Construction Nears Completion at Suongpi

Jesse Gangte.

(September 14, 2023) The initial structure of a joint Degel Menashe-B’nei Menashe Council project for housing homeless B’nei Menashe displaced by the recent ethnic violence is Manipur is nearing completion, our Newsletter has learned. The building, the first of several planned for the site, stands on 250 acres of land outside the city of Lamka (formerly Churachandpur) that have been donated by BMC chairman Lalam Hangshing.

“The interior and exterior wall frames are in place, the tin roof is up. and the concrete floor has been poured,” we were told by Jesse Gangte, the BMC’s Manipur treasurer and director of the project. “All that remains to be done structurally is finishing the walls and installing doors and windows. We already have the agreement of the nearby village of Vangphai to connect us to its electric grid, which will call for 600 meters of cable on wooden poles, while water will be supplied by tanker trucks. Our plan is to acquire a large plastic storage tank with a capacity of several thousand liters and to pipe water to it from a nearby stream, but this will be costly, and for the moment, we’ll have to rely on water deliveries by tanker trucks.”

Frames for the shelter being set up.

The building will be divided into five small dwelling units, each housing one family and measuring 25 x 20 feet. (Since its total cost, it is estimated, will be about $7,000, this will come to $1.400 per unit, a small sum for resettling an entire family.) A separately standing shed that has already gone up will serve as a communal kitchen, while additional sheds will be erected for a communal bath and latrines. The complex should be ready for occupancy, Gangte told us, by Sukkot. “Two of the five families,” he says, “have already chosen adjacent plots of land and begun to farm them: one is growing beans and the other has a large vegetable garden. Once all the families have moved in, each will be given its own plot. The idea is for them to grow complementary crops that will make them relatively self-sufficient in terms of food while leaving enough over for sale at local markets in order to provide them with some cash as well.”

Shem Haokip, head mason.

The head of the construction crew at Suongpi is Shem Haokip, a builder by profession and a B’nei Menashe from the village of Sajal, which was attacked by Meitei assailants last May. “The Meiteis burned everything to the ground, including our synagogue,” he told us. “My family spent many days in an army camp, and then moved to Lamka, where we were put up by the BMC at the Eliyahu Avichail School. Suongpi is a godsend for us. We all hope that the settlement will grow. There’s plenty of land and plenty of still homeless B’nei Menashe households in need of permanent quarters.”

According to Yitzhak Thangjom, Degel Menashe’s managing director, there are some 35-40 such households in Lamka and Kangpokpi. “”We’ll try to house them at Suongpi as quickly as we can raise the money to build more units,” he says. “The idea is to create more than just a refuge. It’s to build a small, self-sustaining community that will lead a semi-collective life, democratically making its own rules and decisions. One might think of it as a little B’nei Menashe kibbutz.”

Everyone, irrespective, lends a helping hand.

Asked what the logic of such an investment was when all the B’nei Menashe of Manipur are looking forward to their Aliyah to Israel, Thangjom said: “No one knows when and how quickly the Aliyah of the remaining 5,000 B’nei Menashe in Manipur and Mizoram will take place. To judge by the pace of Aliyah in the past, it could easily be a matter of another five or ten years. Meanwhile, the displaced families need a place to live. Suongpi is not only the best and cheapest place for this, it has exciting possibilities that do not exist elsewhere. It’s not an opportunity to pass up.”

Right now, Thangjom told us, Suongpi is missing, not only the funds needed to build additional units, but missing the Hebrew name that Lalam Hangshing wants to give it in time for its occupancy late this or early next month. Our readers are invited to write in their suggestions.

A finishing touch for the flooring.

Why B’nei Menashe Have Flocked to Sderot

(August 27, 2023) Last week’s article about Sderot, the town in Israel’s northwestern Negev to which B’nei Menashe have been flocking of their own accord, ended midway through an account by B’nei Menashe immigrant Yaacov Tuboi. In it he told how, soon after his arrival in Israel from Manipur at the age of 62 in late 2014, he grew dissatisfied with life in the Galilee city of Tzfat [Safed] to which his family had been sent by the government. “And so,” his account continues, “right before the Passover holiday of 2015, I decided to have a look at some other B’nei Menashe communities. I thought Kiryat Arba, which was the oldest such community in Israel, would be a good place to start, and my wife and I went to visit a relative there.

“Kiryat Arba had something unusual, its own B’nei Menashe rabbi, Rabbi Shimon Gangte, who gave lessons in Judaism in my native language of Kuki. I found this exciting. But to my disappointment, the town’s B’nei Menashe, despite all their years of living there, still did not have a synagogue of their own. When someone told us that such a synagogue had been founded in Sderot, which was just an hour’s drive away, I asked my relative to take me there.

“Although I didn’t meet the synagogue’s founder David Lhungdim that day,” Tuboi went on, “I took an immediate liking to Sderot. There were only seven or eight B’nei Menashe families there, but the synagogue, Congregation Alfei Menashe, met regularly, and there were plenty of good job opportunities and a friendly municipality, neither of which Tzfat had.

Yaacov Tuboi

Once my wife and I were back in Tzfat, Sderot was never far from our minds. We talked about it with friends who were unhappy with life in Tzfat just as we were. We tried to keep these discussions secret, because we were afraid how Shavei Israel, which ran the B’nei Menashe community high-handedly, might react. Word somehowleaked out, though, and Shavei’s supporters in Tzfat began accusing us of spreading dissension. That was the last straw. I told my family we were leaving for Sderot and we started planning for it.”

The first to make the move, in January 2016, were Tuboi’s eldest daughter and her husband, Ezra Mate. “My wife and I followed them the next month,” Tuboi told us. “We were happy in Sderot from the start. I had what I had always wanted: a B’nei Menashe synagogue and a rabbi with whom I could study Judaism in my own language. I felt that my spiritual quest was fulfilled.” Tuboi quickly found a job working in a greenhouse. “Rabbi Lhungdim helped my whole family to get settled. He found us work, schools for the children, and a house that was a walking distance from the synagogue. Our friends from Tzfat heard how well we were doing under his guidance and gradually joined us. By that summer 15 more families from Tzfat had joined us.”

The Tubois and Ezra Mate were the trailblazers. First to follow them from Tzfat was Khetzron Paolam Haokip, 63, and his family..

Khetzron Haokip

“We have a Kuki saying,” Haokip told us, “that the welfare of a village depends entirely on its chief. That was our problem in Tzfat: the administration of our community was not good. Though we were all newcomers with no knowledge of Hebrew, the help it gave us was inadequate, and when we complained, the answer was always: ‘That’s the way it is.” There were no solutions for any of our problems. As soon as we heard that Yaacov Tuboi and his family had moved to Sderot, we decided to join them. Whereas in Tzfat there was little work available, in Sderot there were many openings, and right-off I found a job that paid well in an electronics factory. Both my daughters now work there too (I myself now work at the municipality), my oldest son is studying at the local kollel [religious study cooperative], and the 17-year-old who comes after him will either go to the army or enroll in Sderot’s yeshiva. We came to Israel for one reason– Judaism -- and Sderot in a good place for B’nei Menashe to practice and pursue it.”

Within a short space of time, four more families had left Tzfat for Sderot. One of them was headed by Tzion Lienpu Haopkip, 47, a father of three boys and two girls. “As with others in Tzfat at the time,” he told our Newsletter. “I was unhappy with the way things were being run. No one in charge of our affairs was near doing their job; no one responded to requests for help. Whenever we demanded better service from Shavei Israel, we were accused of being subversives and threatened with punishment. I could see that Tzfat would not be a good place in which to bring up my children. There were many other families that wanted out like mine.

“I was well-informed about Sderot. I also knew Rabbi David Lhungdim from Manipur, and had confidence in him and his devotion to Judaism. One cold winter morning after Ezra Mate and Yaacov Tuboi moved there my family and three others hired a truck, loaded all out worldly possessions on to it, and headed for Sderot. We never looked back.” B’nei Menashe began arriving in Sderot from other places, too. “By the end of 2017, we already had 40 families,” Rabbi Lhungdim told us. . More followed suit, trickling in one by one. Today, we have 120 to 130 families. Already in 2017 our synagogue developed a Bet-Midrash, a school for Torah study, and earlier this year we converted it into a proper Yeshiva with a daytime and nighttime Kollel.

Rabbi David Lhungdim

We also have our own NGO, Shivtei Menashe, which functions to promote our community’s interests. All our children study Torah and follow the Jewish way: that’s our commitment. But though some consider us Haredim, we’re not trying to impose a Haredi style of life. Some of our young people will remain Torah students all their lives while the rest will go to the army and find employment when they finish their service. They’ll serve the nation.”

Because Sderot’s B’nei Menashe have learned to rely on themselves to solve their problems rather than on Shavei Israel or government agencies, they have developed a tightly knit community in which mutual help prevails. One of the latest new B’nei Menashe arrivals in Sderot, 44-year-old Dina Singson, attests to this. “I came to Israel a year ago,” she told our Newsletter, “after my mother, who was living in Nof ha-Galil, fell seriously ill and was not given proper medical care. Accommodations were found for her in Sderot and I came from Manipur to attend to her.

Dina Singson

The town’s B’nei Menashe have been solidly behind us, and Rabbi Lhungdim and his family have been helping us with everything, from getting us doctors’ appointments to obtaining social benefits. The entire community has stepped in to help, too, and given me work taking care of small children. and bringing them to school and back, so that I can pay for my and my mother’s expenses. We couldn’t have chosen a better place to live.”

Today, Sderot has one of the largest B’nei Menashe communities in Israel and one that is growing all the time. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that B’nei Menashe immigrants to Israel are like most people. Let them make their own choices and run their own lives rather than live in a state of dependency, and they’ll be happier and better-off.

Sderot: The Town the B’nei Menashe Chose For Themselves

(August 24, 2023) On the whole, Israel’s B’nei Menashe have not, when arriving in the country as new immigrants, been given any choice about where to live. No one has asked them what their preferences might be. Nearly all have been sent, after consultation between government offices and Shavei Israel, the Jerusalem-based NGO that has been in charge of their Aliyah, to one of many towns that have been picked out for them. In the last two decades, these have been in the country’s north, to such Upper and Lower Galilee locations as Ma’alot, Karmiel, Migdal ha-Emek, Tzfat [Safed], Kiryat Shmona, Afula, and especially in the last several years, Nof ha-Galil, the former Upper Nazareth. The decision has been made on the basis of the availability of housing, the willingness of local municipalities to absorb B’nei Menashe immigrants, and various other factors, none of which has been the desires of the immigrants themselves. Presumably, they have not known enough to make their own decisions – and whatever they did know, others knew better.

A view of Sderot. Photo courtesy: Wikipedia.

One town is an exception to this. Although it is not in the north and not a single B’nei Menashe has been told to live in it by either the government or Shavei, it is today home to one of the largest, and and arguably the most satisfied, B’nei Menashe communities in Israel. It is the town of Sderot in the northwest Negev, some 50 kilometers south of Tel Aviv and barely five kilometers from the Gaza Strip, which has put it within easy range of the rockets fired at it in every exchange between Israel and Hamas. And yet just as this not stopped Sderot’s population from increasing by a third in the last ten years to its present size of 30,000, so it has not stopped B’nei Menashe from moving to it.

“I’d be lying if I told you that the rockets don’t cause some fear and tension,” says 42-year-old Rabbi David Lhungdim, the local B’nei Menashe community’s rabbi and acknowledged leader. “But as one of our members who served in the Indian army once said to me, ‘It’s hard enough to hit a target you’re aiming at with a rifle – what are the chances of being hit by a wildly fired rocket?’ We take the precautions we’re told to take by the authorities and leave the rest up to God.”

Rabbi David Lhungdim, Bnei Menashe community leader in Sderot.

When Rabbi Lhungdim, who came to Israel in 2007, settled in Sderot in 2009, there were just three B’nei Menashe families there, all who had moved to it from the north. “I was living in Karmiel at the time,” he told us, “along with 20 other B’nei Menashe families who were sent there after completing their Jewish conversion at an absorption center. Things didn’t go well in Karmiel. We had trouble finding jobs and the people responsible for us – I don’t want to mention names – were not doing their work properly. We heard that life was better in Sderot, where no one was responsible for the three B’nei Menashe families living there but themselves, and that plenty of jobs were available there, and some of us visited the town. We liked what we saw, and about 15 families from Karmiel moved to Sderot as a group.”

Lhungdim, who received his rabbinical training at the Yeshiva of Sderot, continues:

“Life in Sderot went by pleasantly and uneventfully until 2014, when I was asked by Shavei Israel to oversee a group of new B’nei Menashe immigrants who were staying at an absorption center in Kfar Hasidim, near Haifa. My main responsibility was to give them daily lesson in Judaism and Jewish law in preparation for their conversion. When I went back to live in Sderot after that was over, it was with new ideas and a sense of mission. I wanted to start something different. Nowhere in Israel, I realized, did the B’nei Menashe have a synagogue of their own. Why not in Sderot?”

A local rabbi, Menachem Gamliel, offered to help. “He was a wonderful man,” Lhungdim says. “He found us a town-owned building that was standing unused and convinced the municipality to give it to us. Volunteers from our community pitched in to renovate it and our Alfei Menashe prayer house was born. Sderot was a small town. Everyone in the community lived within walking of the synagogue and every Shabbat we had a full house. One day Rabbi Gamliel dropped by for prayers and was so impressed that that he arranged for us to get our own Torah scroll, whose arrival we celebrated a few days later. Now we had a real B’nei Menashe house of worship! This was in 2015. Early in 2016, we were joined by a new contingent, a group of families from Tzfat that almost doubled our numbers. You could say they were fugitives from there.”

Yaacov Tuboi, a pioneer Sderot resident.

And let us now interrupt Rabbi Lhungdim’s story to hear from one of the Tzfat “fugitives,” 71-year-old Yaacov Tuboi. He had this to say:

“When my family and I landed in Israel in December, 2014, it was dream come true. After three months in Kfar Chasidim, where we studied with Rabbi Lhungdim and underwent out conversions, we and 30 other families were given apartments in Tzfat. The mayor had come to an agreement with Shavei Israel whereby he promised to do all he could to make us feel welcome.

“We moved to Tzfat full of hope and optimism. We didn’t have jobs yet, and apart from taking Hebrew lessons and continuing our religious studies we spent many days discussing how to administer our community. A va’ad [Hebrew for “committee] was formed for that purpose and I was chosen to be ‘vice-chairman’ despite my protests that I didn’t know Hebrew and wasn’t fit for the role. I was told not to argue, because someone ‘higher up’ had made the decision and I shouldn’t make a fuss about it.”

The “higher-up” was from Shavei Israel. “I fully realized the situation,” Tuboi relates, “when one day our va’ad was summoned for a meeting with the mayor. We all came to it – the chairman, the secretary, the finance secretary, the local Shavei coordinator, and myself, all of us appointed by Shavei. A few days later, Tsvi Khaute [Shavei’s national director] turned up and scolded us for daring to meet with the mayor without asking Shavei for permission. Everyone but me was too frightened of him to speak up. As the months went by, it became clearer and cleare that our va’ad was just a rubber stamp. All the decisions were being made by the ‘higher ups.” I didn’t like that one bit.”

This article, the first of a two-part series, will be continued next week.