A Letter From Pukpui Part 2

(February 17) When four years ago, in 2018, Meirabi Kupchawng convinced six families numbering some 30 souls in the village of Pukpui to join her in adopting Judaism and leaving Christianity behind, there were other families that came close to throwing in their lot with her group only to back out at the last moment. This wasn’t, as far as I could tell, for religious reasons. The families that got cold feet were as convinced as those that went ahead that the Hebrew Bible was God’s ultimate word and should be obeyed. What deterred them was the fear of social opprobrium, not of heresy.

“I myself was willing to will to take a stand as a Jew,” I was told by Zarzoliana Chhakchhuak, the head of a family that changed its mind. “My wife, though, was afraid of what might happen to us in a village in which everyone was Christian. She felt she lacked the courage to face the contempt and derision that she might encounter, and I wasn’t ready to force her or my children to face more than they could endure. If we had thought that by some miracle we could make it to Israel soon, we would have had no problem with embracing Judaism openly. For better or for worse, though, this is a Christian country, and my family wasn’t prepared for years of being ostracized for being Jewish.”

The author teaching a Hebrew class in Pukpui.

Yet my own impression, formed during the week that I spent in Pukpui teaching its six families, was that such fears of rejection were exaggerated. These families seemed to get along well with their neighbors, who regularly popped in for conversations and cups of tea on their way to working their farmlands or foraging in the jungle, and who let their children play with the Judaizers’ and roam freely in their houses. There were no doubt some Christians who found the Jewish group odd or strange and quarreled with its members, but religion discussions were more often of a cordial nature. Such was the experience of Elazar Fanai, whose Christian neighbors still know him by his Mizo name of Lalhmangaihsanga.

“Right next door to us,” Elazar told me, “lives a Baptist evangelist with his family. He often visits me, and we have good talks about Judaism. He hasn’t once ridiculed or derided me for my choice of it. He’s curious about our prayers and customs, such as the Shema, the mezuzah on our door frames, and our observance of Shabbat, and though he’s a Christian through-and-through and isn’t about to forsake his belief in Jesus, he once said to me, “You know, it’s a shame that the Church has done away with so many holy teachings, because these things that Judaism observes are all in the Bible. It’s we Christians who have strayed from the road and need to regain it.’”

Eliezer Fanai (back to reader) reading from Bible to his fellow congregants.

Together with Meirabi, Elazar was one of four Pukpui residents who decided in late 2018,shortly after the six families made up their minds to embrace Judaism, to travel to Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl and contact the B’nei Menashe community there. “Until then,” he relates, “all we knew about Judaism came from either the Bible or a few Mizo programs on YouTube, and we decided to send a delegation to Aizawl in order to learn more. Since we’re all working people who depend on our daily wages, it took us a while to save up enough for the bus tickets and hotel rooms in Aizawl. It was only in February 2020, at the beginning of the Covid epidemic, that we were able to set out.”

The four of them, two men and two women, arrived in Aizawl not knowing what to expect. “All we had,” Elazar says, “was the address of a Hebrew center that a friend of mine, a taxi driver, had managed to get hold of. We headed straight for it and were lucky enough to find some B’nei Menashe there. One of them, Gabriel Hrangchal, gave us a few pointers about Jewish practice that shocked us into realizing how little we knew. Others were less helpful; we had the feeling that we were being given the cold shoulder by them because they looked down on us as country bumpkins. Still, we made plans with Gabriel to return in a few weeks’ time to learn more and headed home in hopeful spirits. Meanwhile, though, the epidemic spread, there were severe travel restrictions, and we were confined to Pukpui for the rest of the year. And then in December, 2020 Gabriel Hrangchal and his family made Aliyah to Israel and we were left without him.”

Leading prayer in Pukpui.

For the moment, the six families make do religiously with what little they have. This includes a single Siddur in which the Hebrew prayers are transliterated into Latin characters and a Mizo translation of the Bible. The little congregation meets every Shabbat in one of the families’ homes. Sabbath prayers are read aloud by a prayer leader, even though the words are not understood, and someone else reads aloud the weekly Torah portion, followed by a communal meal. Some of the men and boys have kippot while others cover their heads with hats and hoods, but there are no tefillin or phylacteries and no tallitot or prayer shawls. One of the things that I did during my week in Pukpui was to show the men how to braid the tzitziyot, the ritual fringes attached to a tallit, so that these can be made at home. And helping to make up for the woeful inadequacy of what they have is the families’ closeness to each other. This carries over during the rest of the week in a strong sense of camaraderie, which sometimes includes listening together to Hebrew songs on YouTube and trying to sing them.

At the Tu b’Shvat Seder.

The week I was in Pukpui was the week of Tu b’Shvat, and besides giving Torah lessons and instruction in basic Jewish practice, I helped the Jewish families stage a ceremony that even many knowledgeably observant Jews know little about – a Tu b’Shvat “Seder.” This ritual, which seeks to turn a minor holiday traditionally celebrated with the eating of dried fruit from the Land of Israel into a day of mystical significance, goes back to the 17th-century kabbalists of Safed and the 18th-century Tu b’Shvat “Haggadah” Pri Etz Hadar; one of its customs, also modeled on the Passover Seder, is the drinking of four glasses of wine -- red, white, and mixed – to symbolize the four seasons of the year (some also say the fourfold world of Creation and the fourfold nature of the Soul) and the processes of growth and change that take place in them.

Though it might have seemed strange to be celebrating so esoteric a Jewish practice in the jungle-covered hills of southern Mizoram, it did not seem so to the participants, for whom nearly all of Jewish observance is also new, strange, and esoteric.

Pukpui’s tiny new Jewish community might itself be compared to a newly planted sapling, and whether it will strike deeper roots, or be absorbed by Mizoram’s B’nei Menashe community and transplanted in the years ahead to Israel, is impossible to say. One of the interesting things about the Pukpui community is that it first developed much as did the early B’nei Menashe communities in northeast India in the 1970s: entirely independently, in near-total isolation from the outside world, and sparked by a handful of spiritually driven individuals’ reading of the Bible and their resulting conviction that the faith of Israel has not been superseded, as Christianity always claimed.

Should the Pukpui experience be taken to suggest that Judaism in northeast India has the ability to renew itself after being deplenished by Aliyah and that it may have more of a long-term future than is generally thought? One hesitates to generalize about so local a phenomenon, which is not unrelated to the general mood of religious crisis and urgency that has accompanied the Covid pandemic in Mizoram in the last two years. Until now, the Jewish community in northeast India has been characterized by the feeling of being in a perpetual state of transit, biding its time in India while waiting to move to Israel. Pukpui’s new Judaizers speak of moving to Israel, too. Yet if there can be one Pukpui in the 21st century, there can perhaps be others, and the last word on Judaism in northeast India may not necessarily be written with the Aliyah of today’s B’nei Menashe.

Asaf Renthlei

Sarah Baite Answers Michael Freund

(February 10) Sarah Baite has replied to Michael Freund.

“I had never expected to receive a letter from you,’ begins her response to Shavei Israel chairman, written two weeks after receiving a letter from him. (See our January 27 article, “Michael Freund Writes to Sarah Baite.”) One of these two weeks was spent in hiding from threatening phone calls warning her that she had better withdraw her police complaint in which she charged a fellow B’nei Menashe, now living in Israel, with the 2016 rape of her daughter.

Baite’s letter to Freund was written in Kuki, the only language she knows, and translated for her into an understandable if not always idiomatically correct English. Here is the complete text of the translation, with a notary’s authentication at the bottom:

For those of our readers who prefer to read the letter in its original form, its handwritten Kuki version appears at the bottom of this article.

To help put Baite’s answer to Freund in proper context, several things should be pointed out:

1. In his January 21 letter to Baite, Michael Freund professed to have known nothing about her daughter’s rape prior to her January 11 complaint to the police. As Baite points out, however, this can only mean that Freund’s senior staff, especially Meital Singson, who was Shavei Israel’s Manipur administrator in 2016 when the rape took place, and Tzvi Khaute, Shavei Israel’s international Coordinator and Freund’s top aide in running the organization, have hidden vital information from him, since both were demonstrably aware of the incident when it took place. Nor could the decision, taken at the time, to expel Baite from Beit Shalom synagogue in Churachandpur for the “crime” of reporting the rape to the Village Authority where she lived, have been carried out without Singson’s and Khaute’s express approval.

2. In his January 21 letter, Freund called on Baite “to contact all the relevant authorities so that they will investigate the matter thoroughly.” Yet although it has been publicly known for the past month that Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen, Shavei Israel’s current Manipur Administrator, repeatedly threatened Baite, both personally and by thugs employed by him, that she had better withdraw her police complaint, he has not been removed from his position by Freund or even openly rebuked for his actions.

3. In his letter to Baite, Freund wrote, referring to an appeal made by her to Aliyah minister Pnina Tamano-Shata in August 2020, “I can assure you that no one from Shavei Israel blocked your Aliya or removed you from any Aliya list.” To this Baite has answered that she never claimed in her appeal to Tamano-Shata to have been removed from such a list. She wrote the minister that her requests to be interviewed by Shavei for inclusion in an Aliya list were ignored or flatly turned down – in a word, that Shavei did block her Aliya.

4. Freund concluded his letter by writing, “If there is anything else that we can do to assist you, please feel free to contact me directly.” Sarah Baite has now contacted Michael Freund directly. It will be interesting to see what he does about it.

Having returned to Churchandpur after spending a week in concealment in the countryside to get away from Sehjalal Kipgen’s threats, Baite has told our Newsletter that these have ceased since her return. She has, though, she says, “been getting a lot of questions from curious neighbors, friends, and relatives ever since I filed my police complaint. Some have been supportive and some have accused me of reviving a case that should have been left to die. I tell them that I did it because I was humiliated by justice being denied me, but from some people in the B’nei Menashe community, this has only gotten me cold stares. Obviously, they are Shavei Israel supporters.”

We asked Baite why her police complaint mentioned her daughter’s being sexually assaulted only once, whereas the First Investigation Report issued this week by the police (see this week’s article, “Churachandpur Police Seek BMC’s Help”) spoke of these assaults having been made “repeatedly”. Her daughter, she answered, told the police things she had never told her mother.

“I was shocked by this,” Baite says. “But it was a frightful experience for my daughter, which was why she didn’t tell me everything. Even in 2016, I only found out what I did because my daughter told her grandmother, who then told me. Now, learning the whole truth, it’s more difficult than ever to live with it. I have no choice, but I am so angry.”

Below appears Sarah Baite’s letter in her own writing.

Police Ask BMC’s Help

(February 10) In a February 5th letter addressed to the chairman of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council, an Investigating Officer of the Churachandpur Women’s Police Station has asked for help in apprehending the accused rapist of the daughter of B’nei Menashe congregant Sarah Baite. (In India, crimes against women are dealt with by a special division of the police.) Although the officer’s letter disclosed the accused’s full name and address, our Newsletter will honor her request not to make these public at the present moment.

The police investigation was launched after Baite lodged a complaint against the accused on January 11, charging him with having raped her daughter, then eight years old, in 2016. Citing an FIR or First Information Report filed on January 27, the letter to the BMC stated:

“In c/w [connection with] the above ref. FIR, [an] Enquiry was conducted into the matter to substantiate the charge leveled against the alleged accused and [it] has been proved that the minor girl child was sexually assaulted repeatedly by the named accused person in the year 2016 on different occasions. Several witnesses have also been examined in this connection.”

From the Investigating Officer’s letter to the B’nei Menashe Council.

The police turned to the BMC for help in apprehending the accused because he is a resident and citizen of Israel, to which he made Aliyah in 2018. The case, it said in its letter, was “deemed serious and important,” and “necessary action” needed to be taken to provide for “the appearance of the accused person before the OC/WPS-CCP [Officer in Charge of the Women’s Police Station of Churachandpur] so as to enable his arrest at the earliest.”

How the accused could be “arrested” in Israel is unclear. Although Israel and India have had an extradition treaty since 2012, extradition for trial in India would be a complicated procedure that would have to be handled at a national level. “The B’nei Menashe Council has no legal standing in this case,” our Newsletter was told by a legal source. “Extradition would depend on the governments of the two countries, or at least on their ministries of justice, deeming the matter ‘serious and important’ enough to merit such action. Extradition requests have to go through the courts, where they can be appealed, and they can drag on for years.”

A more promising route, our source said, might be for the Manipuri police to cooperate with the Israeli police in bringing the accused to trial in Israel. This would be especially feasible if Sarah Baite and her daughter could be brought to Israel to testify and be subject to cross-examination by the defendant’s lawyers. “The fact that the crime was committed in another country would not necessarily be a hindrance,” he observed. “In theory, Israel’s courts have jurisdiction over the acts of an Israeli citizen, no matter where they were committed. But a defendant has his rights, and these include the right to question his accusers in a court of law.”

As a to what the BMC might do to assist the investigation, Lalam Hangshing, Chairman of the B’nei Menashe Council, was vague. “I can only say right now,” he stated, “that this is an encouraging development in the pursuit of justice. The BMC will do all it can to be of assistance.”