Covid19 Rate Soars Among B’nei Menashe Olim In India, Israel

(June 3) As calls for an investigation were sounded, the number of Covid19 cases among the 275 B’nei Menashe immigrants who left Manipur for Israel last week has risen dramatically. Over eighty of the group of 115 that stayed behind in New Delhi due to the illness have now tested positive, while as of Tuesday of this week, 16 of the 160 who reached Israel were declared ill, too. Although since then their number has almost certainly jumped, neither Shavei Israel, the Jerusalem-based organization responsible for their Aliyah, nor Israel’s Ministries of Immigration or Health, have released new figures.

From all indications, the infection was contracted in Manipur by at least one family of the 275 before the group left last week for New Delhi, from which it was scheduled to continue in its entirety to Israel. In New Delhi, the virus spread quickly. Although all of the group was supposedly tested for it with negative results before departing from Manipur, forty of them proved to be virus-positive when tested again in the Indian capital prior to their flight to Israel. These forty remained behind in New Delhi, along with close family that decided to stay with them, when the rest of the immigrants traveled to Israel on May 31.

Now, our Newsletter has learned, the number of B’nei Menashe sick in New Delhi, all apparently with the virulent Indian strain of the virus, has more than doubled. Those known to be infected were immediately transferred from the hotel in which they had been staying to the Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Covid Care Centre, a quarantine station run by the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Managing Committee, a charitable organization run by New Delhi’s Sikh religious community. The Sikh have traditionally engaged in widespread humanitarian work in India that has always been made available, the committee’s president Manjinder Singh Sirsa told our Newsletter, to “all faith and creeds.”

Passing the time at the center

Bhupinder S Bhullar

Although the Care Centre is has a staff of forty doctors and nurses and is equipped with oxygen and emergency facilities, it is not designed to handle serious cases, and six B’nei Menashe, we were informed by the Managing Committee's chairman Bhupinder Singh Bhullar, have had to be transferred to New Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital after developing severe symptoms such as shortness of breath. As of this Thursday, Chairman Bhullar reported, all were out of danger and doing well.

Meanwhile, cases of Covid19 have also broken out among the supposedly Covid-free B’nei Menashe who flew to Israel and are now staying at the Jerusalem Gate Hotel. As stated above, up-to-date figures on the number of those currently sick are unavailable, and there appears to be a total blackout on information regarding them.

Why Covid-positive B’nei Menashe were able or permitted to fly from Manipur to New Delhi in the first place is unclear. Ohaliav Haokip, general secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council, has stated that he was told before the group’s departure from Manipur by Shavei Israel administrator Shlomo Kipgen that Shavei planned to test the olim by means of privately acquired RT-PCR (Rapid Test-Polymerase Chain Reaction) kits administered under medical supervision. In Churachandpur, from which the great majority of the olim came, the supervisor, according to a WhatsApp posting by Shavei activist Yitzhak Seimang Haokip, was Dr. Hegin Kipgen. Yet Dr. Kipgen himself, in a conversation with our Newsletter, denied that he was involved in the procedure and claims to have had nothing to do with it.

RT-PCR kits, which are said to yield results within 48 to 72 minutes, are currently in widespread use in India and can indeed be bought on the private market. However, they are not considered as reliable as standard laboratory tests, and in any case, their findings need to be certified by more than an ordinary physician in order to be valid for official purposes. “The certification must come,” a high Churachandpur police official told B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing, “from a competent government-approved authority. It can’t just be from any doctor.”

Thus far, Shavei Israel has refused to disclose how testing was done in Manipur or to produce any documentation of it. “The entire incident,” Hangshing wrote in a June 2 letter to Israel’s Minister of Immigration and Absorption Penina Tamano-Shata, “was handled in a most reckless, negligent, and irresponsible manner” and may have involved “faked or unreliable Covid [test] results.”

Further inquiry, preferably undertaken by the governments of India and Israel, may determine what actually happened.

160 B’nei Menashe Immigrants Reach Israel, Covid19 Strands, Separates, 115 in New Delhi

(May 31) As 160 B’nei Menashe from the state of Manipur landed at Ben-Gurion Airport today, another 115 found themselves initially confined to their rooms in a New Delhi hotel after they or their family members had tested positive for Covid19. Then, on Thursday afternoon, after spending a day, as one of them told our Newsletter, “staring at the walls” of their hotel rooms, all of the positives were removed by the Delhi police to a Covid isolation center. Since few of them speak Hindi or English, they can be expected to have difficulty communicating with the center’s personnel. It is not clear how many if any of them have developed Covid symptoms, and at the time of this article’s posting, a pall of uncertainty hung over them all.

The Hotel Good Times reception desk

Under the auspices of the Jerusalem-based organization Shavei Israel, which has been entrusted with the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah, the entire group of 275 flew last week in three contingents from Manipur to New Delhi, where it was put up at the Hotel Good Times in the city’s center, near the Karol Bagh market. While there it was sent, as per Israeli government regulations for all travelers to Israel, for Covid19 tests.

Allegedly, the 275 had been proven Covid-free before leaving Manipur, where Shavei Israel required each family to test negative before boarding the flight from Imphal to New Delhi. Yet on May 30, several days after the last of the three contingents reached Delhi, Shavei’s Information Secretary Eliezer Baite announced that 115 of the group “have been afflicted with an illness that is common these days” and will be kept in isolation for two weeks in India. “This,” declared Baite, “is God’s will.”

Baite’s announcement was inaccurate. Not all 115 had tested positive, nor, at this moment, is the exact number of those who did known. Many who did not apparently stayed behind to remain with infected family members.

How a supposedly zero rate of Covid19 in the group turned into a high incidence within a few days is unclear. One rumor making the rounds is that a large B ‘nei Menashe family already carrying the illness boarded the Imphal -New Delhi flight with erroneous or counterfeit test results and quickly passed it on to others. So far, however, there has been no corroboration of this.

Leaving Imphal for New Delhi

The immigrants remaining in the Hotel Good Times, our Newsletter has learned, are being looked after by Shavei Israel’s travel agent in India, Malka Moses. As far as is known, no Shavei officials have visited them or come to their aid, nor has Shavei issued any clarification regarding them. Neither has any been provided by Israel’s Ministry of Immigration. A senior ministry official told our Newsletter that the ministry would act vis-à-vis the detained group in accordance with Ministry of Health guidelines and that he could release no further information.

The Jerusalem Gate Hotel

Meanwhile, the 160 olim who arrived in Israel Thursday afternoon were bused directly from the airport to the Jerusalem Gate Hotel at the western entrance to nation’s capital. There they will spend two weeks in quarantine before beginning the course that will lead to their rabbinical conversion to Judaism. All were reported to be in good health.

280 B’nei Menashe To Leave For Israel Next Week Amid Protests against Manipulation of Aliyah lists

(May 21) 280 B’nei Menashe from Manipur will be leaving for Israel next week, Shavei Israel’s Manipur administrator Shlomo Kipgen announced on May 16 over the organization’s WhatsApp news portal Shavei News2. The group will set out on the first leg of its trip in three contingents, slated to fly from Imphal to New Delhi on May 24, 25, and 26.

Shlomo Kipgen’s announcement

All of the 280 come from the “2016 Dayyanim Interview Pass List,” drawn up by Shavei Israel and representatives of Israel’s Rabbinate five years ago. Since then, no more B’nei Menashe have been approved for Aliyah by Israel’s government. Of the 722 individuals on the 2016 list, 252 reached Israel last December and are now living in the Lower Galilee city of Nof ha-Galil. The remaining 470, plus children born to them since 2016, were recently authorized by a government decision to make Aliyah this year. In addition to the 280 now setting out, a second group is scheduled to fly to Israel three months from now, our Newsletter has learned from sources in Israel’s Ministry of Immigration.

A dark shadow, however, hangs over all this. 107 names from the 2016 list, belonging to 19 families, so it was charged this week by Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council, have been struck from it. These 19 families comprise that part of the 2016 list that has publicly stated its allegiance to the Council, which has been in a state of conflict with Shavei Israel since its election in a community vote last November. Shavei has refused to recognize the BMC’s legitimacy and has repeatedly threatened its supporters with removal from the 2016 list – and now, since not a single member of the 19 families has been included in the group of 280, Shavei is obviously is carrying out its threats. “A quick look at the list of the 280,” says Ohaliav Haokip, the BMC’s General Secretary, “shows that Shavei is doing what it said it would. It has played pick-and-choose with the original ‘Interview Pass List,’ selecting whoever has been loyal to Shavei and crossing out the names of whoever stuck with the BMC.”

Protesting this development, an anti-Shavei demonstration was held by the 19 families in Churachandpur this week at the Beit Shalom synagogue, the city’s largest. The families held signs calling for a fair and transparent Aliyah process not subject to Shavei’s cronyism and discriminatory practices.

Anti-Shavei protest in Churachandpur

In respond to the protest, Shavei Israel’s Information Secretary Eliezer Baite issued a Kuki-language statement condemning it. The Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe, Baite declared, was Shavei’s exclusive domain and no one had the right to interfere in it. “Israel’s government and the Jewish Agency have handed the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe to Shavei Israel,” the statement read. “Only Shavei will have a say in it…As for transparency, Shavei Israel does not owe it to anyone. Everyone knows all they need to know.”

The first lines of Eliezer Baite’s statement

Baite’s statement appeared to represent Shavei Israel’s interpretation of an agreement recently arrived at with the Jewish Agency [see our May 11 article “Jewish Agency to Join in Bringing B’nei Menashe to Israel”. The Agency’s role in B’nei Menashe Aliyah, Shavei holds, will be merely an adjunct one that leaves all substantive decisions to Shavei itself.

The statement also included the admission that the names of BMC supporters have indeed been struck from the Aliyah list. “The present Aliyah list,” it said, “may not be the previous Aliyah list because there are some people and their families who have taken back their passports from Shavei, in effect refusing Aliyah.”

Ohaliav Haokip

“This is an outrageous lie,” says Ohaliav Haokip. “In the first place, Shavei had no business collecting and holding these passports years before the current Aliyah was undertaken. But quite apart from that, what it says simply isn’t true. Of the 19 families, all deposited their passports with Shavei a long time ago. Two of the 19 asked for them back but then returned them to Shavei a second time, while the other 17 never saw their passports again after initially handing them over. The passports of all 19 families are still in Shavei’s possession and the BMC knows where, at last report, they were being held – unless since then they have been destroyed or thrown away. Shavei has invented the story of the passports being returned as a pretext for eliminating the 19 families from the current Aliyah list.”

Following up on Haokip’s charges, Degel Menashe chairman Hillel Halkin turned to both the Jewish Agency and the Ministry of Immigration for clarification. The Agency declined to comment. Almog Moscowitz, Senior Adviser to Minister of Immigration Penina Tamano-Shata, wrote back:

“It is possible that the [107] individuals you mentioned will make Aliyah in the second round [that is slated to depart in three months] and has not been excluded from the list.”

In reply, Halkin pointed out that there was no statistical chance that all 107 “just happened” to have been assigned to the second group. Clearly, he said, their total exclusion from the first group represents deliberate Shavei policy, as is borne out by the fabricated story of the “returned” passports.

“The passports have simply been stolen,” Ohaliav Haokip insists. “If necessary, we’ll go to court to get them back.”