B’nei Menashe Flock To Synagogue Inauguration

(June 23) The village of Phalbung nestles in the hills of Kangpokpi District, a three-hour drive into the mountains north of Churachandpur. It’s little more than a hamlet and is the home, with some 15 families and 60 members, of one of Manipur’s smallest B’nei Menashe congregations, one that was ignored by the others over the years. This was not only due to its remoteness. It was also the result of the B’nei Menashe of Phalbung having doggedly clung to the Ashkenazi prayer book long after Shavei Israel, in an assertion of power, decreed a boycott of all B’nei Menashe communities that did not observe the Sephardi rite. Ostracized by Shavei, whose domination of B’nei Menashe life went unchallenged until recently, the B’nei Menashe of Phalbung were all but forgotten.

And yet on June 19, when they celebrated the inauguration of a new synagogue whose construction was recently finished with the help of a grant from Degel Menashe, busload after busload of B’nei Menashe from elsewhere arrived to join the festivities. Still more came by car and public transportation. By the time the proceedings began at 11 a.m., close to 500 B’nei Menashe had massed in the village despite the rain that had fallen that morning and was expected to continue throughout the day.

Lalam Hangshing addressing crowd.

Even quite a few Shavei Israel supporters, it was reported, turned out for the event, the official part of which was held inside a large tent in a field that the Phalbung community had erected. There was an opening prayer, welcoming speeches, and communal singing, followed by an address by B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing ”Phalbung’s story is a remarkable one of resilience in the face of adversity,” Hangshing said. “Shavei Israel has been a parasite feeding off the miseries of its own people. It needs to be relieved of all further responsibility for the B’nei Menashe.”

Several more short talks were concluded with a resounding chorus of Ka Thange, Ka Thange, the B’nei Menashe anthem. The crowd then made its way to the synagogue, which had been largely built by the congregation’s own labor, for the traditional ceremony of affixing a mezuzah to the doorpost of the entrance. It being well past noon, the guests, or as many of them could fit into it, then entered the building for mincha, the afternoon service, which marked the end of the formal proceedings.

It was now time for the feast all looked forward to. Two cows were slaughtered and butchered adhering to the laws of kashrut, and the meat, having been salted to drain it of its blood, was cooked in huge pots hung over log fires and tended and stirred by a team of men and women. Half of it was cooked in the traditional Kuki style called mepoh, boiled with rice and fresh spices like ginger and garlic, while the other half was fried in oil and prepared as an Indian curry. Everyone was given a plate and took all they wanted.

Feasting at Phalbung.

The rain had providentially stopped, and for hours the guests ate, and helped themselves to more, and mixed and talked and met old friends. Then as the sun began to drop in the sky, they said their farewells and set out for home with, as one of the participants put it to our Newsletter, “warm feelings and a renewed sense of brotherhood.”

These were words that all present would have agreed with. There was at the event a palpable sense of joy and relief, and of a corner having been turned in the struggle of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe to get out from under the thumb of Shavei Israel’s domination and replace the internal strife it had instigated and thrived on with a recovered sense of common purpose. As Ya’akov Haokip, a member of the Phalbung congregation put it: “Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for us, one of inclusivity in which no one is left out any longer. It’s Phalbung’s reward for not having lost or abandoned its Jewish faith in all the years that it had to cope by itself. May the God of Israel bless us all!”

Asked whether she hadn’t felt uncomfortable with the Ashkenazi prayer of Phalbung, Ariella Haokip of Churichandpur’s Beit Shalom synagogue, which has followed the Sephardi rite for long years, replied: “Not at all. We all call out to the one true God who hears prayer. He makes no distinction between Ashkenazi and Sephardi.”

And Khana Dimngel, also of Beit Shalom, echoed the sentiment when she said: “This event should be the first of many like it. We need to bring B’nei Menashe community together again, the way it once was. The commandments of Judaism are also about fellowship and harmony. It’s high time we all stood together. After all, we’re all the children of Menashe.”

To Our Curious Readers:

Shavei Israel Coordinator Tsvi Khaute, we’re told by this week’s article on “Khaute Questioned In Rape Case,” was last week “in Manipur on Shavei business.” B’nei Menashe Council General Secretary Ohaliav Haokip, the same article states, believes he was arrested last Wednesday “to put me out of action at a crucial time.” Shavei Israel wanted, Haokip states in an accompanying article, “to keep me from meeting with the fact-finding team from Israel that was then in Manipur.”

Hmmm. It sounds as if these things might be connected.

They indeed are – and we hope to dispel the mystery next week when we can write about developments that we were asked not to disclose until they came to their conclusion. We ask our curious readers to bear with us until then.

Ohaliav Haokip Tells Of His Arrest

Ohaliav (seated in back) taken away in a police van.

On the morning of June 8, I was going over some documents related to the rump B’nei Menashe Council created by Shavei Israel to challenge the democratically elected BMC of which I am General Secretary when a police van pulled up outside my residence and I was served with an FIR or First Information Report. In it I was accused of falsely putting two names on a petition against Shavei Israel’s grip on B’nei Menashe Aliyah that was sent to The Jewish Agency and Israel’s Ministry of Immigration nearly a year-and-a-half ago. I was told that I was being taken into custody and barely had time to assure my family that I would quickly be released and to contact the BMC executive, whose members reacted immediately. Some even reached the police station before I did.

The next unpleasant surprise came when I was taken from the station to the district hospital for a medical checkup. This is a procedure followed only when an arrested person is slated for a lengthy detention. Why was this being done, I wondered, when no preliminary investigation of the charges against me had been conducted? It was totally irregular.

Ohaliav returned to police station from hospital.

Upon returning from the hospital, I was informed that I would be held by the police until brought before a district court judge. I was then kept for five hours, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., locked up by myself in a dingy, dirty cell with a doorless toilet and no running water. The stench was unbearable. The cell walls were covered with graffiti. One of them said, “Only God in heaven is my shelter and I have full trust in Him. Please help me, O Lord! Release me from this dark room and I will always serve You forever.” My first reaction was to panic. I knew I was the victim of a Shavei Israel plot and I knew Shavei was capable of anything.

Ohaliav’s supporters outside station.

However, after reading the FIR I had been served with, I calmed down. I realized that the charge was not a serious one and had been concocted, among other things, to keep me from meeting with the fact-finding team from Israel that was then in Manipur. In addition, I knew that my fellow BMC members were in the police station with me, and had even brought a supply of food and water that was passed on to me. I actually had a chicken lunch, although I had to eat it standing up because there was no chair in the room. I thought of Mahatma Gandhi and of all the times he was arrested during his struggle for Indian Independence, and I said to myself: “This is no big deal, Ohaliav. The B’nei Menashe are downtrodden by Shavei Israel just as India was by the British. It’s just something you have to go through.”

My spirits restored, I lay down for a nap on the filthy floor with an empty water bottle for a pillow. I never knew that a plastic bottle pressed against my ear could make so much noise! Meanwhile, my wife arrived along with her mother, carrying our three-month-old son, and she encouraged me through a small window that was out of my line of sight and from which all she could see of me was my arm dangling through the cell bars. I told her that Shavei was afraid of me because it knew I was about to produce incriminating documents against it and that, if I continued to be detained, she should help the BMC executive to locate them in the closet in which they were kept.

The first page of the FIR. Its file number appears at the upper left.

Later in the afternoon, I was finally taken to the district court in a police van, followed by an escort of BMC members, and brought before a judge. On examining the FIR, he noticed that the file number on it was that of an old FIR pertaining to someone else who was wanted by the police – in other words, that it had been faked to enable my arrest. This so enraged him that he debated out loud whether to lodge a complaint with Manipur’s High Court, accusing the Churachandpur police of negligence and maltreatment, from which he was deterred only when the police officer in charge pleaded with him not to. In the end, I was released on the surety of the BMC’s Culture Secretary Yoel Sehmang Haokip and told to appear in court again on June 22 at a session at which I would be able to defend myself.

I left the courtroom and we all went to my home for tea and a review of the day’s events. Then my friends who had stood by me all day long went their way and I sat down to dinner with my family. It was already late at night.