THE DEGEL MENASHE TEAM ITS SENDS WARMEST PESACH WISHES, MO'ADIM L'SIMCHA AND SHABBAT SHALOM TO ALL OUR READERS. WE WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AFTER THE HOLIDAYS.
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Degel Menashe wishes all its readers, and the entire B’nei Menashe community, a happy Passover!
In every generation, says the Haggadah, Jews should think of themselves as if they had personally lived through the exodus from Egypt. To Jews in different places, this means different things. To those who live in Israel, it means one thing. To those who live elsewhere because they not want to live in Israel, it means something else. To those who live elsewhere and do want to live in Israel but cannot, it means still something else – and while this group once constituted a large part of the world’s Jewish population before the establishment of the state of Israel, and was still a sizable one until the opening of the gates of the Soviet Union, today it is a very small one. In fact, the B’nei Menashe of Mizoram and Manipur are practically its only members.
The Exodus, for the B’nei Menashe still in India, is not a historical or even a recent memory. It is a contemporary dream. No others Jews in today’s world read the Haggadah as they do. No other Jews feel that they are still living the Haggadah’s story, that they are still in Egypt and in the House of Bondage.
And yet they are not being held in bondage by the government of India. The government has put no obstacle in the way of the B’nei Menashe’s making Aliyah. The obstacle is entirely the doing of the State of Israel. It alone has forced the B’nei Menashe to undertake their exodus in dribs and drabs, a few hundred at a time, with many years often separating between one time and the next. It alone continues to tell them, “You will have to wait. We cannot let you all, or even most of you, into the Promised Land any time soon. Be patient.”
And yet how many B’;nei Menashe still in India are there? Perhaps 5,000. Why can’t they all be let into Israel at one time? What makes it impossible for the State of Israel to accommodate now, immediately, 5,000 devoted Jews who want nothing more than to live in it?
In recent weeks we have heard a great deal about the plight of Ukrainian Jews fleeing from the war in their country. Our hearts go out to them: they have truly lived through a horrendous experience. Israel has declared that it is ready to take in thousands of them – 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 – and it is right and proper to do so. To be a refuge for Jews whose lives have become intolerable in their native countries is one of the things that Israel was created for.
But let also be honest. These are not Jews who dreamed for decades of coming to Israel but were unable to. They could have come at any time since the Soviet Union opened its gates and they chose not to. Why can Israel take in tens of thousands of them at one time but not 5,000 B’nei Menashe?
And this question is compounded by the fact that, unlike the B’nei Menashe of India, very few of the Ukrainian refugees are Jewishly observant. Is this a reason not to welcome them to Israel? Of course not. But it is most certainly a reason to ask: why them and not the B’nei Menashe?
In some measure, the B’nei Menashe themselves share part of the blame for this. Because they are not yet halachically converted and cannot be in India, they have accepted the fact that Aliyah is not their right, as it is the right of all other Jews in the world, but rather a favor granted them by the state of Israel. They have not complained when the state of Israel has taken 30 years, the time that has elapsed since the first groups of them began coming here, to admit half of them while keeping the other half out. They have behaved as if this were understandable and justifiable.
It is neither. It is discriminatory and unfair. And it is a time to put an end to it. The B’nei Menashe of India must tell the government of Israel: “We are not inferior to the Jews of Ukraine or of anywhere else in the world. We want our exodus now! We want to be in Jerusalem next year, as it says in the Haggadah, not ten or twenty years from now!”
Degel Menashe calls on the government of Israel to change its policy. Let all of India’s remaining 5,000 B’nei Menashe immigrate to Israel now. There can be no legitimate reason shut the gates to them. Let our people come!
My recent trip to Manipur began with a phone call from Almog Moskowitz, a senior advisor to Israel’s Immigration and Absorption Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata. On March 23, Almog told me, the ministry, together with The Jewish Agency, would be sending a delegation headed by him to Manipur and Mizoram for the purpose of reassessing current B’nei Menashe Aliyah procedures and making recommendations for changes and improvements. He was calling because the ministry wanted my assistance, as Degel Menashe’s executive director, in scheduling meetings with representatives of the B’nei Menashe community in India whose testimony and opinions we thought should be heard. If I myself wished to be on hand to help with arrangements on the ground, my presence would be welcome
I decided to go. I hadn’t been in my native land of Manipur for many years, and it was a chance to participate in what promised to be a historic turning point in the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe, which has long been a much- abused monopoly of Shavei Israel. I booked a ticket to New Delhi and another from Delhi to Imphal.
A day later, Almog called again, this time with the news that the delegation’s trip had been postponed due to the need to concentrate the ministry’s energies on the Aliyah of Jewish war refugees from Ukraine. I debated whether to cancel my trip, too. But my tickets had already been bought and I was eager to meet with old friends and the B.M.C executives in Manipur and to see the situation there with my own eyes. I knew that tensions between Shavei Israel and much of the B’nei Menashe community which resented Shavei’s control of the Aliyah process and identified with the democratically elected B’nei Menashe Council, were at a height, and I wanted to get a first-hand impression of them.
There was also another incentive for going: the Mumbai branch of ORT, an organization dedicated to Jewish education and vocational training all over the world, had taken an interest in Churachandpur’s Eliyahu Avichail School, an initiative of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council supported by Degel Menashe. A visit to Manipur would be a chance to see the school with my own eyes, to consider plans for its expansion, and to review the prospects for ORT’s participation in the founding of a similar school in Aizawl, the capital of nearby Mizoram. ORT has been conducting talks about such a school with Asaf Renthlei, a prominent figure and educator in Aizawl’s B’nei Menashe community, and this would be a chance to meet with him as well.
And so on Saturday night, March 19, I set out. What follows is a brief diary of my week-and-a-half in Manipur and of some of my thoughts while there.
22.03.23: I landed in Imphal on the evening of March 21. The next morning, after a quick breakfast, I head for Churachandpur, where I meet with members of B’nei Menashe communities, such as Petach Tikva and Pejang, that have been blacklisted by Shavei Israel and denied Aliyah for their refusal to adopt the Sephardi liturgy insisted on by Shavei in place of the Ashkenazi rite that they have traditionally followed.
At this meeting I explain to them the importance of the Ministry of Immigration-Jewish Agency’ impending delegation and of how crucial it will be for them to articulate their grievances to it.
Next, I meet with Asaf Renthlei, who has flown from Aizawl to see me. We discuss the project with ORT and Asaf tells me about the challenges facing the Aizawl community and the determination of a part of it to resist Shavei’s domination. I then return to Imphal to meet with B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing, who lives there and has just arrived from New Delhi. Lalam and I are visited by the newly elected Manipur state assemblyman Paolienlal Haokip, whose constituency of Saikot, a neighborhood in Churachandpur, harbors the largest concentration of Bnei Menashe in the state. Haokip promises to do what he can as a legislator to help the community. Eventually, I met two other legislators Th. Basanta and Nishikanta Sapam, who are old friends from school.
23.03.22: The next morning, Lalam and I drive to Churachandpur to survey a 200-acre property that he owns on the outskirts of town, a 15-miunute drive from the city center along a twisting, dusty road. He has already agreed to donate a part of it for the ORT- Degel Menashe school and now we discuss a second possible project: establishing a self-sustaining community for hard-pressed B’nei Manashe whose Aliyah is still far-off. This would involve both housing and economic initiatives like farming, a fishery, animal husbandry , and the like, as well as a synagogue.
We return to Imphal to be greeted by the news that Shavei Israel goons have burst into a Bible class of the Eliyahu Avichail School and forced its students to disperse.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the Hebrew expression hillul hashem: what a desecration of God’s name! Here are 20 0r 30 B’nei Menashe, young and old, men and women, come together to study Torah – and here in an organization that can as usual think only of asserting its own power. For years Manipur’s B’nei Menashe have been without a school in which they could study elementary Hebrew and religious subjects because Shavei Israel failed to provide one, and now that such a school has at last been founded, Shavei cannot tolerate its being the work of others. What hypocrisy! Little did I know that this was nothing compared to what was to happen two weeks later, when Shavei goons were to invade the school again but this time met with resistance, leading to an all-out brawl with injuries on both sides.
Everywhere I went on my trip to Manipur, I heard of Shavei’s brutality and disrespect for human values. The atmosphere among Manipur’s B’nei Menashe is extremely tense. The community is divided between several hundred hard-core Shavei supporters, a roughly equal number of Degel Menashe and B’nei Menashe Council backers, and a much larger group of waverers in between who are too afraid of losing their chance for Aliyah to speak out against Shavei.
Shavei’s supporters blame Degel Menashe for this tension. Everything in the community, they say, was peaceful until Degel came along and fomented trouble, turning one faction of B’nei Menashe against another. But this “peace” was the peace of a cowed society over which Shavei had absolute control. Dictators always accuse those who have the courage to oppose them of being trouble makers who need to be eliminated. For nearly 20 years, Shavei Israel had no opposition and could do whatever it wanted. Now that it can no longer get away with it, who can blame it for feeling threatened? It is threatened by the anger and frustration of all those it has trodden on, and it is only a matter of time before the fence-sitters, too, rise up against it.
Yitzhak Thangzom
(Part II will follow next week)
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