jewry’s largest non-governmental vocational training organization, has agreed to enter into a partnership with Aizawl’s new Eliyahu Avichail School. Named for the late Israeli rabbi who brought normative Orthodox Judaism to Northeast India, the school, which is supported financially by the B’nei Menashe Council and Degel Menashe and is affiliated with a similarly named school in Churachandpur, opened recently under the direction of Aizawl educator Asaf Renthlei. Renthlei holds an M.A. degree in sociology from New Delhi’s Jawarhalal Nehru University and is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology.

Asaf Renthlei.

The agreement concludes months of talks between the school and ORT officials in Mumbai. “Basically,” Renthei told our Newsletter, “our plan is to develop, with ORT’s help, a vocational training program in addition to the Jewish studies program that we already have. We’ll start with computers, and hopefully branch out as we grow into other areas, such as mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, and so forth. The idea is both to prepare younger students for careers in Israel and to help them find gainful employment while still in Mizoram.” A major problem with many B’nei Menashe immigrants to Israel, Renthlei pointed out, is that they arrive there past school age without professional skills and so end up in low-paying jobs in factories or the services.

According to Renthlei, ORT will bear the financial costs of the computer education track while the Jewish track will continue to be the responsibility of the B’nei Menashe Council and Degel Menashe. The ORT-backed program will begin with a Course on Computer Concepts that will follow Indian government guidelines and equip students with a command of word processing and of power point and spreadsheet usage. Culminating in government certification, it will give its graduates skills needed for the job market.

The course will consist of four months of five weekly hours of study, consisting of two weekday evenings of theory and an intensive practical workshop on Sundays. Its first class, Renthlei says, is already oversubscribed, with 16 applicants for ten places, but with three such rounds in the course of a year, it will be possible to accommodate up to 30 students.

A Jewish studies class.

At the same time, Aizawl’s Avichail School will continue with its program of Jewish studies, which includes Bible, Jewish law, prayer, and ritual, Jewish and Israeli history, and elementary Hebrew. The school, Renthlei told our Newsletter, is now looking for permanent quarters while meeting for the time being in private homes. Unlike the computer program, which will be geared to younger people, the Jewish studies program is open to all ages. Although Renthlei concedes that such an approach is problematic, since the older students tend to be less intellectually flexible and sometimes slow down the pace of the lessons, he believes that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Because the B’nei Menashe, he says, have almost always joined Judaism as families rather than as isolated individuals, it makes sense for their instruction in Judaism to take place on a multi-generational basis.

Asked by our Newsletter about its agreement with the Aizawl school, ORT officials in Mumbai confirmed its existence while preferring not to discuss details until a formal contract is drawn up. ORT was initially wary about getting involved with B;’nei Menashe education because of a bad experience in the early 2000s, when it opened computer courses in Churachandpur that had to be terminated after Shavei Israel, the Jerusalem-based NGO in charge of B’nei Menashe Aliyah, took control of the community’s administration. One of Shavei’s first acts was to order ORT to pack up and leave, presumably because it did not want to share what it considered its exclusive territory with another Jewish organization.

“We spent a long time negotiating with the Eliyahu Avhichail School in Aizawl,” says an ORT official in Mumbai, “because we had been burned once and wanted to make sure it did not happen again. We’re satisfied now that it won’t and hope to formalize our agreement in the near future.”

Avi Hangshing Bags Pistol Shooting Gold

B’nei Menashe marksman Avi Hangshing has come in first in the annual Israel Independence Day shooting competition held earlier this month by the Israel Pistol Shooting Club. Pitted against 250 rivals in a cross-category contest that scored participants for their speed and accuracy, Hangshing finished with an unbeatable 100 percent score.

Hangshing, who came to Israel from Manipur with his parents in the year 2000, was a 2020 Degel Menashe scholarship winner, one of the few recipients in the award’s history in a non-academic field. The grant, given him to practice and improve his marksmanship, was clearly money well-spent.

Avi’s first place certificate.

Massive Turnout Greets BMC Chairman On Return to Manipur

(May 12) A large crowd, estimated at 400 to 500 people, turned out in Churachandpur this week to welcome B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing on his return from a three-week trip to Israel and to hear him report on it.

The size of the audience surprised the event’s organizers, “We were prepared for one hundred people,” our Newsletter was told by Jesse Gangte, the BMC’s secretary of finance, “and we ordered refreshments accordingly. As people began pouring in, we had to send out for more refreshments, and before we knew it, we were ordering still more and still more. We hadn’t appreciated how much curiosity there was regarding the Chairman’s visit to Israel and how many people would want to hear about it from him personally.”

The event was held at Churachandpur’s YMA Hall, since the ordinary venue for B’nei Menashe occasions in the city, Beit Shalom Synagogue, would have refused to host it. The synagogue’s chairmanship, as reported on this Website, was recently seized in an electoral putsch by pro-Shavei Israel activist Seithang Haokip, two of whose operatives, Ronel Letkholien Haokip and Binyamin Nehmang Haokip, according to Finance Secretary Gangte, came to his home the night before the reception and threatened him with “something bad” if he did not call the event off. Gangte ordered them to leave with no further ado.

Despite Shavei Israel’s boycott of the reception, it was attended by official delegations from 14 of Manipur’s 25 congregations, as well as by individuals from many of the other eleven “The attendance would have been even greater,” Finance Secretary Gangte stated, “if we hadn’t held the event on a Sunday, when public transportation in Manipur operates on a very limited basis. Numerous people who would have liked to attend were unable to come or found it too difficult.”

Lemuel Haokip introducing Lalam Hangshing (seated on stage, second from right).

Lalam Hangshing was introduced to the crowd by BMC Advisor Lemuel Haokip. Taking the floor, Hangshing told the audience of his two meetings in Israel with Almog Moscowitz, a senior advisor to Minister of Immigration and Absorption Pnina Tamano-Shata, and of a third meeting with Ya’akov Hagoel, Acting Chairman of the Jewish Agency, at which Knesset Member Miri Regev, a strong supporter of the B’nei Menashe, was present too. “On all three occasions,” said Hangshing, “we spoke in detail about ways of improving and accelerating the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah. I stressed that no private organization, be it Shavei Israel or any other, should be allowed to be in charge of this Aliyah, which should be the sole responsibility of The Jewish Agency.”

Hangshing reported that he submitted to both the Ministry of Immigration and The Jewish Agency a 9-point BMC plan for B’nei Menashe Aliyah reform. This plan, he said, called for both Shavei Israel and the BMC to participate in the Aliyah process. “However,” he went on, “just before I left Israel, the news broke of Shavei and its chairman Michael Freund having been found guilty by a Tel Aviv court of forging documents and fraudulent activity. As a result, the BMC no longer believes that there is any room for Shavei’s inclusion in the process, and we have revised our plan accordingly and resubmitted it. There is nothing that Shavei has done for Aliyah in the past that the BMC can’t do just as well or better.” Hangshing expects that the revised plan will be a main subject of discussion when a joint Ministry of Immigration/ Jewish Agency fact-find mission visits Manipur and Mizoram next month.

Another of the points in the BMC plan, Hangshing stated, was a call for a timetable for bringing all of northeast India’s B’nei Menashe to Israel. There was no reason, he said, why their Aliyah should drag on for so long and leave so many of them in a permanent state of uncertainty. “There are at most 5,000 or 6,000 of us still in India,” he declared. “Surely it should be possible for us all to make Aliyah within a few years.”

Musical ensemble led by Sarah Baite (first row center, holding page).

Apart from Hangshing’s remarks, the highlight of the evening was the appearance of a newly formed ensemble, dedicated to the performance of traditional B’nei Menashe and Kuki music, under the direction of its organizer and director Sarah Lamsi Baite. The group, which is being supported by Degel Menashe’s musicology program, plans soon to issue its first CD.

The unexpectedly large turnout, says Degel Menashe’s executive director Yitzhak Thangjom, is a sign of the B’nei Menashe Council’s growing strength in Manipur. Despite Shavei Israel’s many efforts to discredit the BMC, Thangjom believes, “there is more and more of an awareness that it is the one organization capable of uniting all the B’nei Menashe of northeast India. Shavei Israel is increasingly perceived as a divisive force that has its own interests at heart rather than the community’s, and people have had enough of this.”

Many of the reception’s attendees agreed. “Under Shavei Israel I’ve been waiting for Aliyah for over twenty years,” said Ardon Kipgen, who traveled to the event from the village of Gamgiphai. “Now, after listening to the BMC chairman, I feel hope for the first time. It’s a joy to hear that The Jewish Agency will be finally coming in.”

And Ariella Haokip of Churachandpur, a member of the Beit Shalom congregation who was not deterred by its new executive’s boycott of the BMC, was speaking for much of the audience when she said:

“Hearing Pu Lalam Hangshing’s report has made me and my family very happy. We feel reassured that things are now heading in the right direction. Still, I can’t help worrying that Shavei Israel will try to cause problems. As long as it’s around, there will be neither peace nor unity in our community. An end must be put to it. Whoever stands for justice must stand with the BMC.”