A Brave Woman Stands Tall

(August 25, 2022) Sarah Lamsi Baite continues to fight for her dignity and for justice for herself and her daughter. This week, summoned to a hearing by the Teising Area Chiefs Union, an association of neighborhood authorities in west Churachandpur where she and many of the city’s B’nei Menashe live, she stood tall and refused to back down.

Baite has been harassed and threatened ever since, in January of this year, she filed a police complaint against Kailam Singson, accused by her of raping her ten-year-old daughter in 2016. Singson is today a resident of Israel, to which he came with a group of B’nei Menashe immigrants, organized by Shavei Israel, in 2018. Before this, shortly after the rape, in June 2016, he admitted his guilt by taking part in an out-of-court settlement arranged according to so-called “Kuki Customary Law” by the Village Authority or VA of the neighborhood of Headquarters, Tuibong in which he and Baite lived. In this settlement, Baite received from Singson a sum of 150,000 rupees (a little over $2,000) in return for a pledge to drop the case. She did so after being warned not to go to the police by the Shavei Israel-controlled Beit Shalom synagogue, to which both she and Singson belonged, and with the

Sarah’s interrogators.

understanding that she and her daughter would then be able to resume a normal life.

This was not, however, what happened. A month after the settlement, in July 2016, the Beit Shalom executive expelled Sarah Baite from its congregation for having shamed it by reporting her daughter’s rape to the Tuibong VA rather than remaining silent. Most of the congregation cut all ties with her, and she and her traumatized daughter were cast into social isolation. A gross violation of the settlement she had agreed to, this was one reason, she stated, why she was acting not only within her legal rights when she finally mustered the resolve to go to the police (“Kuki Customary Law” has no legal standing in Manipur), but with full moral justification.

Yet Shavei thought otherwise. Following Baite’s police complaint, its Manipur operatives launched a concerted campaign of harassment and intimidation, thoroughly documented by our Newsletter, aimed at getting her to retract her complaint. In effect, Shavei played a double game. While its leadership in Israel professed shock at Baite’s story, pretended to have been unaware of it prior to her complaint, and made vague promises of offering her assistance, its Manipur staff went on threatening her and getting others to do so.

The latest chapter in Baite’s long ordeal began last July 22, when she was summoned, at the request of the Churachandpur branch of the Kuki Lawyer’s Association, to appear before the Tuibong VA, which then directed her to refund the settlement money received from Kailam Singson and pay an additional 50,000 rupee fine for breaking her 2016 pledge. Her answer was that – her pledge having indeed been broken, though with ample justification -- she was willing to return the money but only to the person she received it from, namely, Kailam Singson himself. Knowing there was no chance of Kailam’s coming to Manipur, where he was sure to face trial and possibly a stiff jail sentence, the Headquarters, Tuibong VA passed the case on to the Teising Area Chiefs Union or TACU, which asked Baite to appear before it.

This she did on August 19, bringing with her six people for support: a couple of friends, a relative, and B’nei Menashe Council general secretary Ohaliav Haokip along with the two advisors, Nechemiah Lhouvum and Ovadia Touthang. Arraigned against her were the TACU neighborhood authorities and representatives of the Kuki Lawyer’s Association. (Speaking to our Newsletter later, the association’s president Daniel Haokip denied prior knowledge of the incident and declared, “The case of Sarah Lamsi Baite was taken up on a personal basis…The matter does not merit coming under the association’s purview.”) Despite her request to be accompanied by her supporters, Sarah Baite was told that she would have to face her interrogators by herself. In the accompanying box, as told to our Newsletter, is her account of the confrontation.

I was told to present myself before a court of seven or eight men while my companions waited outside. They told me they were there to solve a problem for me, since I had accepted compensation for the rape of my daughter. If I did what they were asking, they said, I wouldn’t have to return the 150,000 rupees I received in 2016 according to Kuki Customary Law, even
though I had broken my pledge by filing a police complaint. They said they had spoken to B’nei Menashe religious leaders in [the Churachandpur neighborhood of] Buoljol with the aim of bringing about an amicable solution. All I had to do was withdraw my complaint and sign a statement they had drafted for me. If I did that, they promised I would be put at the top of the list for the next Aliyah group to leave for Israel.
I answered that I didn’t know what religious leaders they were talking about. And how could I sign a statement without knowing what was in it or consulting those close to me and those who have stood by me? Besides, I said, I had no intention of withdrawing my complaint, which I had made after years of humiliation heaped on me. My answer was not well-received. I was told that I was a very obstinate and foolish woman, that I was being manipulated by others, and that I was in contempt of Kuki Customary Law. I said: “Which of us is in contempt of it? When I was expelled from my synagogue for agreeing to a settlement according to Customary Law and complained to the Village Authority, I was told it didn’t interfere in internal B’nei Menashe affairs. But those who expelled me were Kukis, too.
Why was my daughter’s rape by another Kuki a matter for Kuki Customary Law and not my expulsion from where I prayed by other Kukis?”

They simply ignored what I said. They warned me that if I didn’t withdraw my complaint and sign the statement, they would let the whole Kuki people know that I was an evil woman with no respect for Kuki laws and customs. They said I would be marked for life as a social outcast and that no village or neighborhood would ever have me. I said, “You can kill me if you want, but I’m not giving in.” So they said that in that case, they would see to it that no B’nei Menashe, including me, ever got to Israel. They said, “It’s a simple thing for us to write to the Israeli government and have Aliyah shut down forever, and you’ll be blamed for it,” I told them I didn’t believe them and that my answer was still no. When they realized that they were not going to get what they wanted, they told me to come back in two days and let me go.

Sarah Baite’s account.

Sarah Baite behaved courageously, as she has done throughout. Yet it is unlikely that she could withdraw her complaint even if she wanted to, since the case is a criminal one in which the plaintiff in court would be the state, not Baite. And that the state of Manipur takes the case seriously was evidenced this week when Baite received a copy of an order handed down by Lamkhanpau Tonsing, Special Judge for the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO), directing the relevant authorities to inquire into her daughter’s status and to submit a report by September 5 on her eligibility for government “victim compensation.”

Judge Lamkhanpau Tonsing’s court order.

BMC Chairman, ORT officials, Conclude Agreement

(August 25, 2022) At an August 23 meeting in Mumbai, B’nei Menashe Council Chairman Lalam Hangshing and officials of ORT India, the Indian chapter of the international Jewish educational and vocational training organization, formally decided to transfer ORT’s current computer skills program from Imphal, Manipur’s capital, to the new Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail Memorial School in Churichandpur, Manipur’s center of B’nei Menashe life.

ORT originally opened a computer training program on the premises of Churachandpur’s Beit Shalom synagogue in the late 1990s, but moved it to Imphal a decade later after friction with Shavei Israel led to its being asked to leave Beit Shalom. In Imphal too, however, Shavei’s opposition to ORT’s involvement in B’nei Menashe life led to the program’s dwindling over time.

A classroom in Churachandpur’s Eliyahu Avichail School.

Now, with the launching in Churachandpur of the BMC-sponsored Avichail School, ORT has agreed to move its computer program back to that city while assuming partial responsibility for the school’s funding.

Hangshing met in Mumbai with four ORT officials: Dean Johnny Jhirad; Project Manager Elkan Palkar; CEO Shivani Astamkar; and board member Benjamin Isaacs. “It’s our hope,” he told our Newsletter, “that this agreement will give a big push to both Avichail Schools, in Churachandpur and in Aizawl. There is a lot of enthusiasm for it on both our part and ORT’s. B’nei Menashe education in Manipur and Mizoram has been woefully neglected in recent decades. The whole emphasis has been on Aliyah – and while this remains a primary objective, we can’t go on letting the B’nei Menashe youth that is waiting for Aliyah be deprived of an education, both Jewish and general. Computers should be just a start. With ORT’s help, we can think of vocational training in other areas as well, which would complement the Avichail Schools’ Jewish and Hebrew curriculum. We need young B’nei Menashe to arrive in Israel equipped with at least some of the skills and knowledge that they will need to succeed there. The future of the B’nei Menashe community depends on the future of each one of its young people.”

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.