Legal Reform Issue Not Divisive For Israel’s B’nei Menashe

(July 20, 2023) As Israel is torn apart by the battle over the government’s proposals for reforming the legal system, the country’s small B’nei Menashe community has been largely unaffected by the conflict.

This is not just because nearly all B’nei Menashe share a religious life-style and right-wing voting preferences that might be expected to put them squarely in the pro-government camp, which some of them indeed strongly identify with. Thirty-eight-year old Aharon Chongloi from Tiberias, for example, who came to Israel in 2015, told our Newsletter:

Yeshiva student Aharon Chongloi.

“I’ve discussed the matter with our rabbis and we are all in agreement that the reforms should go ahead. When we have a democracy in which the leader is elected by popular vote, why is there a need for another body like the courts to interfere in administrative matters? The people have chosen the leadership and kind of government they want. Those who voted otherwise have to wait for the next election and hope to change things then. They have the right to demonstrate and air their views, but not to disturb the normal functioning of the country.”

Natan Mangsat Kipgen, 81, of Kiryat Arba, in Israel since 2002, took issue with Chongloi. “I’m a simple man with a simple understanding of the world around me,” he said to us..” I do try to keep abreast, though, of what’s happening. And while I’m religiously observant and might be expected to support the reforms like everyone around me, I have my doubts about them. As I understand it, if all of them are approved, the government will be able to overrule a High Court decision that it is acting illegally. This would let the government carry on dictatorially, which would not be good for anyone. It’s bad for normal life to be disrupted, but sometimes demonstrations are needed to call attention to a problem that will affect us all in the future.”

Some B’nei Menashe we spoke tried taking a middle position. “Both sides have valid arguments,” said 48-year-old Esther Schomberg from Efrat, who came to Israel from Manipur in 1997. “It's difficult to judge. On one hand, it’s dangerous to upset a status quo that has given us stability. There needs to be a balance between executive and judicial power. But on the other hand, the government is chosen by a democratic process of elections, whereas much quasi-nepotism and many interest groups affect the choice of judges. The crisis will end when it ends. I think the pro-reform will eventually win.”

But Chongloi, Kipgen, and Schomberg, so our Newsletter’s impression is, are atypical in having clearly articulated opinions on the legal reform issue. Most of the B’nei Menashe we spoke to felt that they had neither the leisure, the knowledge, or the ability to judge the matter. Typical in this respect was K.T. Amos, 41, of Ma’alot, who arrived in Israel in 2015 and told us, “I have a full-time job and a family and children to take care of, which leaves me with very little time to worry about how the country should be run. I don’t know anything about the details of the proposed reforms and have only a general sense of them. There are enough competent people in Israel to take care of things without me. It’s not a subject I discuss with friends and family. I’m too busy making ends meet. I can’t begin to worry about things I have no control over. I trust in God to take care of them.”

Migdal HaEmek resident, Aviela Singsit.

Despite their own more clearly formed opinions, both Chongloi and Kipgen concurred with this assessment. “Some of us B’nei Menashe in Tiberias study in Yeshivas and some of us work,” Chongloi said. “We don’t have much time to socialize. Our main concern is to follow Judaism, which is something we all agree on, and we prefer to concentrate on that rather than on politics.” To which Kipgen added: “In my social group of senior citizens, I haven’t encountered any heated discussions of the reforms. We have a club that attends Torah lessons and conducts various activities, but no one has much interest in the judicial reform issue.”

Is this just true of older B’nei Menashe in Israel? Apparently not. Aviela Singsit, 52, from Migdal ha-Emek, in Israel since 2014, was speaking for others our Newsletter talked to when she said, “I have to admit that I’m quite ignorant about the judicial reforms and their implications. It’s an area that’s beyond me and that I don’t feel qualified to comment on.” And many even younger and more Israelified B’nei Menashe seem to share her feelings, such as Osnat Lotzem, 22, whose family came to Kiryat Arba came Manipur when she was a small girl. “To be honest,” she told us, “I’m not really interested in these things, and I don’t have the time for them. I’m both studying and working, and I have to help my mother run the household. I can only hope everything will all turn out all right.”

Although some commentators have compared the situation in Israel to that in other countries where democracy is imperiled by as drift toward authoritarianism, such as the Law and Justice Party’s Poland, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India, none of our interlocutors saw an Israel-India analogy. “Both Israel and India are democracies,” says Aharon Chongloi, “but you can’t compare the two. India is so much bigger so that issues that affect one part of the population may mean nothing to another. Take the current situation in Manipur: to the average Indian it’s of no importance. Maybe that’s why Modi has not even found it worth mentioning. [This was said before the Indian prime minister Modi finally spoke out about anti-Kuki atrocities in Manipur this week.] In Israel, every issue affects everyone.”

Mangsat Kipgen thought, too, as did others we spoke to, that “India and Israel are two very different countries. They’re similar in some ways and in others not. India has so many more races, religions, and communities. The prime minister of India isn’t bothered by the conflict in Manipur, but no Israeli prime minister could overlook something like that here. In India, the conflict will only grow worse. In Israel, we’ll be able to look back on all this one day and say to ourselves that we got through it. There will always be new problems, but we’ll weather this one. K. T. Amos also thought that “India is so big and diverse compared to Israel, in which we all speak one language compared to the dozens spoken in India. That makes it easier for us here to stand as one in the end . I wouldn't worry too much about Israel because our economy and military are so strong. The only similarity with India is that both governments have chosen to be silent about Manipur.”

The situation in Manipur was on the minds of nearly everyone our Newsletter spoke to, more indeed than were the legal reforms in Israel. In a way, this is natural. Many B’nei Menashe in Israel have close relatives in Manipur for whom their concern is great and identify with the Kukis of that state in their struggle to defend themselves against Meitei violence. Yet at the same time, one cannot but be struck by how many of Israel’s B’nei Menashe do not yet seem to feel sufficiently at home in it to trust their own judgments about its politics, or even to have such judgments at all. Hopefully, the current crisis will make many of them react as did Levana Chongloi, 29, who has been in Israel since 2012. “It’s a good thing you brought this subject up with me,” she told us. “It makes me want to learn more.”

A Report from Kangpokpi

In last week’s Newsletter, the Degel Menashe aid and fact-finding mission sent to the B’nei Menashe of Mizoram and Manipur gave an account of its visit to Manipur’s second largest city of Churachandpur. This week’s account of its stay in the northern Manipuri town of Kangpokpi is its third and final one. Degel Menashe intends soon to present a full report of the mission’s findings and conclusions.

Friday morning at Beit Shalom, Kangpokpi.

(July 13, 2023) Although half a day’s car ride would normally have brought our Degel Menashe mission from Churachandpur in Manipur’s south to Kangpokpi in the north, this would have meant crossing the Meitei-controlled Central Valley at our peril. The risk was too great, and so we made the 15-hour road trip back to Aizawl in Mizoram, flew to Guwahati in Assam, spent the night there, took a train the next morning to Dimapur in Nagaland, and drove south in a rented car without passing through Meitei territory to Kangpokpi, where we arrived late at night. The need for such a three-day trip is one of the many ways in which the ethnic violence that has swept Manipur has totally disrupted the region’s life.

The day after our arrival in Kangpokpi it was a Friday. Our first meeting, which took place in the local Beit Shalom Synagogue, was with B’nei Menashe from the Kuki village of Saikul, located in the foothills bordering the Central Valley’s eastern rim. They had come to Kangpokpi to see us and wanted to set out for home early so as to arrive in time for Shabbat. Saikul has in recent weeks been the site of frequent skirmishing between attacking Meitei and defending Kuki forces, which include the village’s ten B’nei Menashe families, none of which has chosen to leave it. So far, we were told by their representatives, the attacks have all been repelled with heavy Meitei losses and minimal casualties on the Kuki side. We gave the Saikul villagers the 150 kilos of rice that were their share of the food relief we had at our disposal and saw them off with our prayers.

Representatives of the Saikul community.

The next group we met with at Beit Shalom was from the village of Kangchup, on the Central Valley’s northwest side. Its fate has been different Saikul’s. Stormed by Meitei bands at the beginning of the fighting in early May before it had a chance to organize, its population, including some 50 B’nei Menashe, fled for their lives and most of its homes were burned; although subsequently some of its male residents have returned to defend what is left of the village, no B’nei Menashe are among them. We spoke at length with one of the Kangchup group, Yaakov Sitlhou, whose family is now living in rented rooms in the village of Motbung, some 15 kilometers south of Kangpokpi.

“Kangchup was overrun by a Meitei mob on the 4th of May, around noon,” Yaakov told us. “We were totally unprepared. We had heard about the violence in Imphal and Churachandpur, but we didn't think it would reach us. I myself was sure the government would protect us. How wrong I was! Our house was at the far end of the village. When shots began to ring out and I saw the mob coming and setting fire to everything in its way, I took my wife and two daughters and headed on foot for an Assam Rifles army camp nearby.”

The Sitlhous were quickly joined by other B’nei Menashe families. “We scarcely made it out of the village in time,” Yaakov said. “The bullets were already whizzing past us. Four of us had gunshot wounds, my friend Tuvia Kipgen with a shotgun pellet in his shoulder; one was badly wounded in the stomach and had to be evacuated to a hospital in Guwahati. When we reached the army camp, my wife had a heart attack. Her life was saved by an army officer who had access to an oxygen tank.”

Meeting with the Kangchup community, Yaakov Sitlhou, in the center with blue shirt.

The Sitlhous stayed in the army camp for slightly over three weeks before moving on to Motbung. “Before the fighting,” said Yaakov, “I used to run a fairly successful organic vegetable farm. We had a good income and a secure life. All that has changed now. We've lost everything. I have no illusions about returning to our home and fields in the foreseeable future.”

But the most painful part of it all for him and other B’nei Menashe, Yaakov explained to us, was less the loss of their homes than the loss of their Jewish communal life with all its practices and rituals. Yaakov had tears in his eyes as he told us how, while at the army camp, he missed the Sabbath table at which his family used to gather every week to recite the Kiddush and sing Sabbath hymns. “Some of us living in relief camps,” he said, “still don’t have so much as a table. They have to make their Shabbat on the floor, surrounded by Christian families staring as them. When something like this happens, you feel disconnected and life means less. Things like a communal Kiddush, studying Torah – that’s what we miss most. You can take a rifle and shoot at Meiteis but how is that going to help us? Our task is to lead a life of Torah. We need to be able to do that together, in the privacy of our own community.”

Rivka Lhouvum, also from Kangchup, told us of similar experiences. Her husband and three children fled to the same army camp as did the Sitlhous before finding refuge in Kangpokpi. “In Kangchup,” she told us, “we had had a home and a small stationary business. Now we’ve lost everything. All we have left is our hope that things will change for the better.”

Relief camp at the Industrial Training Institute campus, Kangpokpi.

From Beit Shalom we went to see a government-run relief camp on the grounds of Kangpokpi’s Industrial Training Institute. Each of its six rooms used for living quarters was crowded with up to eight families, among them four B’nei Menashe ones -- three from Kangchup and one from Sajal, 18 people all in all. Conditions were primitive. There was no furniture or accessories of any kind. The camp residents slept on the floor, on thin reed or plastic foam mattresses. Their only personal possessions were the clothes they were wearing when they fled their villages. They had no mosquito nets, an absolute necessity in Manipur when the monsoon season sets in, as it just has done.

Some displaced B’nei Menashe have managed to leave the relief camp and are now renting room in Kangpokpi. We spoke with one such family, that of Elkana Ngaite, his wife

Reed and foam mats which serves as beds.

and three children, also from Kangchup. Elkana was a successful trader who also ran a small-loan business that catered to local merchants, and luckily has enough money in the bank to pay for rented quarters. Altogether, of the 190 B‘nei Menashe who fled to Kangpoki at the height of the hostilities in May and found temporary shelter there, only those at the Industrial Training Center camp are still homeless. Some have rented rooms like the Ngaites, some have moved in with relatives, and many have left for Churachandpur, where there is a larger B’nei Menashe community and a greater sense of security. Work is scarce in Kangpokpi, and employers give preference to local residents. None of the displaced B’nei Menashe is currently earning any income, and those relying on their savings face the prospect of their money running out.

We spent Shabbat in Kangpokpi, hosted and fed by Liora Gangte, a local member of the community, and attended Friday evening and Saturday morning prayers at Beit Shalom. Despite all that everyone has been through, the congregation, old-timers and displaced newcomers alike, sang the familiar melodies with great exuberance and in perfect harmony. In a moment of collective trauma, we were thankful to be able to be there with them.

DEEP IN THE CONFLICT ZONE AT LAMKA (CHURACHANDPUR)

Last week we posted a dispatch from Jessica Thangjom, a member of the Degel Menashe aid mission to northeast India, describing its visit to Thingdawl, a displaced persons’ camp in northern Mizoram. This week she is joined by mission member Asaf Renthlei, who describes his impressions of the homeless B’nei Menashe in Manipur’s second largest city of Churachandpur.

(July 6, 2023) After returning from Thingdawl, our Degel Menashe mission left Aizawl for Churachandpur at 7 a.m. on Thursday, June 29. As we neared the Mizoram-Manipur border, Internet reception grew more patchy, the Manipuri government having yet to renew the Internet services that it shut down when the violence in that state broke out two months ago. At Khawdungsei, the last stop on the Mizo side, we said goodbye over our cell phones to those in Israel we had been maintaining contact with, and a little later, as we reached the border crossing at the Tuivai Bridge, we did the same with our friends in Aizawl.

The road to Manipur; on treacherous terrain filled with landslides.

The roads got worse and worse. At many points on the Manipur side, they were paved with nothing more than stones that had been partly pounded into gravel by the trucks passing over them, and they frequently narrowed to stretches that only one vehicle could pass at a time. Although we were already in the monsoon season, it was our good fortune that the preceding days has seen no heavy rains of the kind that can turn such roads into quagmires. Only once did we get briefly stuck, and at 10 o’clock that night we finally reached Churachandpur, having taken 15 hours to cover the 200-kilometer distance.

The next day, we were up early disbursing supplies to the displaced B’nei Menashe in Churachandpur, who are now quartered at two locations – 23 of them on the premises of the B’nei Menashe Council-run Rabbi Avichail School, and a larger group of 105 at the Shavei Israel-administered Beit Shalom Synagogue.

At the Avichail School, where there were two families from Sajal, a heavily B’nei Menashe village destroyed by Meitei assailants in early May, each family had a room to itself and conditions were reasonably comfortable. The situation was different at Beit Shalom, whose population, most of it from Sajal too, is squeezed into a curtained-off enclosure at the foot of the synagogue, each occupant living and sleeping within inches of another. Although the caretaker, Samuel Vaiphei, did not allow us to enter the area, we caught a glimpse of it the next day on our way to Shabbat services in the synagogue. Two Kuki humanitarian organizations, the Kuki Youth Organization and the Indigenous Tribal Leadership Forum, have been, Vaiphei told us, providing the Beit Shalom population with food and water, but the water must be carefully rationed, there is a severe lack of blankets and mosquito nets, and there are only four toilets for the entire group.

While the Beit Shalom facilities, according to Vaiphei, make it “one of the best relief camps in Churachandpur,” Beit Shalom’s occupants paint a different picture of insufferable congestion, inadequate services, and sleepless nights. One family, after two weeks at Beit Shalom, which it told our mission was a “pig sty,” fled to the the Avichail School in desperation. Eight other families, the school having no more room, approached us with the request that we arrange alternative lodgings for them. Soon after our departure, one of Beit Shalom’s occupants, 28-year-old Ronen Thangminlal Haokip, was found dead in a toilet of a drug overdose. Haokip, who had no previous record of substance abuse and was driven to drugs by his despair, left behind a wife and two small children.

The relief camp at Beit Shalom.

It is not just the displaced B’nei Menashe families who need care and attention. With fighting continuing along the demarcation line between Kuki and Meitei-controlled areas, there is no end to the hostilities in sight. Supplies can reach southern Manipur and Churachandpur, where the great majority of the state’s B’nei Menashe live, only from Mizoram, and the local economy is barely functioning, so that most families that have retained their homes are in living in straightened circumstances, too.

The majority of B’nei Menashe in Churachandpur are daily wage laborers and the difficulty of finding work has hit them hard. Employed or not, they have to pay their rent, their food expenses, and their electricity and water bills. The average family’s diet has deteriorated significantly and now consists of rice with vegetable gravy and chillies. Meat, while still available, is off the table, and fried fish is a delicacy reserved only for Sabbath meals, if at all. The local food markets are open only three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and their produce is snatched up quickly.

In such bleak circumstances, it was uplifting to join the community for Shabbat. We ate our Friday night meal with its kiddush and familiar melodies with the families at the Avichail School, and were hosted for a Sabbath lunch by Joel Haokip, a local B’nei Menashe member. Later in the day, the community members cobbled together a handsome se’uda shlishit to which we were invited. For the Havdalah ceremony, a Torah tutor at the Rav Avichail school, Simon Singsit, graciously hosted us in honoring the departing Sabbath with raisins and homebrewed raisin wine.

Relief materials being disbursed at Lamka.

On Sunday morning, we headed back for Aizawl with heavy hearts. The sheer magnitude of the circumstances in Churachandpur which we were already aware of in broad strokes through scattered news reports and social networks but were seeing in person for the first time, was a haunting experience. Yes, people were out and about in the streets, small businesses were open, and water and electricity were more or less available, but in the two months that have passed since the eruption of violence in early May, the complete breakdown of law and order continues.

As the Indian army and the central government in New Delhi go on sitting on the sidelines, the conflict grew ever more vicious. It reached a climax the week we were in Manipur when a Kuki-Hmar village, Langza, was attacked and burned to the ground. One young villager, caught by Meitei militias, was beaten to a pulp, and decapitated, his head impaled on a bamboo stake. In revenge, a Langza defense force attacked the nearby Meitei village of Khoijumantabi, killed several of its guards, and beheaded one of them. The wounds inflicted by the last two months will take a generation or more to heal. The B’nei Menashe of Manipur cannot wait that long for their long-promised Aliyah to Israel.