(March 3) “If you require any assistance, legal or otherwise, we would be willing to help you….I hope and pray that you and your daughter can make Aliya at the earliest possible opportunity to fulfill your dream and that of your forefathers to return to Israel. If there is anything else that we can do to assist you, please feel free to contact me directly.”
So wrote Michael Freund, the Chairman of Shavei Israel, in an email to Sarah Baite, the widowed mother of a raped daughter whose story, come to light in recent months, has shaken the B’nei Menashe community.
Michael Freund.
Freund’s words were written on January 21, at the conclusion of a letter in which, declaring that “my heart goes out to you and your family,” he sought to defend Shavei against charges that it was complicit in covering up the rape and in putting the alleged perpetrator of it, a Shavei crony, on an Aliyah list for Israel, where he now lives.
Baite answered Freund’s letter by email on February 9 after emerging from the hiding she had gone into to avoid threatening phone calls from Sehjalal Kipgen, Shavei’s Manipur administrator, and from others acting at his behest. (Kipgen warned Baite that she would have to face the consequences if she did not withdraw the complaint against the rapist that she had made to the Churachandpur police.) Replying to Freund’s offer of assistance, Baite wrote back:
“You write, is there anything you can do to assist me. I will tell you three things, You can depose Sehjalal Kipgen from his position. You can tell your lawyers to have the rapist be sent back to India for facing trial or stand for trial in Israel. And you can promise me that I will make Aliyah soon so that I will not have to wait any longer.”
That was nearly a month ago. Today our Newsletter asked Baite whether she had heard from Freund. It was not easy to get hold of her, because she had gone to a patch she tends in the fields, where there is no cellphone reception, to pick vegetables to sell in a Churachandpur market, and she could only be reached when she arrived at her stall there. Her concise answer:
“Not a word!”
Baite, who ekes out a living by selling her vegetables and working for farmers in their rice fields, then spoke at greater length. “Michael Freund is a very smooth talker,” she said. “I suspected from the minute I received his letter with its offer of help and sympathy that he only wrote it because he felt forced to.
All of Shavei’s top officials were involved in trying to cover up the rape of my daughter and he thought he had to do something to defend the organization. His letter to me, which he publicized right away, was no more than a show to impress those who read it. Its words were very nice, but there wasn’t a bit of sincerity in them. They were a lie.
“Who am I to Michael Freund?” Baite went on. “I’m nothing to him and I know it. On the one hand, he sends me a letter offering help and sympathy. On the other, he ignores all my requests and goes on backing his Shavei administrator, Sehjalal Kipgen, who threatened me because I’m seeking justice for my daughter and myself after all the suffering and humiliation that we’ve been through. Michael Freund is simply not trustworthy. I hope the government of Israel and all concerned will learn from this what kind of a person they have put in charge of the B’nei Menashe.”
(February 24) At a meeting held this week at the Indian Embassy in Tel Aviv and attended by some 30 representatives of Israel’s four communities of Indian Jews and their descendants, embassy officials called on them to unite in a single roof organization. The four communities are the Bene Israel, who were, historically, concentrated along India’s west coast; the Cochin Jews, who hailed from the subcontinent’s southern tip; the Baghdadi Jews, once mostly residents of Bombay and Calcutta; and northeast India’s B’nei Menashe, who have in recent years gained increasing recognition from the other groups as a part of Indian Jewry.
Although efforts to unite all Jews of Indian origin in Israel have been made in the past, none has come to fruition. The most recent attempt was in 2018, when a proposed “National Convention of Indian Jews” was launched in the city of Ashkelon. Lack of effective leadership and the Covid pandemic were equal factors in its failure to strike roots.
This week’s meeting, convened, by Pawan K. Pal, the Indian embassy’s Second Secretary in charge of Public Diplomacy, took place within the framework of the embassy’s year-long celebration of two milestones: the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Indo-Israel ties and the marking of India and Israel’s 75th years of independence. Forming the B’nei Menashe delegation were Jessica Thangjom, a board member of the Indian Jewish Heritage Center; Yitzhak Thangjom, executive director of Degel Menashe; and three younger members of the community, Ronia Lunkhel, Yael Lunkhel, and Yosef Naite.
After welcoming remarks by Rajiv Bodwade, the embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission, embassy Counselor Dinesh Udenia spoke of the embassy’s desire to engage all Israelis of Indian origin in its activities.
Mr. Pawan K. Pal, Public Diplomacy, speaking to delegates
Besides expanding existing undertakings, such as the Know India program, which is similar to the Jewish Agency’s Birthright program, and scholarships for study in Indian Universities, the embassy, Udenia told the gathering, would like to get Israel’s Indian Jewish population, and especially its younger generation, to take a greater interest in its roots and pursue matters of common interest. This could best be done, he said, if it could unite in a single body that that would set an agenda and propose ways of implementing it. .
A lively discussion among the participants followed. It was agreed that the National Convention for Indian Jews should be revived as the best possible platform for achieving these objectives and that an annual day should be set aside for the celebration of the Indian Jewish heritage. After various alternatives were considered, it was decided that sometime during the eight-day autumn holiday of Succot would be the most appropriate time for such an event. Mr.Beni Walter suggested the city of Lod near Tel Aviv as a venue for the celebration and told the gathering that the municipality would be willing to make its facilities and services available for it. In their concluding remarks, the Indian diplomat reiterated their intention of standing behind such initiatives. And Ronia Lunkhel spoke for the younger B’nei Menashe delegates when she said, “The desire to transmit the Indian heritage to my generation was impressive. It was an interesting and enriching event.”
(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.
