A Lot of Questions To Be Asked: A Degel Menashe Editorial

(August 11, 2023) Part I of the story of Yosef Demsat Haokip and his family’s Aliyah to Israel, which appeared in last week’s Newsletter, told of a brave man’s refusal to be cowed or intimidated by Shavei Israel’s discriminatory Aliyah policies and its cynical manipulation of them to enhance its power. Demsat’s victorious insistence on maintaining his dignity and self-respect despite Shavei’s bullying tactics should serve as a model for all B’nei Menashe. He has proven that it is possible for his people to reach Israel while continuing to stand tall in the face of Shavei’s threats and intimidation.

Part II of Demsat’s story tells of his and his family’s five months in a Shavei Israel-run absorption center, along with the 250 B’nei Menashe immigrants who arrived with him in Israel last October. Here, Shavei's harassment of him continued. Part ll's revelations are even more disturbing than Part I’s because they cover new ground. Until now we have heard a great deal, in large measure due to this Newsletter, about Shavei’s abuse of its monopoly over the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah. This week we hear from Demsat about Shavei’s abuse of its monopoly over the B’nei Menashe’ absorption in Israel – that is, over what happens to them in the first stage following their arrival. He paints a scandalous picture.

What is scandalous is not so much the physical conditions in the absorption center in the Galilee village of Goren that Demsat and his family were sent to – the two rooms with one toilet that their eight-member family had to live in for nearly half a year, or the daily food prepared without the slightest consideration for the diet they were accustomed to. No one promised the B’nei Menashe a life of luxury upon their arrival, and if crowded quarters and a thoughtless disrespect for their eating habits are part of it -- well, immigrants to Israel (and other countries) have had to face worse things.

No, what is truly scandalous is the educational and cultural aspect – or should we say the educational and cultural vacuum? -- of those five months. For day after day, as Demsat describes it, he and his fellow olim were made to sit from morning till night through one poorly prepared and incompetently taught class after another, broken only by lengthy prayer sessions and quickly eaten meals. The teachers were Shavei Israel staff members with no professional background or qualifications whose only subjects were Judaism and Jewish law. There were no rabbis among them (although the B’nei Menashe community has several of its own) and no experienced educators (although the community has these, too). Shavei Israel preferred to hire its own operatives, however unsuited for the job they were.

Worse yet is the fact that, during their first five months in Israel, all Demsat and his fellow olim were exposed to was, as he puts it, “religion and prayer, prayer and religion, all the time.” Outside the windows of their classroom was a new country, the country of their dreams. Were they taught anything about it? No. Were they instructed in its language? No. Were they once taken to see something of it? Again no. Were they introduced to any Israelis or offered a chance to talk to them? No once more. Were they given the slightest preparation for the life that awaited them once they left the absorption center and had to strike out on their own? Not if Demsat is to be believed. They were too busy – read Demsat’s description of his giyyur interview – learning the laws of de-boning a fish on Shabbat to have time for such frivolous pursuits.

Granted: a successful giyyur is a necessity for new B’nei Menashe immigrants and they need to be taught all that is required for it. Shavei Israel is not responsible for the questions asked a giyyur candidate by a rabbinical court, and if one of these is how to extract a bone halakhically from a fish, so be it. But Shavei is partially responsible for the adjustment to Israeli life of the B’nei Menashe it brings to Israel – and in its total neglect of this in its absorption center in Goren (and presumably, in other absorption centers run by it in the past) it is guilty of shocking negligence, Knowing the minutest laws of Judaism is not going to help newcomers in Israel to find a job, communicate in Hebrew with their neighbors, navigate Israeli bureaucracy, or understand the culture and mentality of their new homeland. In this respect, the five long months that Demsat Haokip and his family spent in the Goren absorption center were wasted ones.

And where, pray, was the Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption in all this? The ministry not only paid the costs of the Goren absorption center, it bore full responsibility for what went on there. Did it know what this was? Did it care? Did it send anyone to talk to the B’nei Menashe immigrants, sit in on their classes, listen to their complaints and suggestions for improvements? Not to the best of Demsat Haokip’s knowledge, and not to the best of ours. As is the case with the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah from India, the ministry’s attitude seems to have been to dump their absorption into the hands of Shavei Israel while saying, “Here, it’s all yours. You take care of it. Just send us the bills. We’ll pay them and ask no questions.” But there are a lot of questions to be asked.

At The Absorption Center: Part II of Demsat Haokip's Story

In the end, we made it to Israel despite my refusal to sign the loyalty oath that Shavei demanded of me. Perhaps Shavei was worried about the negative publicity it was getting in cases of Aliyah discrimination like mine. Even then, though, it squeezed the last drop of satisfaction from putting me through the wringer by keeping me and my family in the dark until practically the last moment. Two weeks before the departure for Israel of the last group of B’nei Menashe who had passed the 2014-15 interviews, long after all the others had been informed of it, we received word that we would be joining them.

It was a victory of sorts, though not a complete one, because my son Menashe was not allowed to come with us. The reason was that in 2015, a year after his Aliyah interview, he married a B’nei Menashe girl who had not been interviewed and Shavei struck him from the Aliyah list instead of including her, too. It was terribly unfair, but that was Shavei’s policy.

The homes in which the B’nei Menashe olim were housed.

Our group of 250 immigrants arrived in Israel in October, 2021 and was taken straight to an absorption center in Goren, a moshav in the Upper Galilee near Ma’alot, where we were housed in homes for vacationers. There were 12 to 15 of these houses, located on a gentle slope overlooking a forest. My family of eight was allotted two rooms in one of these houses, each room with four beds. One of them, which came with a bathroom, was shared by me, my wife, and our two younger children, while the other was occupied by the four older children, who had to use our facilities. It was a tight fit, but I didn’t complain.

We settled quickly into the routine that was to be ours for the next five months. Our days were mostly spent in shi’urim {religious lessons]. These were supervised by a Shavei administrator, Aharon Singson, who was assisted by four teachers. A typical day began with a wake-up at 6 am. Shacharit [the morning prayer] began at 6:45 and typically lasted until 8. We were then served breakfast, consisting of bread, eggs, butter , cheese, milk, and tea or coffee. The shiurim, for which we were divided into four or five groups of several dozen pupils, began at 9. At around 12:30 there was a break for mincha {the afternoon prayer], lunch, and some free time, after which there were more classes from 3 pm to 6:30, when we broke again for arvit [the evening prayer] and supper. After supper, Aharon Singson gave all of us together another shiur, which usually lasted from 8 to 10 or even 11. By then, it was time for bed.

The forest around Goren.

The shiurim dealt with the weekly Torah portion, and with Jewish law and custom, and were meant to prepare us for our giyyur [conversion] interviews with a bet-din [rabbinic court}. There was, as far as I could make out, no rhyme or reason to any of it – not why we studied one subject at one time and another at another time, nor why some of the classes lasted an hour, some half-an-hour. It was all random, according to whatever mood the teacher was in on a given day. There wasn’t a single class in Jewish or Israeli history. We learned nothing about Israel itself or Israeli life. We were taught no Hebrew beyond the alphabet. We never met or talked with even one Israeli, including the residents of Goren. We were never taken on a single trip. All we saw of the country we had come to live in was a children’s park in the village that our children had almost no time to play in, and the forest on the village’s edge. You could sometimes see wild animals there, such as deer, foxes, and a lot of wild boar, and I liked watching them. Otherwise, it was religion and prayer, prayer and religion, all the time.

I suppose we had to know all that for the rabbis. But there was no excuse for the food, which was simply terrible. To begin with, although the mainstay of a B’nei Menashe diet is rice, the staff at Goren did not know how to make rice the way we ate it. The rice was always half-cooked and made with oil and salt, whereas we traditionally used only water; this led to constant stomach problems that made us dyspeptic much of the time, although we were never sick enough to be allowed to skip our classes, despite all the gas that was passed in them. The fried schnitzel, cold cuts, and other meat that we were served were foreign to our taste, and the salads, not all the ingredients of which I could identify, were far too bland. Some chilies would have vastly improved their taste! No one seemed to realize that we like our food to spicy. And why did there have to be so much sugar in everything? I can understand sugar in cakes, tea and the like, but why put it in a chicken dish, which is something no B’nei Menashe would dream of doing? Given all the money that was spent on our upkeep, I would have thought that one of our brothers or sisters might have been asked to cook for us. Everybody would have gained from it.

After four or five months of this, we were deemed ready to face the dayanim [rabbinical judges.]. For this we were divided into groups of six or seven families, numbering 30 to 40 in a group, and bused to Haifa. It took several days to complete the process, and given my standing with Shavei, it came as no surprise to me that our family was in the last group and was the last family in that group to be called. We were used to that from Manipur.

“Demsat and his family dressed for the Bet-Din. From left to right: Ahava, Rakhel, Leah, Demsat Yosef and his wife, Osnat, Leora and Rivka. Sara is in the front.

As we were ushered into the Bet-Din by Tzvi Khaute [Shavei Israel’s chief administrator], I saw Michael Freund [Shavei’s founder and chairman] seated at the back of the room. The interview began. I was asked about Joseph in the Bible. I told the whole story – how he was the favorite of Jacob, and how his jealous brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, and how he was falsely accused and imprisoned, and how he was taken from his prison cell to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, and all the rest. When I finished, the next question was about how to remove a bone from a cooked fish on Shabbat. I answered that since there is a prohibition on forcibly separating objects on the Sabbath, one should use one's teeth rather than one’s fingers to detach the bone from the flesh. Each of my family was then asked in turn a Torah question followed by a halakhic question. The interview must have lasted over an hour, and I assumed we did well, because there were a lot of tov me’ods [“very good”s] after each answer.

When the interview was over, we were told to wait outside. I was expecting us to be called back in to recite the Shema Yisra’el [the “Hear O Israel” prayer, the Jewish proclamation of faith] but it didn’t turn out that way. After a few minutes, Tzvi Khaute came out from the rabbis’ chamber and informed us that we had failed the interview.

I didn’t know what to think. I felt helpless, numb. And yet I wasn’t entirely surprised. It was typical of the way Shavei had tormented me from the beginning. Tsvi wielded a lot of power. He controlled things. If he wanted us to fail the interview and be sent back to India, or simply to be worried sick, he could easily have asked the dayanim for that favor. There was nothing I could do about it.

That evening, Tzvi sent one of his men, Chanan Singsit, to summon me to a meeting with him. I knew what he would want: for me to beg for forgiveness and plead that my family be allowed to complete its giyyur so that it could live in Israel. I told Chanan that I wasn’t going to any meeting. I was not, I said, going to be bullied, and I would sooner be sent back to Manipur than have to knuckle under.

Chanan reported back and Tsvi sent another person to talk to me. This time, after much argument, my family insisted that I see Tsvi. I went to meet him the next day at his Goren office. When I got there he asked, “What do you have against me?” and told me that my family would have to appear before the dayyanim again “What good would that do?” I asked. “We’ll be failed this time, too. Do I have to remind you that it was I who, as vice-chairman of Congregation Bet-Shalom in Churachandpur, taught Judaism to many of those who passed the interview? They still still know less than I do, but they got through it and I didn’t.”

We ended the meeting with my reluctantly agreeing to appear with my family again before the Bet-Din. This time the interview was short. I was the only one asked a question, and all I was asked was to recite the Shabbat evening Kiddush [blessing over wine]. I hadn’t needed five months of shiurim for that! We were informed we had passed and we were all told to say the Shema.

(Next week: Demsat is settled in Nof Hagalil.)

From a Village in Manipur to Nof Ha-Galil: Part I of a 3-Part Series

[Yosef Demsat Haokip joined the B’nei Menashe in Manipur in 1990, yet was denied Aliyah to Israel until last October. Here, in his own words, is Part 1 of his three-part story.]

I was born Demsat Haokip in 1968, in the village of Matjang, in the Ukhrul district of Manipur. The village had some 37 households, and my father was its chief. We owned rice fields and supported ourselves from them.

We boys in Matjang spent our childhood playing games and exploring the jungle around our village. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I started to help around the house by fetching water and firewood, and I occasionally worked in the rice fields. Although there were no schools in our area, I learned the Latin alphabet in which our Kuki language I written from an uncle who had some education and gave me lessons when he had time; he taught me to read and write by using the Kuki-Thadou translation of the Bible. As with other families in such villages, religion played a very important role in our lives. A family had to be part of a Christian congregation. My own family belonged to a group called The Fundamental Church. We prayed and attended services regularly.

In 1978, a lower primary school was established in Matjang, but after I attended it for one year, my family moved to the nearby village of Bongbal Khullen. We did that because of the Naga insurgency. We Kukis were its main victims. Underground bands of the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagland had begun roaming the jungles of the Ukhrul region, which had a large Naga population. They were armed with modern assault rifles, against which we were helpless, and they would come to Kuki villages and take what they wanted – livestock, poultry, everything. Refusing them meant risking one’s life. But while my parents thought we might be safer in Bongbal Khullen, which was larger than Matjang, that didn’t turn out to be the case. The Nagas made life unbearable there, too, and in 1987 we decided to move to Churachandpur, where we lived ever since. It was lucky that we did, because thousands of Kukis were killed in the Ukhrul region when the Nagas ethnically cleansed it in the early 1990s.

In Churachandpur, my family joined a church called New Life, It was very strict and disciplined and I liked it. But the city had a large variety of Christian churches and denominations, and this opened my eyes to the range of choices that existed and to the many religious debates that were common at the time. It was then that I heard about Judaism. The man who first told me about it was Yamlet Baite, who called himself Y.D. Israel; he was the father of Sarah Lamsi Baite, who has been in the news recently. [Editorial note: Sarah Baite, as reported by our Newsletter, has been seeking justice for the 2016 rape of her daughter, allegedly committed by a Shavei Israel crony now living in Israel.] After much soul-searching, I decided that this was the religion for me, because it alone was faithful to the Bible. The Bible, for example, commanded circumcision, and Judaism was the only religion that practiced it.

Demsat and his wife Osnat

The more I learned about Judaism, the more I grew to love it, On April 8, 1990, my parents, my sister, and my two older brothers joined the B’nei Menashe movement together. All the males were circumcised on that day by Gideon Kailam. After the village of Boljol adopted Judaism in 1991 and changed its name to Petach Tikva, I and Chaim Janglal Kipgen, who now lives in Israel, were the first B”nei Menashe to build new houses there. By then my father had come down with TB, and when he passed away in 1993 he was buried in Petach Tikva in a Jewish ceremony; the man who officiated was Natan Mangsat Kipgen, who now lives in Israel too, in Kiryat Arba. The next year I married my wife, Osnat Lhingneikim, who belonged to the B’nei Menashe community of Moreh. We eventually had six children, a boy and five girls.

When Shavei Israel took control of the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah in 2003-4 and insisted that the movement abandon the Ashkenazi liturgy it was accustomed to and adopt the Sephardic rite, Petach Tikva was one of the congregations that refused to comply. As a result, it was put on Shavei’s blacklist and none of its members were considered for Aliyah. The last of them to come to Israel, in 2002, was Mangsat. Perhaps my association with Petach Tikva, even though I wasn’t living there and was active in the Beit Shalom synagogue in Churachandpur, had something and to do with what came afterwards, but I can’t say for sure.

Demsat and his family.

My family’s first Aliyah interview was in 2014. The procedure was for Tsvi Khaute [Shavei Israel’s head administrator] to come from Israel with a Shavei-employed rabbi for a preliminary screening; we were interviewed twice by him and Rabbi Hanoch Avitsedek and passed. The next stage was to be vetted again by a board of three dayanim [rabbinical judges] who came from Israel several months later, again with Tsvi and Rabbi Hanoch. There must have been some twenty families who were candidates. Our interviewer was Rabbi Moshe Nidam [of B’nei Brak]. A B’nei Menashe companion of Tsvi’s, Thanglal from Kiryat Arba, translated for him. Besides the usual halakhic questions, we were asked about the Mishkan [the Tabernacle in the desert]. I don’t think I or anyone else gave any wrong answers, but after two months we were informed that we had failed. We weren’t given any reason and there was no one to ask about it.

Looking back on them today, I think these interviews were most likely a charade. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tsvi had decided in advance who would pass and who would fail. He had complete control over everything. If you were close to him or were one of his followers, your place on the Aliyah list was assured. There were B’nei Menashe who never sat for an interview at all and who are in Israel today. The whole system is unfair.

Demsat speaking at Beit Shalom function.

We weren’t called for an interview again. Still, I didn’t raise my voice in protest at the time. I tried to stay in Shavei’s good graces. In 2018, I even mediated a dispute between Meital Singson, then Shavei’s Manipur administrator, and Ohaliav Haokip, who is today general secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council. Each had lodged a police complaint against the other over an altercation, and I tried persuading each to withdraw it in the best interests of the B’nei Menashe community. It wasn’t easy, but I succeeded. I was seen as a peacemaker, and at the next Beit Shalom elections, I was chosen vice-chairman of the synagogue.

My first real run-in with Shavei came in 2020. In November of that year, there were elections for a new B’nei Menashe Council for the first time in five years. Having always believed in the importance of the BMC, I was happy to see these held, and when a non-Shavei slate won the vote, I supported it. Shavei then launched a campaign to have the elections declared illegal, and when that failed, it did all it could to destroy the newly elected BMC and sought to enlist me in its effort. Shortly after the elections, Meital Singson came to my home, and told me that if I, as vice-chairman of Beit Shalom, denounced the newly elected BMC and its executive. I would be fast-tracked for Aliyah.

I thought this was wrong and I refused. In whatever capacity I’m in, I’ve always tried to stand up for the truth. I was then summoned to the home of Shlomo Sehjelal Kipgen [Meital Singson’s successor as Shavei Israel’s Manipur administrator] in order to sign a declaration of loyalty to Shavei; without it, I was told, I and my family would never make Aliyah. I didn’t answer the summons and didn’t go. My conscience didn’t allow me to support the lies and manipulations that Shavei was engaged in. Next, I was visited by two Shavei supporters, Zvulun Satkhothang Haokip and Azaria Paokam Haokip, and told to report to Lunjang Alon Haokip of Boljol and explain myself. Alon was Shavei’s strong-arm man, and they said it was up to him whether I would ever make Aliyah or not.

I told them to tell Alon that I would not be intimidated. I said that my Aliyah was not up to mere mortals, because there was Someone infinitely more powerful than any of us in whose hands it rested. They left without being able to persuade me.