B’nei Menashe Join Indian Jewry At Malida Celebration

(January 20) When Ronia Lunkhel rose to address the audience at this year’s Malida celebration, she was the first representative of the B’nei Menashe to do so. Considering that Malida as an official celebration is only three years old, this may not seem like much. Yet it marked one more stage in the growing recognition of the B’nei Menashe as an integral part of Israel’s community of Jews from India.

Malida, originally the name of a rice-and-fruit dish served by Indian Jews on festive occasions, and consequently of such occasions themselves, has now joined other ethnic celebrations such as the Moroccan Maimouna and the Ethiopian Sigd as an annual day in the Israeli calendar, one coinciding with the holiday of Tu b’Shvat.

Malida: the original dish.

Largely the creation of two Israelis of Indian background, Ilana Shazor, a social worker from Hadera, and Elias Dandekar, a writer and historian from Binyamina, the annual Malida was celebrated this week in Jerusalem. The 200 guests who attended an evening of Indian food, dance, and music, and had a choice of lectures given in adjacent rooms, came from what have traditionally been considered India’s three distinct Jewries: the Bene Israel of the subcontinent’s west coast, the Cochin Jews of its southern tip, and the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta. To these has now been added as a fourth group: the B’nei Menashe of the northeastern states of Mizoram and Manipur. Still an unknown quantity to many Israelis, they were the subject of Ronia Lunkhel’s talk.

A Malida dance performance.

“Not many people in this country know of our history,” our Newsletter was told by Ronia, a 29-year-old student of traditional Chinese medicine who came to Israel as a one-year-old with her family, grew up in Kiryat Arba, and lives today in the Galilee. “I felt that it was both a privilege and an obligation to tell the Malida guests about us, about why we are here in the land of Israel, and about how our story has influenced me personally. Some of them weren’t easily convinced by my explanation of who we were and asked hard questions. Even though I had prepared for these, I didn’t know all the answers, which has made me determined to learn more. My hope is that we B’nei Menashe can learn to live in this country as full Israelis without losing our roots in ancient tribe of Israel.”

The Melida guests.

Some knowledge of the B’nei Menashe, says Isaac Ashkenazi, an Indian-born resident of Ra’anana who was one of the Malida guests, has long existed among at least some Indian Jews. As a child in a Baghdadi Jewish congregation in Calcutta, he recalls, “I remember sitting in our synagogue on a Jewish holiday when three or four families of B’nei Menashe walked in. My father, who was the synagogue’s sexton, welcomed them and gave them prayer books. It was a new experience for me to see people like them at Jewish prayer.”

But Ashkenazi, who would appear to be referring to a group of pre-B’nei Menashe Judaizers from Mizoram who visited Calcutta in search of a Jewish connection (the B’nei Menashe movement itself did not take shape until the mid-1970s), adds that at first Indian Jewry was wary of the B’nei Menashe and doubted their Jewishness, and that in Israel, too, it had little contact with them until the last decade, after they had been making Aliyah for twenty years. “The turning point,” he says, “was in 2010 when the Indian Jewish Heritage Center organized an event for the specific purpose of introducing the B’nei Menashe to the Indian community in Israel. But the B’nei Menashe have also become more interested in contacts with us over the years. The first generation of them in Israel was too involved in adjusting to a new world have room in its life for such a thing. It was the second generation that looked about and became aware that there were other Jews from India in Israel just as we were becoming aware of them.”

Concern about the B’nei Menashe’s Jewish bona fides has long since vanished among Indian Jews, according to Elias Dandekar.

Elias Dandekar.

“After all,” he says, “all of us Jews from India go far back in history. We may look different from one another and from other Jews in Israel, but the same blood flows in our veins.” And there are in addition, says Ilana Shazor, psychological and behavioral traits that other Jews from India have in common with the B’nei Menashe. “Although the differences between Cochin and Maharashtra [the home of most of the Bene Israel] are enormous,” she observes, “there’s a basic Indian spirit in both. There’s the same downplaying of the individual self. The B’nei Menashe have it also. Put two of them in a class of aggressive Israelis at school and you’ll at once see how Indian they are. We Bene Israel and Cochini Jews were like that, too, when we first came to Israel. We’ve lost a lot of it since then, and the B’nei Menashe remind us of how we were.”

As a fellow Indian Jew, Ilana says, she feels a special responsibility to the B’nei Menashe and a desire to help them in their adjustment to Israel.

Ilana Shazor.

“It’s embarrassing to see them being treated in the same way as immigrants like my parents were back in the 1950s,” she says. “All the red tape and uncaring bureaucracy are still there. I think of it as my duty to help them in their absorption process.” Elias Dandekar, who took part two months ago in a B’nei Menashe demonstration in front of the Ministry of Immigration’s offices in Tel Aviv, says of it, “We’re all from India and we have to march together.”

This was also the sentiment of yet another Malida guest, Avner Isaacs of Rosh ha-Ayin, who was two years old when his Bene Israel family immigrated to Israel from Mumbai. “For me, they’re not only Jews in every sense of the word,” he said, “they’re also my brothers and sisters as Indians. I think that all Indian Jewish organizations in Israel need to help them find solutions for their problems. I feel personally committed to this.”

So does Ilana Shazor, who also took part in the Tel Aviv demonstration. “When I heard that the B’nei Menashe were having problems with a private organization [Shavei Israel] into whose hands they had fallen,” she relates “I decided to give them my support. That’s why I saw to it that one of their young people was invited to speak at this year’s Malida celebration. It was important for Ronia to be heard. She explained things in the best possible way.”

Midrash Comes To Manipur

(January 13) The parshat ha-shavu’a, the weekly Torah portion read on Shabbat in the synagogue, has always been a part of his life, says Ohaliav Haokip, director of Manipur’s new Eliyahu Avichayil Hebrew School. This past week, in an effort to make it a part of his students’ lives too, Ohaliav issued the third in a planned series of brochures that he calls The Parashah Corner and hopes eventually to expand to all of the weekly Torah readings.

Ohaliav’s most recent brochure is for last Shabbat’s reading of Bo, the chapter of Exodus that tells of the last three of the Ten Plagues inflicted on the Egyptians and of the Children of Israel’s preparations to set out from their house of bondage for a new life of freedom. Like its two predecessors, it includes the text of the week’s chapter, translated into the Kuki language of Manipur spoken by the region’s B’nei Menashe, plus translated commentary taken from the Midrash, the classical corpus of rabbinic exegesis going back to the early centuries of the Common Era. To this is added illustrative material culled from the Internet.

An illustration for the Torah reading of Bo.

“The Bible was already translated into Kuki fifty years ago.” Ohaliav told our Newsletter. “There’s no need to redo that. I grew up with Bible stories, because they’re ones that every B’nei Menashe mother tells her children. But as I grew older, I became aware that there were writings of the rabbis about these stories that our parents and teachers didn’t know. I discovered that that there was another, rabbinical dimension to the Bible known as Midrash, and more I learned about it, the more I wanted to learn even more.”

A good example of Midrash occurs at the start of Ohaliav’s brochure on Bo. The portion begins with Exodus 10:1, with the words, “And God said to Moses, ‘Come [bo] to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I might show these my signs before him.”” Why, the rabbis asked, is Moses told to “come” to Pharaoh’s palace when it would have been more logical to tell him to “go” to it? The answer they give, The Parashah Corner informs its readers, is that in a world in which God’s glory is everywhere, coming and going are the same.

Or, in the language of The Parashah Corner:

When he first began investigating the world of Midrash as a teenager, Ohaliav, who is today 34, had no other sources than the Internet. “I found things there that I could never have imagined,” he relates. “But I dreamed of something better. Our synagogue library had mostly prayer books and Bibles in English and in Kuki translations. One day, though, while rummaging on a shelf, I came across a five-volume collection called The Midrash Says, one volume for each of the five books of Moses. Or rather, for four of the five, because the volume on Bamidbar or Numbers was missing. I was so thrilled to have the other four, though, that I didn’t mind.”

Ohaliav would have liked to continue his Jewish studies in Israel. “My older brother Avishai,” he relates “left for Israel in 2008 and I hoped to soon be able to join him. And in fact, I was invited by Shavei Israel to an Aliyah interview that took place in 2015 and passed with flying colors. The expectation of soon being in Israel was constantly before me. It felt exciting to be alive in those days.”

Ohaliav’s dream, however, was shattered when, not long afterwards, he was struck from Shavei Israel’s Aliyah list for marrying a woman who, though a member of the B’nei Menashe community, had not sat for an Aliyah interview herself. Today, they live in Churachandpur with a daughter, but “that's a whole other story,” Ohaliav says. “I’ll just say that I went through some very difficult times. Apart from my family, the greatest solace I found was in books about Judaism that I was able to get hold of from friends and relatives. One of the most helpful of these was a two-volume edition of The Weekly Midrash, a collection of Midrashim organized around the weekly Torah readings that was sent to me by Degel Menashe.”

An English version of Tzena Urena, a late medieval volume originally written in Yiddish for women who did not know Hebrew, The Weekly Midrash inspired Ohaliav to launch a Torah portion Internet blog. “Until then,” he explains, “all we in Manipur had available about the weekly readings was some very skimpy material we were getting in B’nei Menashe newsletters from Israel, and so I had the ideas of putting out a blog of my own. That was about two years ago. A lot of people enjoyed it and told me so. Before long, I was making it a weekly feature, and when Degel Menashe asked me to be the director of its new Eliyahu Avichayil School, it was natural to think of integrating it in the lessons I gave there.”

Ohaliav’s involvement with Degel Menashe began in the early summer of 2020, when the first bad wave of the Covid epidemic hit Manipur and Degel Menashe launched a food relief campaign, the first of several, for the B’nei Menashe community. “I volunteered to take part in the operation and soon found myself in charge of it,” says Ohaliav. The campaign was vehemently opposed by Shavei Israel, which until then had been the sole organization operating among northeast India’s B’nei Menashe, and as a result, when the food relief activists successfully revived the defunct B’nei Menashe Council as an independent B’nei Menashe body that would be a counterweight to Shavei, Ohaliav agreed to run in elections for the position of general secretary and won. Not long after that, when the BMC, together with Degel Menashe, decided to open a Hebrew school in Churachandpur, he accepted its offer to act as the school’s director.

“We began our school last May,” Ohaliav relates, “but had to shut it down soon after because of Covid lockdowns. It was only in October that we were able to reopen. But I was able to use that time to rethink our curriculum, and one aspect of this was producing The Parashah Corner.

Ohaliav Haokip teaching a Bible class.

“The lessons I give at the school,” he says, “form the basis of The Parashah Corner. In the first half of each week, I teach the coming Shabbat’s Torah portion with midrashim. In the second half of the week, as the Sabbath draws close, I collect what I’ve taught in a brochure.” Ohaliav runs off copies of The Parashah Corner on a home printer for use in the classes he teaches and shares it on the Internet for the general B’nei Menashe public.

The Torah, said the ancient rabbis, was given in seventy languages – the number of different tongues, so they imagined, that existed in the world. Although the Kuki language of Manipur was not one of these tongues that they were aware of, they would no doubt be as pleased as they would be astounded to know that their thoughts are being read in it today every week in The Parashah Corner.

Hebrew class at Beit Shalom, Vengnom.

Degel Menashe Board Meets At End of Year

(January 7) At a year-end Zoom meeting last week, Degel Menashe’s board of directors met to review the organization’s 2021 accomplishments and to look ahead to 2022. The meeting was held almost exactly two years after the organization’s official founding in December, 2019 as an Israel government-recognized non-profit NGO.

After opening the board meeting, executive director Yitzhak Thangjom called on Hillel Halkin, the board’s chairman, to give a report on Degel Menashe’s activities in the past year. This included:

1. The Degel Menashe Website, which now has concluded its second year of operations, too. Its weekly newsletter \covers B’nei Menashe and Degel Menashe affairs and has a regular readership, the report said, of 600 viewers, whose number often doubles when items of special interest appear. Although off to a good start, this audience needs to be increased. The Website’s appeal can be heightened by such things as running a weekly editorial, reviving the now dormant Letters to the Editor section, and creating an Index of published articles that would enable them to be easily referenced. Thought should also be given, Halkin suggested, to changing the Website’s current operating template, which while easy to use, is highly restrictive in the options it offers.

Scholarship recipients, file photo.

2. The Degel Menashe academic scholarship program. Under the direction of board member Batel Rently and with the continued help of a New Mexican Jewish donor who has preferred to remain anonymous, Degel Menashe was able to expand this program once again in 2021. From six scholarship recipients in 2019 and 14 in 2020, it reached 17 young B’nei Menashe this past year, all pursuing higher studies in different institutions in Israel. The total sum dispersed to them, averaging 40 percent of their tuition fees, also grew from previous years.

One new aspect of the 2021 program, Halkin’s report stated, is its stipulation that all scholarship winners devote 12 hours of volunteer work during the year to the B’nei Menashe community. Scholarship winners will be encouraged to work together in teams when they share interests or places of residence.

3. The Degel Menashe leadership project. Less successful than the scholarship program, the report stated, was 2021’s attempt to launch a leadership training program for young B’nei Menashe under the auspices of board member Dr. Reuven Gal and Israel’s Institute for Quality Leadership. Although a preliminary workshop with Dr. Gal in late April was attended by 11 Bnei Menashe youngsters and generated great enthusiasm, the Institute’s suggested program called for more hours of their time than many of the workshop’s participations felt able to commit themselves to. The project has therefore been suspended, though the possibility remains of reviving it at a future date.

4. The Degel Menashe oral history project. Consisting of oral history interviews with scores of B’nei Menashe elders in Israel, all of whom were involved in the early years of the B’nei Menashe movement in India, this project, it was reported, has resulted in a book called Lives of The Children of Manasia that will be published in English by Gefen Books of Jerusalem in the course of 2022, The book comprises edited versions of 12 of the most interesting of these interviews, plus an Introduction, Afterword, and Glossary. Taken together, the interviews fully tell the story of the B’nei Menashe and their origins for the first time, dispelling many myths while presenting a complex and compelling narrative of their own. Fascinating reading in their own right, they will constitute, Halkin said, to be a basic reference work on the B’nei Menashe for scholars and historians of the future.

In addition, the oral history project is now continuing and seeking new informants in Manipur. In charge of it there is the journalist Mang Taithul, who will be conducting additional interviews under Degel Menashe’s direction.

Baite and Troupe at a practice session.

5. The Degel Menashe musicology project. For several reasons, the chairman’s report stated, this project, whose goal is to collect and record traditional B’nei Menashe music and singing before they are forgotten, has yet to fulfill its initial promise. Although one successful recording session was held in Kiryat Arba in 2020, several factors have impeded further progress. Among them have been the Covid epidemic, which made it extremely difficult to bring singers together (nearly all traditional B’nei Menashe music is performed in groups); the illness or incapacity of elderly members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel who still know the old musical traditions; and the opposition of Shavei Israel, which having fought all Degel Menashe projects with threats against those taking part in them has fought this one as well.

As a result, the report said, the project’s focus has now shifted to Manipur, where a musically talented member of the B’nei Menashe community with a good knowledge of traditional music, Sarah Baite, has been put in charge of it. Baite is now in the process of contacting and organizing other B’nei Menashe who know and can perform these traditions along with her.

With this, the chairman’s report moved from Israel to India, where Degel Menashe has stepped up its activities, These have been concentrated, he said, in three areas: 1. The "Lakoi" or traditional/folk songs, 2. Children songs and 3. Recent proto-Judaic compositions from 60s and 70s.

6. Degel Menashe’s Hebrew school projects in Mizoram and Manipur. After a tentative start interrupted by lengthy school closures occasioned by the Covid epidemic, this project resumed in October, 2021, after the Jewish holidays, and has been developing quickly. Two remarkable young B’nei Menashe, one in Mizoram and one in Manipur, are directing it. In Mizoram, the director is Asaf Renthlei, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from St. Stephen’s College and Jawaharlal Nehru University, respectively, and is currently working on a Ph.D. In Manipur, it is Ohaliav Haokip. who has a degree in aerospace engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, and additional degrees in economics and computer applications.

The aim of both the Mizoram and Manipur programs, whose students include children, adolescents, and adults, is to instill an elementary facility in reading Hebrew, a familiarity with the basic sources of Jewish tradition, especially the Bible, and a greater knowledge of Jewish customs and observance. At present, the Manipur program has enrolled over 100 students spread over four regional centers, of which the main one is in Churachandpur, while the Mizoram program has some 20 students in Aizawl, from which it hopes to spread out, too. This program has been funded by a grant from the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, and its directors are now negotiating with ORT, the worldwide Jewish educational network whose Indian center is in Mumbai, in the hope of involving them, too.

Classes in progress at the newly opened schools at Manipur and Mizoram.

File photo of food distribution.

7. The Degel Menashe food relief program. Following three rounds in 2020 of emergency food distribution to B’nei Menashe in northeast India thrown out of work by the Covid epidemic, two more rounds were conducted in 2021 with the help of donations from the Jewish Federation of New Mexico and the San Franciso-based organization Scattered Among the Nations. Twenty tons of rice and cooking oil were distributed in Manipur and Mizoram to some 300 needy families -- a significant decrease from 2020, Halkin reported, because Shavei Israel was more successful in its scare campaign designed to prevent acceptance of aid from Degel Menashe. This campaign was bolstered in 2021 by the Aliyah, under Shavei Israel’s auspices, of over 700 B’nei Menashe to Israel, which heightened the impact of Shavei’s threat to bar anyone having contact with Degel Menashe from future Aliyah lists.

8. Degel Menashe’s ongoing struggle to break the monopoly on the B’nei Menashe Aliyah process granted to Shavei Israel by the Israeli government. This struggle, Halkin said, has known many ups and downs, which occurred in 2021 too. This was a year in which, on the one hand, Degel Menashe met with high Ministry of Immigration and Jewish Agency officials, including former Agency chairman Isaac Herzog; forwarded to both the Ministry and the Agency petitions signed by over a thousand B’nei Menashe in India and Israel who asked to be freed from Shavei Israel’s domination; helped organize anti-Shavei demonstrations in Churachandpur, Aizawl, and Tel Aviv; and collaborated with former Likud cabinet minister and present Knesset member Miri Regev in taking her anti-Shavei fight to the Knesset floor. Yet it was also a year in which the Ministry of Immigration and the Jewish Agency, despite repeated promises to take action, chose to remain on the sidelines and let Shavei’s Aliyah monopoly continue. The struggle, Halkin said, would be carried into 2022, and there were reasons for optimism that it would eventually succeed.

The last topic on the board meeting’s agenda was that of the chairman’s post. At their previous meeting, Halkin reminded the board members, he had indicated his desire to step down and be replaced. He felt, he had said then, that Degel Menashe had accomplished a tremendous amount in a short period and that he would be leaving it to his successor in good administrative and financial shape. Yet at last week’s Zoom meeting it transpired that such a person had yet to be found, and Halkin agreed to continue as board chairman on a pro tempore basis.