Looking to 2023: A Degel Menashe Editorial

(January 5, 2023) The start of 2023 also marks the start of the fourth year of Degel Menashe’s activities. We were granted our Israeli NGO or amuta status by the Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations in Jerusalem at the end of 2019, and began to operate in January 2020.

We’ve come a long way since then. Although we’re still a small organization, we’ve grown greatly. Our income, our budget, and the scope of our activities have expanded from year to year. We’ve accomplished much and hope to accomplish much more.

All this was spelled out at our annual Board of Directors meeting held in the last week of December. As presented to the board, our 2022 record was impressive. In Israel, it included our academic and vocational scholarship program that awarded grants to 21 winners, the highest number ever; our oral history project, which culminated in the publication last summer of the already much-acclaimed Lives of the Children of Manasia; the help extended by us, some of it openly and some behind the scenes, to members of the B’nei Menashe community in need of counseling and aid; and our active participation in events of the Indian Jewish community, which – in part due to our efforts -- now regards the B’nei Menashe as an integral component.

In India, we can point to our educational programs in Manipur and Mizoram, where Jewish schools, with our financial and administrative assistance, are now functioning for the first time on a daily basis; to our backing of Manipur’s resuscitated B’nei Menashe Council, which once again, after long years of abeyance, has become a hub of communal activity; to our musicology project, which has been collecting traditional B’nei Menashe songs with an eye to issuing one or more CDs of them; and to our unwavering legal and moral support for Sarah Baite, whose battle against injustice, followed by the entire B’nei Menashe community, has made her a B’nei Menashe heroine.

All of this will be continued in 2023 with the addition, we hope, of additional projects, such as a leadership training program to provide young leaders for the B’nei Menashe community in Israel; a socio-economic survey of Israel’s B’nei Menashe to pinpoint their problems and needs with an eye to developing government and private programs to deal with these; a “peace corps” of young Israelis who will travel to India to teach the B’nei Menashe Hebrew and other subjects while interacting with them and learning about their history and culture, and still other things.

This leaves for last our campaign for reforming and quickening the process of B’nei Menashe Aliyah and having it transferred from the hands of the private organization, Shavei Israel, that now has exclusive control of it to a public body, preferably The Jewish Agency, so that it can be administered fairly, expeditiously, and without the many abuses that have characterized it until now. 2022, a year which witnessed no B’nei Menashe Aliyah at all, saw a continuance of this campaign, culminating in a commitment obtained by us from the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration not to extend Shavei Israel’s monopoly on the B’nei Menashe Aliyah process on the future. If the Jewish Agency does not step in, the Ministry promised in an official document, the process will be opened to competing organizations.

Now that 2023 has ushered in a new government, we have every hope that the Ministry, which is as new political administration, will honor its predecessors’ commitments. Degel Menashe will do all it can to see that this happens and will continue to lobby with the Ministry, The Jewish Agency, and the Israeli Rabbinate to help press its campaign for B’nei Menashe Aliyah reform to a successful conclusion.

.A happy new year to all our readers!

Hanukkah Gifts and Celebrations In Israel, Manipur, and Mizoram

Eyal Nitzani handing out scholarships.

(December 29, 2022) Hanukkah, traditionally a time for gift-giving, was just that last week for Degel Menashe’s twenty-one 2022-2023 academic and vocational scholarship winners. At a ceremony hosted, as it was last year, by the municipality of Ramla, the award winners were presented with their checks by Mayor Michael Vidal and, after he had to leave due to schedule constraints, by Eyal Nitzani, Deputy Director of the Israeli Students Association, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Absorption and Integration.

Some of the award winners, whose fields of study ranged from microbiology and computer programming to nursing and administration, were accompanied by their families, so that about sixty people attended the ceremony, during which the fifth candle of Hanukkah was lit. The event was emceed by Runia Lunkhel and featured several speakers, including Degel Menashe board member Yossi Dahan.

Degel Menashe scholarship winners.

Hanukkah festivities in Churachandpur.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, the B’nei Menashe communities of northeast India marked the holiday

with festivities, too. In Manipur, the B’nei Menashe Council, assisted by its women’s and youth divisions, sponsored a two-day Hanukkah Conference in Churachandpur. Some 500 men, women, and children came from all over the state to take part in the candle lighting, singing, lessons, and competitions in music, art, and Jewish knowledge. A high point of the celebration was the participation of seven guests from Israel, young backpackers who came to spend the holiday with the B’nei Menashe and ended up teaching them a bit of Hebrew and some Israeli songs.

In Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl, Hanukkah was celebrated by a weeklong Limud Torah or Torah Study program organized by the B’nei Menashe Council and Degel Menashe. The event kicked off with a study session on Sunday, December 18 at the city’s Shalom Tzion Synagogue. Following Minchah prayers, Hanukkah candles were lit for the first night, after which those gathered after which those gathered sat down to a dinner of traditional Hanukkah foods, such as rasgulla, a milk-based sweet once popular with the now-dwindled Jewish community of Calcutta, and chhangban, a B’nei Menashe fried sticky rice dish.

Last day of Hanukkah at Shalom Tzion Synagogue, Aizawl, Mizoram.

A highlight of the celebrations occurred mid-week, on Wednesday, December 21, when the community went picnicking in northern Aizawl. The day-long excursion began with the reading of Psalms and group singing, while later in the day, after the fourth Hanukkah candle was lit, a communal feast was held. On Shabbat, the participants sat down to a lavish Kiddush spread following the mornings prayers and then attended another study session. The next day, Sunday, December 25, the eighth and last candle was lit as soon as the stars came out in the night sky and the everyone sat down to enjoy a last meal of chhangban.

B’nei Menashe Take Part in Dinner Hosted By Indian Ambassador

(December 15, 2022) At a dinner hosted last week in his official residence in Herzliya by India’s ambassador to Israel Sanjeev Singhla, some 20 young Israelis of Indian descent met for an evening of celebrating Indian-Israeli ties. The dinner was held as part of a worldwide Indian government program aimed at connecting Indian diasporas in different countries to the land from which their parents, grandparents, or more distant ancestors emigrated. Among the Israeli youngsters taking part in the event were three members of the B’nei Menashe community: Avi Hangshing, Yosef Naite, and Levana Changloi.

In his remarks to his guests, our Newsletter was told by Avi Hangshing, Ambassador Singhla stressed the importance for the identity of young people everywhere to stay in touch with the country of their or their forbearers’ origin. “It was fascinating for me,” Hangshing said, “because while I’ve always been interested in history, I never knew anything about the historical ties between India and Israel – such as the fact, for example, that Indian soldiers fighting with the British army played a key role in the World War I battle for Haifa, from which they helped drive the Turkish army.”

Asked by us whether he still felt a connection to India, from which he came with his family to Israel in his high-school years, Hangshing, a security trainer and competitive marksman, replied: “You can leave the place you were born in and spent your childhood in, but it never leaves you. There are moments -- a song that reminds you of something, a taste that brings back memories – that make everything come back to you. Israel is my home, but India will always be a special place for me. It makes me happy to see the two countries enjoying such a good relationship. I was honored to participate.”

Yosef Naite gives the ambassador a Hanukkah menorah.

Yosef Naite, a woodworker from Kiryat Arba who presented Ambassador Singhla with a Hanukkah menorah made in his workshop was impressed by the solidarity of the young Israelis at the event. “I never realized,” he said,, “how tightly-knot and mutually supportive the Indian Jewish community in Israel is. It made me feel that I’m part of something beyond just the immediate environment in which I live.” Naite, whose family settled in Israel when he was a small child, has always been proud to be part of the B’nei Menashe community. “Now,” he says. “I feel proud to be part of the Indian Jewish community, too.”

Levana Chongloi, a computer engineer who came to Israel at the age of 23, feels the event at Ambassador Singhla’s reconnected her to roots she had pushed to the back of her mind. “The evening made me feel nostalgic,” she says. “Although I knew almost no one there at the beginning, I had amazing conversations with many young people who have an Indian side to them just as I do. Talking to them and getting to know them was a kind of homecoming for me. It gave me a sense of community and belonging, and that’s something we always long for and seek.”