Ministry of Immigration Served Notice That Shavei Ties Must Be Cut

(July 4) The Tel Aviv law firm of Dror, Menchel & Weinstein has served legal notice on the country’s Minister of Aliyah and Integration, Pnina Tamano-Shata, that her ministry will be taken to the High Court of Justice unless it cuts its ties with Shavei Israel.

Written by the firm’s managing partner Ron Dror, the notice to the minister begins, in English translation:

“On behalf of my clients, fourteen members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel, and of Degel Menashe, I am addressing the demand to you that the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration terminate the role of Shavei Israel in the B’nei Menashe’s immigration to Israel and its absorption here.

“My clients declare, firstly, that Shavei Israel is a morally and financially corrupt organization that has over the years abused its near-total power over B’nei Menashe Aliyah from India to Israel; and, secondly, that despite all the flaws and injustices that this has led to, which are well-known to the Ministry, its granting Shavei Israel this power has been, and continues to be, its deliberate policy.”

The five-page notice, dated July 3, proceeds to enumerate the ways in which Shavei Israel’s “corruption” has manifested itself, starting with blatant discrimination in India against B’nei Menashe who refuse to accept Shavei’s dictates, and ending with this year’s April 15 ruling of Tel Aviv district court judge Naftali Shilo that the organization and its chairman, Michael Freund, are guilty of criminal forgery and fraud. The notice also documents how the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration has condoned such acts while refusing to reply to, or even acknowledge, the countless complaints made regarding them.

The notice concludes: “Judging from all that has been said above, it is clear that the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration is determined to continue its policy of full collaboration with Shavei Israel and to ignore the weighty reasons presented to it for withdrawing the powers it has granted this organization and transferring them to other bodies. I therefore have no alternative but to inform you in the name of my clients that, unless I receive from you a speedy answer listing the steps that you intend to take in order to rectify the situation, and unless there are signs that such steps are being implemented, we will be forced to resort to legal measures that will require your ministry to cut its ties with Shavei Israel.”

The legal notice’s concluding paragraph, signed by Advocate Dror.

Dror, Menchel & Weinstein is a prominent Israeli law firm specializing in commercial and public litigation. Its third partner, Yehuda Weinstein, who acts in an advisory capacity, is a former Attorney-General of Israel. The firm, which has agreed to take on the case pro bono in recognition of its public importance, was retained jointly by Degel Menashe and 14 senior members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel. “We have been considering such a step for a long time,” our Newsletter was told by Hillel Halkin, Degel Menashe’s chairman of the board. “We put it off until now in the hope that it could be avoided. That hope has been dashed. The Ministry of Aliyah has given us no other choice.”

Asked why legal notice to cut ties with Shavei Israel wasn’t also served on The Jewish Agency, which signed an agreement of collaboration with Shavei in May, 2021, Halkin said: “The Jewish Agency is a different matter. Its role in the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah has until now been a small one, limited to a measure of financial support for Shavei. It’s precisely that which we wish to change: we want the Agency to take full responsibility for this Aliyah, so that Shavei has no more to do with it. The Agency now has a new, highly regarded chairman, Doron Almog, whom we hope will adopt such a policy. He can’t do so, however, without the Ministry of Aliyah’s backing, and so it’s against the Ministry that we need to act.”

Degel Menashe’s 14 fellow litigants were enthusiastic about participating in the case. “Shavei’s demise is long overdue,” our Newsletter was told by one of them, Natan Mangsat Kipgen of Kiryat Arba, who has not seen his family in Manipur for 20 years after it was black-listed for Aliyah by Shavei Israel. “Shavei has treated our community very badly, and misused and abused the authority given it, “ Kipgen said.

Another signatory to the legal notice, Eliora Mate of Bet She’an, calls Shavei Israel “a bad seed that was planted long ago in our community. Families have been separated by it, favors have been dispensed by it at whim, power has been abused by it. It has created a general atmosphere of fear in our community. The bad seed has grown fully now. The only solution is to root it out completely.”

Demsat Yosef Haokip, a recent immigrant to Israel and now a resident of Nof Hagalil who also put his name to the legal notice, adds: “Our community is afflicted with a sickness. This sickness has been brought upon us by Shavei Israel. The only remedy is to get rid of it. Shavei may have done some good work, but the evil it has done outweighs the good by far. If peace is to come to our community, Shavei must go. The courts need to address this problem.”

Rivka Lunkhel of Kiryat Arba would like to appear in court herself. “I would tell the judges everything I know about Shavei,” she told us. “Since its establishment, it has promoted nothing but division. There are people whom I never wronged who don’t talk to me, even hate me, because I don’t support Shavei. But why should I when I see all the horrible things that it’s done? Why is all this necessary?”

Unfortunately, that’s what it seems to be.

Shavei Hounds Sarah Baite From Her Home

(June 30) As if it had not already persecuted her enough, Shavei Israel effectively drove Sarah Baite from her home last week. Baite, a 41-year-old widow whose teenage daughter was raped by a Shavei crony in 2016, had been mercilessly threatened and harassed by her landlord until she finally packed her few belongings and moved out. Here, as related by her in a lengthy phone conversation between Manipur and Israel, is her account of the latest episode in Shavei’s campaign against her.

Sarah Baite.

Baite and daughter had lived for many years in Churachandpur, Manipur’s second largest city and the center of its B’nei Menashe community, in a house belonging to a Shavei loyalist – a man we will refer to by his first initial of T., since we have been asked not to publish his name for fear of retaliation. T., a resident of the town of Moreh on the Manipur-Myanmar border, kept the house as a second home for himself, his family, and whatever guests he might have on his frequent visits to Churachandpur. Baite was employed by him as his housekeeper. Whenever T. arrived, she was charged with looking after him and his entourage, in return for which she and her daughter were allowed to live in the house without rent.

This arrangement, Baite says, lasted without incident until January of this year, when she filed a police complaint against her daughter’s accused rapist, who was brought by Shavei to Israel in 2018. She had waited six years to take such a step because of pressure by Shavei not to do so when the rape occurred, at which time she agreed under duress to a private settlement involving a small sum of hush money. (Not that this helped her, because, as reported by this Newsletter, she was then blamed by Shavei when news of the rape got out anyway, expelled from the B’nei Menashe congregation to which she belonged, and placed on Shavei’s black list of B’nei Menashe denied Aliyah) When she did finally go to the police early this year, encouraged by growing anti Shavei sentiment in Manipur, the campaign of intimidation against her was renewed more brutally in the form of threats of physical violence if she didn’t withdrew her complaint.

This time, Baite, backed by the B’nei Menashe Council, refused to give in, even though she temporarily had to flee Churachandpur out of fear for her safety. Yet after a brief lull following her return, the situation grew still worse when it became known that a Ministry of Immigration/Jewish Agency fact-finding mission was about to visit Manipur and Mizoram. (Originally scheduled for April, the mission arrived in Manipur on June 9th and spent several days there.) Fearing that she would be invited to appear before it and implicate Shavei in the rape’s cover-up, Shavei operatives intensified their warning that she had better retract her accusation.

Tsvi Khaute.

Things came to a head, Baite says, with the arrival in Manipur from Israel of Tsvi Khaute, Shavei Israel’s head administrator, who came in advance of the Ministry/Agency mission. Khaute called on Shavei’s supporters to descend on Churachandpur in a show of strength, and among those responding was T., who brought with him a party of Shavei supporters from Moreh. “On any given day,” Baite relates, “there were up to five of them staying at the house. I had to cook for them, wash their dishes, draw their baths, make their beds, clean their rooms, do their laundry, and still more. And far from thanking me, they treated me terribly. They would get drunk and constantly cursed me and ranted at me for being a troublemaker who should be ashamed of herself. I couldn’t talk back or defend myself, because that’s not something a servant does. I simply had to put up with it, because I had nowhere else to do go.”

Despite all the harassment, Baite appeared before the fact-finding mission and testified briefly. On June 10, Khaute, whose presence in Manipur had become known to the authorities, was questioned at the Churachandpur police station about Shavei’s complicity in the rape’s cover-up. After the mission’s departure for Mizoram on June 12, he escorted them, came back and remained in Manipur to rally Shavei’s forces. Stung by his police interrogation, he heightened the pressure on Baite still more. “My landlord kept telling me,” she told us, “that I had better go see Tsvi Khaute, apologize, and do whatever he told me. When I refused to, T. informed me that I was summoned to a meeting with Tsvi on June 22.”

Baite ignored the summons. “The next day,” she narrates, “My landlord called me up and demanded an explanation. I told him, ‘Ever since my daughter was raped, I asked to see Tsvi Khaute each time he was in Manipur. I literally stood outside his door for hours, begging to talk to him and tell him about my situation. Each time, he refused to see me. His underlings never let me through the door. And now I’m supposed to come crawling to him? It’s he who should apologize to me.”

T. reported Baite’s reply to Khaute and returned to tell her that another meeting had been scheduled for Saturday night, June 25, and that she had better attend it -- or else. Meanwhile, Baite also received another summons, this one from the headsman of the neighborhood in which she had lived at the time of her daughter’s rape, under whose jurisdiction the 2016 settlement had taken place. At this meeting she was informed that the Kuki Inpi Manipur, a roof organization of Manipur’s Kuki population, and the Kuki Lawyers Association, were both threatening to take her to court unless she honored this settlement. It was obvious to Baite that Shavei was behind this, too. “I told the headsman” she said to us, “that I had come this far to seek justice and had faced every possible humiliation and insult, and that I wasn’t going to back down now. By then, I had had enough. I realized that it was only a matter of time before I was kicked out of T.’s house, in which life had become unbearable in any case. And so I went to the B’nei Menashe Council and asked for help.”

The BMC swung into action. BMC general secretary Ohaliav Haokip and treasurer Jesse Gangte spent the morning of Friday, June 24 looking for new lodgings for Baite and found her a one-room flat that the BMC would pay for. It was decided that she should move as soon as the Sabbath was over, before anyone could arrive to drag her to a forced meeting with Khaute. Right after the Havdalah prayer that ends the day of rest, a team of seven volunteers arrived from the BMYO, the BMC”s youth organization. Within a short time, Baite and her few belongings were transferred to her new home, which was only several hundred yards away from her former one. “The next day,” Baite says, “T’s wife called me and asked me why I'd left their house without notice. I told her that considering all the harassment I went through, I should have left long ago. Now that I’m gone from there, I’m as happy as can be. It’s a huge load off my back.”

Ministry of Immigration–Jewish Agency Team Visits Manipur and Mizoram

(June 23) It can now be told. After having been asked “for security reasons” to keep its visit under wraps until it returned to Israel, our Newsletter can reveal that a joint Ministry of Immigration and Absorption-Jewish Agency fact-finding mission spent the week of Thursday, June 9--Tuesday June 15 in northeast India. Headed by Almog Moscowitz, a senior advisor at the Ministry, the team included Ephraim Nagosse of the Ministry and Ilai Oz and Yair Kannai of the Agency.

The mission was in Manipur, principally in Churachandpur, from the 9th to the 12th of June, and in Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl from the 11th on. Its supposed purpose to assess the situation of the B’nei Menashe community in the two Indian states; to review repeated accusations that the Jerusalem-based Shavei Israeli has systematically abused its administration of B’nei Menashe Aliyah to Israel; and to make recommendations for reforming the Aliyah process.

As such, the team’s trip to India was ostensibly a victory for Shavei’s critics, and especially for Degel Menashe, which has been calling for such a fact-finding mission for the past two years. And yet though encouraged by the team’s presence, our Newsletter has learned, the non- and anti-Shavei forces in Manipur and Mizoram were disappointed with its performance. Rather than function as an objective commission of inquiry, they say, it behaved throughout its visit as a guest of Shavei Israel that was mainly intent on pleasing its host. Shavei’s representatives and supporters never left its side and its schedule was closely coordinated with Shavei while all others were kept in the dark until the last minute.

Delegation at Shavei reception. Left to right: Tzvi Khaute, Shavei coordinator, Ephraim Negosse, Ilai Oz, Almog Moscowitz, an undentified man, Yair Kannai, Edith Blaustein, Shavei vice-chairman and Boinu Haokip, head of Vengnuom Village Authority.

The team’s pro-Shavei bias, reports our Manipur correspondent Rivka Dimngel, was evident even before it arrived in Manipur, on its way to which it was accompanied by Edith Blaustein, Shavei Israel’s deputy director-general. (No one in the non- or anti-Shavei camp was even informed of the team’s departure until shortly beforehand, let alone asked to travel with it.) And as soon as the team touched down at Manipur’s Imphal Airport, Dimngel writes, “it was whisked away by Shavei representatives and ushered straight to a grand reception at Churachandpur’s Beit Shalom synagogue that was organized by Shavei in its honor and to which non-Shavei members were not invited.”

The reception ceremony, Dimngnel continued, lasted three-and-a-half hours, after which a single hour and a half was allotted to a meeting with a mixed group of non- and anti-Shavei plaintiffs. These included three officials of the independent B’nei Menashe Council and spokesmen for four communities that had been barred from Shavei Israel’s Aliyah lists because of their adherence, against Shavei’s dictates, to the Ashkenazi rite of prayer.

This meeting, according to Dimngel, “did not go as well as was hoped for. It was all very rushed and most of those present were given no time to air their grievances. This was a huge disappointment, because they had been waiting for this moment ever since Passover.” (The fact-finding team’s trip had originally been scheduled for right after the Passover holiday and had been postponed.) One of the few who got to speak briefly was Sarah Baite, Shavei’s attempt to hush up the 2016 rape of whose daughter has been widely debated in the B’nei Menashe community in recent months. Baite’s account, Dimgnel reports, stirred “a lively discussion” among the team’s members, who responded, however, not by condemning Shavei but by stressing the importance of “peace and harmony” in the B’nei Menashe community.

Prayer at Pejang (photo taken last April).

On the evening of June 11, after Shabbat, the fact-finding team also traveled to the Churachandpur suburb of Pejang for a group session, to which it was escorted by Shavei Israel’s second-in-command Tsvi Khaute, with yet another congregation denied Aliyah by Shavei. (No one from the B’nei Menashe Council, or any other non-Shavei faction, was allowed to guide the team at any point, much less sit in on its meetings with Shavei supporters and activists.) The team members listened to addresses by the Pejang congregation’s chairman, Ya’akov Chungkhohao Haokip, and by executive board member Hosea Kipgen, both of whom expressed their gratitude for having been taken notice of after long years of Shavei neglect. Turning to Khaute, Haokip said, “In all your many trips to Manipur, you never bothered to visit us even once until now.” .

Reactions to the fact-finding team’s visit among non- and anti-Shavei forces, Dimngel writes, were mixed. On the one hand, it raised their morale by making them feel that that they were no longer “invisible.” Yet on the other hand, almost all of the team’s time was put at Shavei’s disposal and there was a sense that the delegates from Israel were merely going through the motions of hearing the case against Shavei when they had already decided in the latter’s favor. Tellingly, they let themselves be freely photographed at Shavei-sponsored events, while asking to have no pictures taken when meeting with the other side.

From Manipur, the team moved on to Mizoram, where on Monday, June 13 it met with a group of “refuseniks” who had been denied Aliyah by Shavei. This group, too, was given barely an hour of the delegation’s time. The meeting took place at Aizawl’s Shalom Tzion synagogue, the oldest Jewish house of worship in Aizawl, which remained in B’nei Menashe Council hands even after Shavei, whose own synagogue is called Khovevei Tzion, took control of the community.

The team was greeted by the BMC’s Mizoram chairman, Gamliel Thomte, who related the synagogue’s history. BMC treasurer Nadav Hauhnar then spoke about the rift between the BMC and Shavei Israel, which has resulted in no BMC members from Mizoram making Aliyah since the early 2000s. Only those who deserted the BMC and Shalom Tzion for Shavei and Khovevei Tzion, the treasurer said, were eligible for Shavei’s Aliyah lists.

Leah Renthlei.

This point was driven home when BMC member Ben Tzion Hauhnar told the visitors that, though he was one of the pioneers of the Judaism movement in northeast India, in which he was active starting in the mid-1970s, his support for the BMC has kept him from reaching Israel for the past near-50 years. Another woman, Elisheva Khiangte, described having been turned away by Shavei from all its Aliyah interviews despite her documented seniority in the community. Aliyah refusenik Leah Renthlei, whose two sisters live in Israel, told of being punished by Shavei for the “crime” of having extended hospitality to Israeli tourists without first having received the organization’s permission.

The delegation, having been told by Shavei that the anti-Shavei plaintiffs were not sincere about their Judaism and were simply using it to get to Israel, asked them whether this was in fact true. All vehemently denied it. BMC chairman Thomte pointed out that, on the contrary, any B’nei Menashe whose sole motive was Aliyah would have left the BMC camp for Shavei long ago, as indeed many did. BMC treasurer Hauhnar stated emotionally that he was comfortably-off in Mizoram and had no economic motive for making Aliyah at all. “If it’s God’s will,” he told the delegates from Israel, “I’ll move to Israel tomorrow, even though I’ll have to begin everything from scratch there. If it isn’t, I’ll remain faithful to Judaism here in Mizoram to the end of my life.”

Asaf Renthlei, an educator and leader in the Aizawl community who is not affiliated with Shavei, summed up the team’s visit as follows:

“The visit was positive in the sense that, until now, people like Leah and myself had been told over and over by Shavei functionaries and proxies that we had no chance of making Aliyah unless we cut off our relations with Shavei rivals like Degel Menashe. Following the visit, they’ve changed their tune and are now telling us that there’s no problem with our Aliyah, which Shavei Israel will see to along with the Aliyah of others.

“Clearly, this change of tone was due to the delegation from Israel’s stressing that it would not allow discrimination in the Aliyah process. Nevertheless, it was disappointing that the delegation refused to say whether it would recommend reconsidering Shavei Israel’s role in this process . If anything, its use of Shavei staff to shepherd it around reinforced much of the B’nei Menashe public’s perception of Shavei’s strength and legitimacy. It can only be hoped that its profession of neutrality will be reflected in its report.”

The delegation set out on its return trip to Israel the following day.