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.

DEGEL MENASHE VISITS DISPLACED AT MIZORAM: AN ACCOUNT

(June 30, 2023) Some 200 of the 650

B’nei Menashe of Manipur who have fled their homes because of the Meitei-Kuki violence of the past two months are now in northern Mizoram – over 40 families in a government-run displaced persons camp in the location of Thingdawl and another 15 families in the nearby town of Kolasib. Some have come directly from Manipur. Others have been relocated from Aizawl, where they initially sought shelter.

This week, a Degel Menashe delegation made the 4-hour drive from Aizawl to the Kolasib-Thingdawl area in order to visit the refugees and determine what aid they required. The delegation consisted of six people: two, Jessica Thangjom and volunteer Rachel Garrick from Israel; four, Asaf Renthlei, Leah Renthlei, Ben Aryeh Chenkual and local B’nei Menashe Council treasurer Nadav Hranglientawna, from Aizawl; and Ohaliav Haokip, general secretary of the BMC in Manipur, from Churachandpur. Here, with input from Asaf, is Jessica’s preliminary report.

The team with the local Kolasib B'nei Menashe community members at their synagogue.

Rachel and I landed at Aizawl’s Lengpui airport on a flight from New Delhi on Tuesday morning, June 27, where we were met by Asaf, Leah, Ben Aryeh, Nadav, and Ohaliav. From there we set out directly in a three-car convoy for Thingdawl. With us we took a few simple gifts for the children in the Thingdawl camp: notebooks, crayons, and pencils with sharpeners and erasers, and some sweets and fruit juice.

We arrived at Thingdawl at about 4 p.m. Despite it being the week of the year’s longest day, the light was already beginning to wane, since India has no daylight saving time and only a single time zone, at whose far eastern end Mizoram and Manipur lie. Directed to the camp by local inhabitants, we came to three two-story buildings standing on a hillside. In two of them, it was explained to us, the camp’s 300 displaced– half B’nei Menashe, and half Christian Kukis – are housed, while the third served as an administrative center and kitchen for the two daily meals that are served to the camp’s occupants.

A warm welcome at Thingdawl.

The B’nei Menashe of Thingdawl were expecting us. We were welcomed by a group of them, mainly children, and got to work at once distributing our gifts. One of the first things we noticed about the Thingdawl camp was that most of its residents were children and women. The men and older boys, we were told, had stayed behind in Manipur to help the Kuki defense effort. Over 10,000 Kukis have crossed since early May from Manipur to Mizoram, whose government was already coping with over 30,000 refugees from Myanmar fleeing the depredations of the military regime there. One must commend the Mizo government for the generous hospitality it has shown despite the strain on its resources.

A government building utilized as a relief camp.

Each of the two buildings housing refugees in Thingdawl, one of which has been set aside for the B’nei Menashe, has 13 rooms, each room holding up to four families. A communal kitchen on the ground floor serves those who would rather prepare their own food, which consists largely of rice, lentils, potatoes and vegetables procured when possible from the local market. The rooms have practically no furniture. All sleep on the floor with a thin foam mat for a mattress in the best of cases and makeshift pillows fashioned from clothes, bags, and other items. Some of the families have badly needed mosquito nets, either purchased or donated by local Mizos; some do not. Each building has a communal toilet and washing area, but water must be brought by the residents from nearby water tanks in buckets or pots and is carefully rationed.

All in all, the Thingdawl camp does not give a depressing impression. Its B’nei Menashe live in primitive but not overcrowded conditions . Each family has a corner of a room or more for itself, with cloth partitions sometimes erected for privacy, and a general sense of neatness and order prevails. The children have been enrolled by the government in local schools (though they do not speak Mizo, they pick it up quickly, since Kuki is a closely related language) and the women keep busy for much of the day cleaning, doing laundry (a never-ending task, since the same clothes must be worn and re-worn), preparing food, and fetching water.

Shacharit at the camp.

The chief needs of the camp’s B’nei Menashe residents are mattresses, pillows, and mosquito nets. We slept alongside them in a room above the cooking area the night we were in Thingdawl, and the mosquitoes buzzed around us all night, making it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. We woke early the next morning, groggy and reminding ourselves as we sipped out breakfast of black tea that we had just gone through a single night, while those whose mats and floors we had shared had to endure such nights one after another. As there were not enough men for a minyan, Asaf, Ohaliav, Ben Aryeh, and Nadav had to say their morning prayers individually.

That same day, we also visited the eight displaced families that have been taken in by the tiny Bnei Menashe community of Kolasib, which is a little under half an hour’s drive away. Some are staying with relatives and some have rented homes of their own, either with savings they managed to bring from Manipur or from the work that some have found in local betel plantations. Their situation is better than that of the Thingdawl residents, a program of assistance to whom might include subsidizing rentals in Kolasib. If it was a pleasure for the six of us to be able to rest and wash up in normal facilities, how much more so would it be for Thingdawl’s B’nei Menashe to be able to live that way!

Meeting with the Deputy Commissioner, Mr. John LT Sanga.

After leaving Thingdawl in the morning, escorted by the children who followed us everywhere, we met with the District Commissioner of the Kolasib region, Mr. John LT Sanga. He and Asaf had studied together in New Delhi and knew each other. An affable man with (like many Mizos and Kukis) an identification with Israel, he told us that the area is currently hosting the largest refugee population in all Mizoram, some 17,000 displaced persons having arrived in a steady stream from Manipur in the last 40 days. The previous day, in fact, had been the first in all that time with no new arrivals. When asked how long Mizoram was prepared to continue hosting the displaced Kukis, his answer was, “For as long as is necessary.”

This was reassuring, because the Thingdawl camp’s B’nei Menashe do not on the whole wish to return to Manipur. They do not feel that they have a future there. Their next destination, as far as they are concerned, must be Israel.

We parted from the commissioner and set out on the return trip to Aizawl, from which we planned to continue to Churachandpur. Although this might not seem to make sense when looking at a map, Kolasib being much closer to Churachandpur than is Aizawl, no passable roads lead from Kolasib northward, it already being the beginning of the monsoon season in India, when dirt roads become untraversable. A paved highway connects Churachandpur to Aizawl, and that was what we planned to take.

A glimpse inside the camp: