Degel Menashe Announces 2023 Scholarship Awards

(December 8, 2022) The names of Degel Menashe’s 2023 scholarship winners were announced this week. Twenty-one recipients will share IS75,000 in award money averaging 30 to 50 percent of their tuition fees for the year.

Arbi Hnamte

The winners come from all over Israel, from Kiryat Arba, Nitzan, and Sderot in the south to Afula and Yesud Hama’ala in the north. They range in age from 37-year-old Arbi Hnamte, who is starting her last year of nursing school at the Hebrew University, to 11-year-old Dan Haokip (see last week’s Website article “Helping A Star to Be Born”), who trains at football with the junior youth team of Hapoel Jerusalem. They are planning for careers in such diverse fields as education, molecular biology, interior design, statistics, health management, and traditional Chinese medicine. Two are studying full stack development, which involves the application of computer technologies to commercial projects. Some were born in Israel, others came from India with their families at a young age, others have arrived in the last decade. All of them B’nei Menashe, they are a diverse group.

Their scholarships will be a great help to them. “I’m now starting my first year as a B.A. student in economics and business administration at Ariel University,” wrote Shoshana Menashe on her application form. “Because it’s far from where my parents live, I have to take a room in the dormitories, for which they pay. But they’re trying to save money to buy a home of their own and I can’t ask them for more, and so the tuition is up to me. It’s hard to have to work to earn the money for it while studying at the same time, which is why I’ve asked for financial assistance.”

Simcha Chenkual

Many of the scholarship winners feel that they are being enabled to fulfill an ambition that might otherwise be beyond their means. “My parents came to Israel in 1999,” wrote Simcha Chenkual, “and ever since I was small, the desire to study and contribute to Israeli society has been an important part of me. This year, I’ll be starting the Open University in Haifa, where I’ll major in psychology and education for those with learning disabilities. I have three younger brothers, and I hope our generation will be the first in our family to have the opportunity for academic study. A scholarship that will pay for part of my tuition will help me to make my dream come true.”

Yael Lunkhel

Yael Lunkhel, who is studying at Shenkar College in Tel Aviv, spelled her dream out more poetically. She wrote:

“I’m now on my way to obtaining a B.A. degree in industrial design and material engineering. This involves courses in math, chemistry, physics, and art. Everything in this world is made of something, and it will be my job to use these materials for both my personal vision and the products I design. For me, industrial design is like a magic show: matter from different spheres is taken and combined to make something new, which is revealed at the end when the magician removes his cloak in front of an amazed audience. Yet the magician knows that it’s not magic but a dance of science with creativity.

“When I think of myself at the end of my studies, I imagine being able to make the world a better place with my knowledge and skills. At the age of 24, I’ve finally taken the plunge and gotten down to fulfilling myself.”

Degel Menashe wishes all our scholarship winners a year of learning and achievement!

Helping A Star To Be Born

(December 1, 2022) At the age of 11, Dan Haokip, who will be among the 20 Degel Menashe 2022-23 academic and vocational scholarship recipients to be announced later this month, is the youngest award winner to date. And not only his age is unusual. So is what he wishes to study. It’s football.

And yet why not? A professional career in football, if you have the talent for it, is not a career – and Doron Dadash, Dan’s coach at Hapoel Jerusalem, with whose children’s team he plays and works out several times a week, thinks he has a lot of it. “I believe Dan can go far,” Dadash told our Newsletter. “Although he’s been training and playing with Hapoel for only a few months, he’s already on the level of boys who have been with us for several years. It’s not only his technical skills, which are advanced for his age. It’s his football intelligence. He has an instinctive ability to read the play on the field and know where to be at any moment. You don’t often see that in eleven-year-olds.”

Dan not only has talent, he has ambition. How far can he go? “I’d like to play in the European Champions League,” he told us over the phone.

“Dan has loved football practically since was a baby,” says his mother, Esther Haokip, who is separated from her husband and lives with her four children in Kiryat Arba. “I used to find him glued to the TV screen, watching a football game, before he knew how to talk. And as soon as he started talking, he could name all the famous football stars in the world. When he got to be a little older, he joined a children’s football club in Kiryat Arba. It cost money, and we never have enough of that, but how could I have told him he couldn’t? I could see how happy it made him.”

Earlier this year, Esther had a visit from an old friend who noticed Dan’s love of the sport and told them she had heard that Hapoel Jerusalem was scouting for young talent and that it held try-outs. “There was a try-out last May,” Esther says, “and I took Dan to Jerusalem for it. He was asked to play and then given a physical check-up, and we were told that we would hear from the club in two or three weeks. To my mind, it was just a fun day for Dan. I never thought anything would come of it.”

Football practice never stops: Dan Haokip in his bedroom.

Yet that same evening, Esther received a call from Doron Dadash. “He told me,” she relates, “that Hapoel was so impressed by Dan’s performance that it was accepting him immediately and wanted him to come four times a week for training sessions. I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know how we would manage It’s over an hour each way, traveling by bus, from our home in Kiryat Arba to the Hapoel field, and the bus fare, which has to be for two people because Dan is too young to travel alone, isn’t cheap. There were costs to pay Hapoel, too. Even though I knew we couldn’t afford it, I also knew how important it was for Dan, so I decided to give it a try.”

Dan began traveling to Jerusalem four days a week after school, sometimes with his mother and sometimes with a family friend or relative. After a month of this, though, Esther decided it was simply too hard. “I told Dan he would have to stop,” she says. “It was a great disappointment to him but he understood. Doron was disappointed, too. He started calling me on the phone to try to get me to change my mind. He said I shouldn’t worry about the money, that Hapoel would work something out with me, and that I mustn’t let Dan’s potential go to waste. In the end, I gave in and Dan started going again. But even if Hapoel covered the costs at its end, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for the transportation.”

That’s when Degel Menashe stepped in. Hearing Dan’s story, it contacted Esther Haokip and told her it was offering Dan a scholarship that would pay for the travel expenses.

And so Dan is back on the playing field. We spoke again with him over the phone the other night. He and his mother had just gotten home from Jerusalem. He had already done his homework in his free moments at school and had just enough time for dinner and a bath before going to bed. Perhaps for a few minutes of watching the Mondial, too. Dan is rooting for Brazil. That’s because his favorite player is the Brazilian star Neymar. “I like his style,” he says. “He knows exactly what to do with the ball.” That, says, Doron Dadash, is what Dan knows, too.

A Modest Start and A Big Dream: Israelis Teach at the Rabbi Avichail School

(November 24, 2022) “At the moment they’re coming one or two at a time, but we expect lots more,” says Lalam Hangshing, chairman of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council. Hangshing was referring to the recent visit in Manipur of three young Israelis, who came to spend a few days with the B’nei Menashe community in Churachandpur, home to the northeast India’s largest B’nei Menashe community, and who, while there, volunteered to teach at its Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail Z"L Memorial School. “The word will get around among Israeli backpackers that we exist,” says Hangshing, “and when it does, they’ll start coming.” And he adds: “And when they come, we’ll have a role for them to play.”

The three who came this month were Matanel Lotner, familiar to our readers as the traveler who wrote a series of reports on the B’nei Menashe of Manipur and Burma for our Newsletter in the summer of 2020, and Shani Beserglik and Asif Kahana, two friends recently discharged from the Israeli army and now backpacking in India, as many Israelis of their age do after their military service. Asif, who hails from the settlement of Ofra in Samaria, which has a small B’nei Menashe community, wanted to see the world from which it came from, and Shani, who had read about the B’nei Menashe in a Facebook site for Israeli trekkers, was eager to join her. Hearing of their arrival in Churachandpur, Rivka Dimngel, the principal of the Rabbi Avichail School, invited them to give some lessons in elementary Hebrew, and the two happily agreed. “It was a wonderful experience,” says Asif.

From left to right , facing class: Asif Kahana, Shani Beserglik, Rivka Dimngel.

Dimngel was enthusiastic. “The girls were gems,” she told our Newsletter.

“They not only taught, they related to their students with empathy and warmth. Their classes were fun and interactive, with language games and lots of energy and laughter, and when they were over, everyone wanted more. You can’t teach much Hebrew in a few hours, but just hearing the sound and rhythms of spoken Israeli Hebrew was exciting to our students, many of whom had never heard them before. Overall, it was fantastic.”

Matanel Lotner with Rivka Dimngel.

Matanel Lotner, who is now studying in New Delhi and had been in Manipur once before, was equally excited by the experience of teaching there. “More than I deserve to be thanked,” he says, “I want to thank the Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail School for having me. I want to thank its marvelous teachers, who are struggling valiantly to teach the rudiments of a language they barely know and to give Torah lessons in a land in which they themselves had nowhere to study Torah. I want to thank Degel Menashe for financially supporting the school. And I want to thank all its students, men, women, and children, who are excited by every new Hebrew word they learn and every new bit of Jewish knowledge. When I told them the story of the Mishanic sage Eliezer ben Hyrkanos, who had no Jewish education until the age of twenty-eight yet became one of the great rabbis of Jewish history, their faces lit up.”

Sarah Baite.

Matanel had a unique experience with Hebrew outside of the school, too. “I had a conversation with Sarah Baite,” he related to our Newsletter. (Sarah is also a figure our readers know: a brave fighter for justice for a sexually abused daughter, she is also a talented singer and composer of traditional B’nei Menashe songs who has been doing much to record old musical traditions.) “Sarah told me that one night she dreamed of the word enleila. At first she thought it was just a nonsense word, but when she kept dreaming it night after night, she became so obsessed with it that she began writing it on the walls of her home until her friends and family thought she had gone mad. When I explained to her that the Hebrew words eyn leila mean ‘There is no night,’ and that she was being told by her dream that the dark days she had lived through were over, she was overjoyed.”

A strange incident! Yet young Israelis teaching in the Rabbi Avichail School, the first regular Hebrew school that the B’nei Menashe of Manipur have ever had, will be, Lalam Hangshing hopes, more than a passing incident. “With the lessening of the Covid epidemic,” he says, “we dream of encouraging young Israelis traveling to India to come teach Hebrew and Jewish subjects at the Rabbi Avichail School on a regular basis – and not just for a day or two before they move on, but for weeks or months, to which they will commit themselves in return for food, lodging, and in an appreciative and thankful community that they could find nowhere else in the world. It will be a wonderful experience for them and a wonderful experience for us. The time has come to make it happen.”

Scenes from the Eliyahu Avichail School.