The Mistakes of Nof Hagalil: A Degel Menashe Editorial

(August 21, 2022) Part II of Demsat Haokip’s account of his Aliyah, posted in last week’s Newsletter, painted a depressing picture of a Shavei Israel-run Absorption Center for 250 new B’nei Menashe immigrants in the Upper Galilee village of Goren. This week’s Part III describes the immigrants’ transition to a permanent life in the town of Nof Hagalil, once more under Shavei’s supervision. Together with the accompanying story of another of the new olim, Hanna Singson, it portrays an even sadder reality.

It would be bad enough had Demsat and Hanna simply pointed out the inexcusable negligence of Shavei’s Nof Hagalil staff in regard to the newcomers. At a loss in a country whose language they do not speak and whose customs are strange to them, these olim desperately need help and guidance. What they get is cynical indifference from Shavei’s operatives, who receive paychecks for pretending to assist them.

This is not, however, the main problem. That is something much bigger. It is the entire complex of policies, set by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption in collaboration with Shavei Israel, that determines the new immigrants’ lives.

One might begin with their housing – that is, with the transfer of all 250 of them from their Absorption Center to Nof Hagalil, a middle-sized city in the Lower Galilee. As Demsat Haokip writes, this was done without asking them if this was where they wanted to live or if they had other preferences. They were simply bused there and put in apartments as if where they lived was none of their business Why was Nof Hagalil chosen for them? No one bothered to explain. Perhaps it was because the town had available and reasonably priced rental housing. Perhaps because its mayor, a figure with known political connections, wanted to increase its population. Perhaps for other reasons. What these may have been, the immigrants weren’t told.

Not that Nof Hagalil is necessarily a bad place to live, or that the apartments given the newcomers were unsatisfactory. But many of the Goren group had friends and relatives who had reached Israel from India before them and were already acclimatized – in Bet-She’an, in Migdal Ha’emek, in Sderot, in Kiryat Arba, in other B’nei Menashe communities. The B’nei Menashe have a strong sense of social and familial solidarity. These friends and relatives would have been happy to take the new olim in, to help find them housing and jobs, and to orient them in their new lives – and they would have done it a hundred times better than Shavei Israel’s apathetic staff. As Demsat Haokip puts it: “It would have been good if we could have been absorbed into an existing B’nei Menashe community, one with people who had been living in Israel for at least a few years and whom we could have communicated with and been helped by.”

This is how immigrants have traditionally been settled in new countries – not by bureaucrats but by those who came before them and speak their language and understand their needs. It is how the 250 B’nei Menashe should have been settled, too. If they had been given, besides the standard benefits, the right to decide where to apply them, they would have been far better-off. This is precisely what most olim to Israel nowadays – from America, from France, from Argentina, from Russia – are given. Nobody tells them where to live. Why should the B’nei Menashe be different?

Yet even if, for some unknown reason, Nof Hagalil had to be the destination of all 250 of the Goren group, surely they might have been asked where they wanted to live in it. Demsat Haokip speaks, as does Hanna Singson, of the new immigrants’ feelings of loneliness and isolation because they find themselves at a distance from those they knew in Manipur or befriended in Goren. Some of this may have been unavoidable: there were only so many places for rent in Nof Hagalil and they weren’t all near each other. But why, given this limitation, weren’t the newcomers consulted about whom they wanted to live close to? They have no cars, after all, and public transportation is slow and costly; whoever can’t be conveniently walked to is far away. A nearby friend or two would be an enormous comfort. Only non-caring minds that think of people as mere statistics would have failed to take this into account.

And what about work? While B’nei Menashe immigrants have to earn a living like everyone else, it is shocking to be told by Demsat Haokip that he was simply instructed by Shavei Israel to report for work at a factory chosen for him with no knowledge of what pay he would receive or of what his job would entail. Have the B’nei Menashe been brought to Nof Hagalil as indentured servants who have no say in their own employment? True, most of them were farmers or day laborers in India; few have come to Israel with the skills or education that would benefit them in the Israeli job market. But is this a reason why, accompanied by a translator, they should not be allowed to visit an employment office and decide for themselves what is most suitable for them? How is it even possible to know what this might be unless they are interviewed fist? Many of the newcomers, even if they lack formal training, are good with their hands and with tools. Is putting swimming pool cleaners in boxes, as Demsat Haokip was assigned to do, the most they are capable of?

Demsat is in his mid-fifties: it may make little economic sense to invest in teaching him a trade that would equip him for a better job. Yet most of the B’nei Menashe immigrants of a working age are younger – and the Israeli economy is crying out for construction workers, mechanics, plumbers, welders, electricians, drivers, heavy-equipment operators, technicians of all kinds. Are the newcomers in Nof Hagalil who are in their twenties, thirties, and forties being offered vocational courses in these areas? Has anyone sat down with them and told them what the opportunities are? Are they being given any horizon in Israel other than decades of minimum-wage drudgery on factory production lines? And without a horizon, is it any wonder that some of them, according to Demsat, joke sadly about returning to India?

Of course, one can’t function well in Israel even as a mechanic or a welder without a basic working knowledge of Hebrew – and perhaps the greatest blunder in the Goren group’s absorption has been the failure to provide them with this. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Demsat’s describes, on the one hand, the unqualified Hebrew teachers in Nof Hagalil whom he gave up on after a few lessons, and on the other hand, Shavei’s requirement that the immigrants attend nighttime classes in Judaism. More classes in Judaism after months of them in the Absorption Center in Goren – is this, rather than Hebrew, what the immigrants need? Without Hebrew, their path to advancement in Israel is blocked, no matter how much religion they are taught

It may not be too late to correct at least some of the mistakes made in Nof Hagalil --- mistakes that replicate those made with every other group of B’nei Menashe olim brought by Shavei Israel in the last two decades . It is certainly not too late to prevent their recurrence in the future. This will only happen, however, if responsibility for the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah is transferred from Shavei to The Jewish Agency. After a long campaign waged by Degel Menashe, the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption has promised in writing to do this. (See our July 21 Website article: “Ministry of Aliyah: Ties With Shavei Ended.”) Now, it must be held to its promise.

Old, Ill, and Abandoned: Shavei Israel, The Ministry of Immigration, and Hanna Singson

(August 18, 2022) A mask over her mouth, her body crisscrossed by IVs as though linked to multiple lifelines, 74-year-old Hanna Singson lies in a bed in the internal medicine ward of Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital . Only one visitor is allowed to see her at a time. She has been diagnosed with pancytopoenia, a bone-marrow condition in which there is a lower-than-normal number of red and white blood cells and platelets in the blood. The only child who remained unmarried, her daughter Dina Chinthem Singson, lives in Manipur. “I am very lonely and miss my daughter very much,” Hannah tells Jessica Thangjom, the visitor now in her room. “You don’t know what loneliness is until it happens to you.”

Hannah came to in Israel in October 2021 with the latest group of B’nei Menashe immigrants from Manipur and was like them given housing in Nof Hagalil, the former city of Upper Nazareth.. (See Demsat Haokip’s three-part story, of which Part III, “In Nof Hagalil,” appears in today’s Newsletter.) Her daughter Dina remained behind in India after Shavei Israel refused to let her join her aged mother. As explained in a letter Dina wrote to the Ministry of Immigration/Jewish Agency fact-finding mission that visited Manipur last June, she was working in Chennai, far from Manipur, at the time of the 2014 Aliyah interviews conducted by Shavei that led to her parents’ inclusion in the 2021 list, and she could not make it back quickly enough to sit for them.

Dina’s repeated requests to Shavei to be interviewed at a later date, which grew more urgent after her father

Hannah and Dina Singson in Manipur.

died in 2015, were turned down, and last October her mother departed for Israel by herself. Infuriatingly, as Dina wrote the Ministry/Agency delegation, “there were others who did not clear the interview but were allowed to make Aliyah. And now that my mother is in Israel, the people in charge of her well-being aren’t able to give her the proper care and attention. Knowing this weighs heavily on me and I feel miserable about it all the time.”

Dina was understating things. It wasn’t that Shavei Israel’s staff in Nof Hagalil was “unable” to assist Hannah when she took up residence there after several months in a Shavei-run Absorption Center in northern Israel. It was that it had no interest in helping her. “As long as I was in the Absorption Center,” Hannah told Jessica Thangjom, eager to talk despite her physical weakness, “there were people around me all the time. But in Nof Hagalil, Shavei placed me in a one-room apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom in a big building in which I didn’t know a soul. It was on the bottom floor, two floors below ground level, and it was dark and dirty. I had to pay the landlord 2,000 shekels a month, which included water, electricity, and taxes, and he demanded checks for a year in advance. Even before I took sick, I was stiff from old age. It was hard to manage all the cooking, laundry, cleaning, and shopping on my own. Making meals was too much for me, and I ate mainly canned and ready-made food.

“Right from the start,” Hannah related, “I felt neglected. Whenever I asked for help from Shavei, I was ignored. Even if I was able to get through to someone, all I was ever told was that I should be patient. No one from Shavei bothered to visit me even once during the half-year I was in Nof Hagalil. I wasn’t feeling well. I kept asking for assistance and didn’t get it. Finally, Shlomo Telngoh Haokip, the Shavei representative in charge of the new immigrants in Nof Hagalil] agreed to take me to a doctor at the health plan I was registered in. He told

Shlomo Telngoh Haokip.

me to meet him there at 10 a.m. I arrived on time and waited for him till noon. He never showed up, never got in touch to apologize, and never answered his phone when I tried contacting him. He and others from Shavei are supposed to be helping newcomers like myself, but they don’t lift a finger to do anything. They’re paid for jobs they don’t perform.”

Back in Manipur, Dina, increasingly desperate about her mother’s deteriorating state, contacted Degel Menashe. Jessica and her husband Yitzhak, Degel Menashe’s managing director, traveled to Nof Hagalil, met Hannah, and were quickly convinced that she had to be moved. “She was depressed and exhausted,” Jessica told our Newsletter. “We found a kind B’nei Menashe couple in Sderot, Rivka and Zvulun Guite, who had an extra room and were happy to take her in. In July we drove up to Nof Hagalil and moved her to Sderot. It took a long time to convince the landlord to

Jessica Thangjom.

return the checks she had given him. We explained to him that she needed someone to look after her and would die of neglect and loneliness if she stayed in Nof Hagalil. He was more concerned about his rent than he was about Hannah, but when we told him that he would be held responsible if anything happened to her, he agreed.”

Hannah arrived in Sderot in poor condition. The Guites arranged for her to see a doctor as soon as possible. Tests were done and it was decided to hospitalize her. Back in Manipur, meanwhile, Dina now finds herself in a state of de facto expulsion from the pro-Shavei Israel synagogue in the Churachandpur neighborhood of Boljol to which she and her mother belonged -- her punishment for continuing to campaign for her Aliyah and to criticize Shavei for its neglect of Hannah. “I apologize for such a lengthy note,” she wrote the Ministry/Agency mission, “but this is the briefest testimony I can give to the burden of grief that I carry.” She received no reply.

In Nof Hagalil: Part III Of Demsat Haokip’s Story

(August 17, 2022) In two previous installments, Demsat Haokip told of his Aliyah from Manipur and his family’s stay in an Absorption Center in Israel. This week his story continues with his family’s first months in Nof Hagalil, the former city of Upper Nazareth, to which his group of 250 immigrants was sent.

We were still at the Absorption Center when the day for our giyyur [conversion] arrived. A few days previously, all the males in our group were required to perform a tipat dam [symbolic circumcision], even though we had all been circumcised before joining the B’nei Menashe community in Manipur. On the day of the conversion, we were taken to a mikveh [ritual bath]. We were three families, some 20 or so people, men and women apart. The three adult males were brought to the bath one by one. As usual, I was last. Several rabbis were present. I was told to take off my clothes while one of them examined my circumcision. After a good look, he seemed satisfied, because I was signaled to descend the steps into the water. Then I was signaled again to immerse myself completely. I dunked for a second or two, surfaced, and was told to recite the Shema Yisra’el [the “Hear O Israel” prayer]. Then I stepped out of the water and dried myself with a towel. It was little more than a formality for me, since I had already felt fully Jewish before this.

There was one other notable event before leaving the Absorption Center. Now that we were converted, all the married couples in our group of 250 immigrants were remarried according to Jewish law. This was done ten couples at a time. Before the ceremony, I was asked to sign a ketubah [halakhic marriage contract] along with two witnesses. The ten couples were lined up, a rabbi standing at one end gave a short speech that none of us understood, and the seven traditional blessings were said, several of them by Shavei Israel representatives. Then all the husbands recited “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither” and in unison broke a glass placed under each one’s foot. This was followed by dancing and music, and some food.

The couples at the wedding.

Meanwhile, Shavei Israel was making preparations for our move to Nof Hagalil. Its representatives were given the job of finding rental housing for us there. I suppose they tried matching the size of available apartments to the size of our families, but we ourselves weren’t consulted about any of it. Nobody asked us whether we wished to live in Nof Hagalil, and nobody asked where we wanted to live in it. We were simply told, “This is where you’ll be.”

Most of us were given furnished apartments with three bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen with a refrigerator and stove. The only thing we had to buy was a living-room table, and we bought a cheap plastic one. The younger families with fewer children were given two bedrooms. Our monthly rent was 2,500 shekels and we had to sign a lease that runs until the end of this year.

There was only one other B’nei Menashe family in the building. Our Israeli neighbors are nice, but since we know no Hebrew, we have no way of talking to them. . It would have been very helpful if we could have been absorbed into an existing B’nei Menashe community, one with people who had been living in Israel for at least a few years and whom we could have communicated with and been helped by.

Hebrew was and is a big problem. When we first arrived in Nof Hagalil, we were offered a daytime Hebrew course given in a large room provided by the municipality. Yet since none of the teachers could speak our language, and we couldn’t speak theirs, it was impossible to understand them. I learned nothing and eventually dropped out. We have to get along in sign language as best we can. When we go shopping, everything in the supermarket has a price displayed on it, so we pick things out, take them to the cashier, and pay for them, all without a word. If only we had been taught some conversational Hebrew in the Absorption Center, or back in Manipur, in all the years that we were waiting for our Aliyah!

Valid until 10.10.22

A few days after arriving in Nof Hagalil, we were given our permanent Israeli ID cards, which meant we were now full Israeli citizens and entitled to a sal klita, an immigrant’s allowance of 8,000 shekels a year for the next half-year. When a Shavei representative handed them to us, however, we noticed that our daughter Rachel’s ID card was different; it was a temporary one that had to be renewed within a year. Since we couldn’t go to the Ministry of Interior office without Hebrew, we asked Shlomo Telngoh Haokip, the Shavei official in charge of assistance to the Nof Hagalil immigrants, to help us. He said he would but did nothing about it. When we asked him a second time, the result was the same. When Rachel gave birth in May, he didn’t answer our appeal for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. And after her son Yair was born and she wasn’t given the ma’anak ledah [birth allowance] that every new mother gets. Shlomo said to us when we went to him agian, “Look, I can’t do anything about it. Ask Tsvi Khaute [Shavei Israel’s chief administrator].” I sent Tsvi a WhatsApp message and he texted back, “Don’t worry. You’ve been taken care of until now and you’ll be taken care of from now on.” Given the way we’ve been taken care of until now, I have every reason to be worried!

That’s what we come to expect from Shavei. We have the telephone numbers of their counselors whom we’re supposed to call when we need assistance, but when we call them, they generally ignore us. It’s the same when you send them WhatApp messages. And if you do get to talk to them, they’re always telling you that they’re busy with someone else and have no time. Our problems are clearly not a priority for them. We need people who have some kindness and a genuine desire to help, not like them.

One thing Shavei did do was open bank accounts for us all, in which the immigrants’ allowance was deposited. Of the 8’000 shekels we receive every month, 2,500, as I said, goes for rent, another 2,500 for water, gas, electricity, and municipal taxes, and the remaining 3,000 is spent mainly on food. We can manage on that if we stick to eating meat once a week, on Shabbat. Our children’s education costs us nothing. The younger ones go to government schools in Nof Hagalil, while the three older girls were sent by Shavei Israel to religious boarding schools in Ma’alot and Acre. It’s all paid for by someone.

The Shavei announcement calling for the return of the 6,000 shekels.

We were also given an initial loan of 6,000 shekels by Shavei to start us off with while waiting to get our allowance.. At one point, Shavei posted a WhatApp announcement that this loan was being converted into a grant and wouldn’t have to be repaid. Our happiness didn’t last long, though, because a week or so later a second announcement was posted that we would have to return the money after all, since it was needed for a new wave of Aliyah. That was in mid-May, three months ago. Since then, there’s no new wave of Aliyah wave in sight. I don’t know what others have done, but I’ll think about repayment after I get a better explanation.

Our allowance runs out at the end of August, after which we’ll be on our own. That leaves even older men like myself – I’m in my mid-fifties – with no choice but to find work. None of us actually went and looked for a job; with no way of talking to a prospective employer, how could we? The choices were limited in any case: we could either go to work in a factory or take a cleaning job. Shavei counselors came and told us what employment they had found for us, just as they had told us earlier what apartments we had been given. I was informed that I would be working at a factory that made robotic swimming pools cleaners, and the next day I was taken there.

“Demsat’s wife: She’ll have to work, too.

The work assigned me was to pack the assembled robots for shipment. It wouldn’t have been hard if I had been able to sit down, but I wasn’t given a seat and had to stand on my feet all day long. It was too much for me and I quit after three days. Although I hadn’t been told what my pay would be, I was given 400 shekels for my three days of work, minus the cost of the work boots I was made to buy, which was deducted from my salary. Now I’m waiting for Shavei to find me another job. If we’re to make ends meet, my wife will have to work, too.

When we first arrived in Nof ha-Galil, we were like a bunch of blind people. Even today, after having been here for months, it’s still like that. No doubt the place is beautiful, with lovely views all around, but we’re too involved in groping our way from one thing to the next to notice them. If we at least had been concentrated in a single neighborhood, we could have taken comfort in each other’s company. Those of us who are lucky live close to one another, but most of us live far away. And now that most people have a job, we don’t even go to the same synagogue any more. We used to meet for prayers every day in a hall provided by the municipality, but there’s no time for it now that we have regular jobs. Some of us see each other at night in religion classes given by Shavei. Although we’re not forced to attend them, it’s made clear to us that we’re expected to.

There’s a joke going around that we’re still waiting for Aliyah – back to India. That’s more of an expression of frustration than anything else. I doubt that anyone in his right mind would actually return to Manipur. We waited for so many years to come to Israel and we’re not about to give up now that we’re here. We B’nei Menashe aren’t complainers. We do what’s asked of us and don’t grumble.