Degel Menashe Board Weighs Options After Freund Forgery Ruling

(May 5) At a hastily convened meeting two days before Israel’s Independence Day, Degel Menashe’s board of directors heard a report on Tel Aviv district court judge Naftali Shilo’s ruling that Shavei Israel founder and chairman Michael Freund is guilty of forging his ex-wife's signature on numerous official documents. This was done, Judge Shilo implied, in an attempt to conceal the alleged embezzlement and transfer to Shavei of IS50 million ($15 million) of family money. [See our April 28 article, “Court Finds Freund, Shavei, Guilty of Forgery, Fraud.”] The money, for the return of which Freund and Shavei are currently being sued by Freund’s divorced wife Sarah Green, was given to the family by her father Pinchas Green, a wealthy American businessman.

Hillel Halkin.

Although the board reached no decisions, it unanimously agreed that strong action was called for. “We are still waiting to see the reaction to the court’s ruling of the government, and specifically, of the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption,” our Newsletter was told by Degel Menashe chairman Hillel Halkin, who presided over the meeting. “So far, I’m sorry to say, there’s been no reaction at all. I hope this is merely due to the fact that the recent days have not been full working ones. Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day may have slowed the Ministry’s ability to digest and process the case.”

Halkin believes the picture will soon become clearer. “I expect,” he said, “that we’ll know by the end of next week whether the Ministry intends to cut its ties with Shavei Israel or thinks it can go on with business as usual. If this is what it does think, it’s mistaken. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a government body should even consider continuing to work with an organization and its leader that have been found guilty of criminal fraud. And this is especially so since the court’s findings comes on top of many previous disclosures of gross abuses and malfeasance on Shavei’s part.”

At its meeting, Halkin said, Degel Menashe’s board considered possible courses of public and legal action should the Ministry refuse to sever relations with Shavei. “There are various options,” he stated. “There was a consensus on the board that we need to examine each of them carefully. We’ll do that as quickly as we can. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Immigration can rest assured that, whatever we course we decide on, it won’t be able to get away with pretending that nothing has happened.”

Shavei Bans Torah School, Beats Up Its Own Head Goon

(May 5) It could only happen with Shavei Israel. First it sends its goons to violently disrupt classes of the B’nei Menashe Council-run Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail School at Beit Shalom synagogue in Churachandpur. Then it seizes control of the synagogue, northeast India’s largest, by staging a phony election for its chairmanship. Then it has the synagogue’s new chairman formally expel the school from its premises. Then said chairman appoints the head of the goons to be the synagogue’s chazzan or prayer leader. And finally, when the new chazzan angers pro-Shavei members of the synagogue by his behavior, he gets beaten up by them in turn. One couldn’t wish for a more perfect record.

Much of all this has already been reported by this Newsletter. The first Shavei attack on the school, which had been operating on the synagogue’s premises with full permission, was related in our March 24 article, “Shavei Hooligans Storm Churachandpur Classroom.” The fake election was described in our March 31 piece, “Shavei Strong Arm Tactics Continue in Manipur With Synagogue Putsch.” A second Shavei assault on the school, which led to police intervention, was the subject of our April 7 “Shavei Invaders, Avichail School Students, Brawl At Beit Shalom.” You can read about it all on this page.

As for the latest developments, they began when Beit Shalom’s new chairman, Shavei Israel activist Seithang Haokip, announced after Passover that Beit Shalom would no longer host the Avichail School and was expelling it. This was accompanied by another announcement that Ronel Letkholien Haokip, who had led both of the two thuggish attacks on the school, would be Beit Shalom’s new chazzan, replacing the former prayer leader Avichayil Manchong. This was an unusual move even by Shavei’s standards, since Avichail Manchong was known as one of the most Jewishly educated B’nei Menashe in Manipur while Ronel Haokip was reputed to have difficulty with the Hebrew alphabet.

Ronel’s comeuppance was not long in coming. Stumbling through the prayers that he led, he began issuing arbitrary orders, the most recent of which, issued at last week’s Friday night services, was that all children under bar-mitzvah age must leave the synagogue at once. An argument followed in which the infuriated congregants demanded to know the reason for this unprecedented fiat. Before Ronel, hardly an expert on Jewish precedents, could finish explaining his action, the crowd set on him and gave him a thrashing and a bloody nose. This time, too, the police had to be called to restore order.

The situation among Manipur’s B’nei Menashe is tense. “There is a pervasive fear that violence can break out again at any moment.” says Ohaliav Haokip, General Secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council. “Pro-BMC B’nei Menashe fear even to attend services at Beit Shalom. If Shavei militants can physically attack one of their own trusted members, it goes without saying that no one is safe.”

“For they have sown the wind and they have harvested the storm,” said the prophet Hosea of the godless of his day. The storm that Shavei is now harvesting would appear to have only begun.

What Now? A Degel Menashe Editorial

(April 28) It has been an event-packed week, as our three new Newsletter stories relate.

It was a week in which Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption confirmed that a joint Ministry/Jewish Agency fact-finding mission will soon be traveling to Manipur and Mizoram to study the situation of the roughly 5,000 B’nei Menashe still there and reformulate procedures for their Aliyah. And it was a week in which Degel Menashe and B’nei Menashe Council leaders met with the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to discuss changes in these procedures. These are important developments. They show that Degel Menashe’s long campaign to have responsibility for the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah transferred from Shavei Israel to The Jewish Agency is finally having results and that both the Agency and the Ministry realize at last that the present system needs to be restructured.

But the week’s most dramatic development took place in a Tel Aviv district court. There, Shavei Israel founder and chairman Michael Freund was found was guilty of forging numerous documents to cover up his apparent embezzlement of 50 million shekels of his family’s money and his transfer of it to the coffers of Shavei. It was with this sum that he was able to turn Shavei into the powerful organization that it has become.

As unexpected as it was, this development did not surprise us. Over and over, we have sounded the warning that Shavei Israel is a morally and financially corrupt organization Over and over, we have been ignored. Now, those who ignored us will have to listen to the courts.

Whether the state of Israel will now file criminal charges against Michael Freund, or whether it will simply wait for the law to make him return the funds he is accused of stealing, remains to be seen. Either way, it is now a matter of official record: Shavei Israel is an organization born in crime and maintained by crime.

This changes everything. For the past two years we have fought to break Shavei Israel’s stranglehold on the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah. We have documented the ways in which Shavei’s monopoly on this Aliyah has led to innumerable abuses and injustices. We have described how Shavei has used its monopoly to control and intimidate the B’nei Menashe community. We have called upon The Jewish Agency to step in and put an end to the anomaly of a private organization deciding who is allowed to live in Israel and who is not. Yet throughout all this, we have never demanded that Shavei Israel be excluded from the Aliyah process. We have held that it could play a constructive role in this process as long as others were allowed to play one, too.

No longer. After the court’s ruling this week, Shavei Israel must go. It must not be allowed to have anything more to do with the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe or with their absorption in Israel. It must be recognized for what it is: a criminal body that belongs beyond the pale. No one in the B’nei Menashe community should have to be sullied by contact with it. No Israeli authority should want to be sullied by such contact, either. It is inconceivable that from now on a single shekel of public money should go to an organization founded on fraud and theft, or that it should be entrusted with any public task.

This makes rethinking the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah more urgent than ever. The sending of a fact-finding mission to northeast India is a first, necessary step. It should take place as soon as possible. And it should set for itself the clear goal of determining how, with Shavei now out of the picture, this Aliyah can be carried out more fairly, quickly, and efficiently. The task should not prove too difficult. There are enough forces in the B’nei Menashe community that, working together with the Ministry of Immigration and The Jewish Agency, can get the job done and do it better than Shavei did. The time to rebuild after an earthquake is at once.