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.

The Torah Returns to Saikul

(November 17, 2022) With the help of Degel Menashe, the B’nei Menashe of Saikul, a village of 2,700 inhabitants nestled in a valley of the East Sadar Hills some 50 kilometers north of Manipur’s capital of Imphal, have a Torah scroll again. In fact, they have two of them. Not real parchment ones written by a certified scribe – such a Torah they never had to begin with. The Torah they had and lost was a printed paper facsimile, the kind that serves many northeast India B’nei Menashe communities that cannot remotely afford the tens of thousands of dollars that a hand-written parchment scroll costs. Yet such facsimiles are not cheap either, and that had by Saikul’s B’nei Menashe was no less valuable for being one. They kept it in an Ark in their synagogue from which they took it on Sabbaths and holidays to read the weekly and festival portions, and they danced and sang with it on Simhat Torah, the Day of the Rejoicing of the Law, just as Jews do with Torah scrolls everywhere. And then they lost it.

“We received our Torah on October 9, 2001,” Yochanan Thangboi Tuboi, the Saikul community’s head recalled in a telephone conversation this week with our Newsletter.

Yochanan Thangboi Tuboi.

“That was the eve of Simhat Torah, and the scroll was a gift from Aviel Hangshing, a patron of many B’nei Menashe activities in those days.” (Hangshing, the father of current BMC chairman Lalam Hangshing, settled in Israel in 2014 and died last year in Kiryat Arba at the age of 96.) “It was truly a day of rejoicing for us.”

Saikul’s B’nei Menashe community was a middle-sized one. “”We were about 20 households,” Tuboi said, “numbering some hundred people, including children. We were a tight-knit group. Everyone helped everyone. We were always there for each other, regardless of what the need was.”

In 2015-16 Tuboi continued, things began to change. “A directive came from Shavei Israel,” he relates, “that small, outlying communities like ours had to uproot themselves and move to Churachandpur. That was where Shavei had its headquarters, and we were told that unless we lived there under Shavei’s supervision, we would never be eligible for Aliyah to Israel. There was no official written announcement. It was all conveyed by word of mouth.

“In those days, Shavei’s word was unchallengeable. The B’nei Menashe did what Shavei told them to do. Some of us obeyed now, too: Who didn’t want to live in Zion? To the best of my memory, three or four families left Saikul and moved to Churachandpur. But for most of us this was too hard, even if it came from Shavei. We all had property and livelihoods in Saikul: our homes, vegetable gardens, rice fields, and the like. Giving all that up for new surroundings was daunting, especially as Shavei offered no help in resettling us and expected us to manage on our own. There were too many uncertainties and fears. Most of us decided to stay in Saikul.”

They chose to remain: some of Saikul's B'nei Menashe.

Retaliation was not long in coming. “Fairly quickly,” Tuboi says, “Shavei made us realize that, as far as it was concerned, we no longer existed. It cut off all contact with us. Until then, the B’nei Menashe Council, which was run by Shavei, had come from time to time to take a community census and update us in its registry; now all that stopped. No one came as in the past to collect our dues. And when new Aliyah lists were compiled, none of us was on them, just as Shavei had threatened would be the case.”

This went on, Tuboi told us, for several years. The B’nei Menashe of Saikul continued with their lives as before. Though they were no longer able to turn to Shavei for guidance or instruction in Jewish matters, they kept up their Jewish observance to the best of their ability and knowledge, which included regularly reading from their Torah. Until, that is, 2019. Tuboi remembers the exact date. “It was the 6th of August. On that day, without warning, a group of B’nei Menashe arrived in our village from Kangpokpi. They were led by Haolal Chongloi, a well-known Shavei operative, and they told us they had orders from Shavei to confiscate our Torah scroll, since we no longer had any use for it. There were too few of us left in Saikul, they said, to have a regular minyan [a prayer quorum of ten men], and the Torah couldn’t be read aloud without one.

“This wasn’t true. We weren’t as big a community as Kangpokpi, but we certainly did have a regular minyan, and more than enough men for it. The Torah scroll had been given to us, not to Shavei. We protested. But Chongloi bullied us into submission and we felt helpless. Even though we had already been struck from Shavei’s rolls, we weren’t mentally prepared to defy him. He took our Torah and left.”

The Saikul community was desolate. Its Jewish life went on, but it wasn’t the same as before without a Torah. “We looked desperately for another one,” Tuboi says, “but no B’nei Menashe community in Manipur had one to spare and we had no means of bringing one from Israel.”

Meanwhile, though, things in Manipur were changing. Saikul’s wasn’t the only B’nei Menashe community that had suffered at Shavei Israel’s hands. In 2020, an anti-Shavei revolt broke out, culminating in communal elections in November of that year for a new B’nei Menashe Council, which resulted in a narrow victory for the

Delegates meet in 2020 elections.

anti-Shavei forces.

The ballot was preceded by a floor fight in which Saikul and three other B’nei Menashe communities that had been blacklisted by Shavei were reinstated and given the right to vote. Saikul was now again a recognized part of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe society.

It still took two more years to get a new Torah. “It was our good fortune,” says Tuboi, “that early this autumn, Lalam Hangshing was in Israel. When he was there, he told Degel Menashe’s managing director Isaac Thangjom about our problem and Thangjom offered to donate not one Torah but two if Lalam would take them back with him to Manipur.” The larger of the two Torahs was about half-a-meter tall and came in a wooden case as per the Sephardi and Eastern custom; the smaller Torah had, Ashkenazi-style, only the traditional drape.

The two Torahs.

“One can think of it,” Thangjom said to our Newsletter, “as symbolic of the ‘Sephardi-Ashkenazi’ reconciliation that Degel Menashe has been working for after years in which Shavei Israel split the community by seeking to force the Sephardi rites on everyone.”

Taking with him the two Torah scrolls, Lalam Hangshing returned from Israel to Manipur after Rosh Hashanah, just in time for the holiday of Sukkot, of which Simhat Torah is the final day. “On October 12,” Yochanan Tuboi told us, “he brought the scrolls to Saikul, almost 21 years to the day on which his father brought us our first Torah, and we rejoiced now just as we rejoiced then. We would have liked to stage a huge celebration and invite all of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe, but putting up so many people was more than we could handle, and besides, a big Sukkot feast had already been planned for that week in Churachandpur. But even though we decided to have a smaller ceremony, there was such a feeling of solidarity with us that over 200 guests showed up.

Eating at Saikul's celebration (Lalam Hangshing is second from left).

B’nei Menashe came from different congregations in Churachandpur, from Gamgiphai, from Pejang, from Imphal, from Kangchup, from Phalbung, from Kangpokpi, and from still other places.

“It’s been a great joy,” Tuboi summed up, “to see our community’s spirits soar now that we again have a Torah to read from every Shabbat. There are two boys in Saikul, the sons of my friend Samuel Misao, who can recite the parshat ha-shavu’a [the weekly Torah portion] and now do it every week; they don’t yet know the chant notes, but I’m sure they’ll learn them soon. And they’re not the only ones in Saikul who can read Hebrew. Most of our youngsters can, and most of them know how to pray from the Siddur. We still number 20 families and nearly 100 people despite those who left for Churachandpur, and we expect now to take our rightful place on the Aliyah lists. Our destination is still Zion.”