Going To Court: A Degel Menashe Editorial

Taking legal action against a government ministry is not something to be done lightly. It’s a last recourse when all else has failed. But in Degel Menashe’s long battle with Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration to have the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe taken out of the corrupt and abusive hands of Shavei Israel and transferred to The Jewish Agency, the time has come to admit it: all else has failed.

The last straw – the last failed hope – was the so-called “fact-finding mission” sent by the Ministry and the Agency to Manipur and Mizoram in early June. Such a mission had long been a goal of ours. As far back as November 24, 2020, Degel Menashe wrote to Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata: “You should consider sending a Ministry/Jewish Agency delegation to Manipur and Mizoram in order to investigate the situation there and write a report that can serve as the basis for future decisions.” We thought that an on-site commission of inquiry might convince both bodies, as countless written testimonies had been unable to, of the need for a thorough reform of the B’nei Menashe Aliyah process. We welcomed the news last April that such a mission was about to depart for India, and we welcomed it again when, after a two-month delay, it set out in June.

We were naïve. After all our bitter experience with the Ministry of Immigration and Integration, we should have known better. The “fact-finding mission” was a farce. It had no interest in the facts and did not bother to look for them. In its week in northeast India, it spent no more than four hours on hearing from Shavei Israel’s many victims and critics. Few of those wishing to relate their grievances were given a chance to. Those allowed to speak were permitted five or ten minutes each. The delegation from Israel had no time for them. It was too busy being hosted by Shavei, shepherded around by it, and attending its receptions, to which Shavei’s opponents were not invited.

In short, the Ministry/Agency mission visited Mizoram and Manipur as the guest of the organization it was supposed to investigate. Although it went through the motions of listening to both sides so that could it pretend to be fair-minded, its mind was made up in advance. If it ever files an official report, the findings are predictable. “Yes, we found a few people who claimed to have been treated badly by Shavei Israel,“ these will state. “Perhaps some were. But no organization is perfect, not even Shavei, which has promised not to let such slips recur. We fully recommend leaving the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah in its hands.”

For words such as these, there will have been no need to have traveled to India. They could be written without leaving Jerusalem.

And all this comes on the heels of the Ministry’s refusal to answer repeated queries about what it intends to do regarding Judge Naftali Shiloh’s April 15th ruling that Shavei Israel and its chairman Michael Freund have been guilty of repeated acts of criminal fraud! No answer is an answer, too. What the ministry intends to do is obvious:

Nothing.

That is, it intends to carry on with business as usual. Yes, its business partner is a private NGO that behaves like a mafia, but clearly this doesn’t bother it.

And so, all else having failed, Degel Menashe has decided, along with fourteen senior members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel, to go to court. If the Ministry will not change course of its own volition, it will have to be made to. The Tel Aviv law firm representing us is a leader in the field of public litigation. It has agreed to take the case on a pro bono basis as a public service. We thank it for doing so and agree with its judgment. This is indeed a public issue. It concerns not just the B’nei Menashe but all Israelis who care about clean and fair government and want their country’s ministries to care, too.

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.”