Shavei Bans Torah School, Beats Up Its Own Head Goon

(May 5) It could only happen with Shavei Israel. First it sends its goons to violently disrupt classes of the B’nei Menashe Council-run Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail School at Beit Shalom synagogue in Churachandpur. Then it seizes control of the synagogue, northeast India’s largest, by staging a phony election for its chairmanship. Then it has the synagogue’s new chairman formally expel the school from its premises. Then said chairman appoints the head of the goons to be the synagogue’s chazzan or prayer leader. And finally, when the new chazzan angers pro-Shavei members of the synagogue by his behavior, he gets beaten up by them in turn. One couldn’t wish for a more perfect record.

Much of all this has already been reported by this Newsletter. The first Shavei attack on the school, which had been operating on the synagogue’s premises with full permission, was related in our March 24 article, “Shavei Hooligans Storm Churachandpur Classroom.” The fake election was described in our March 31 piece, “Shavei Strong Arm Tactics Continue in Manipur With Synagogue Putsch.” A second Shavei assault on the school, which led to police intervention, was the subject of our April 7 “Shavei Invaders, Avichail School Students, Brawl At Beit Shalom.” You can read about it all on this page.

As for the latest developments, they began when Beit Shalom’s new chairman, Shavei Israel activist Seithang Haokip, announced after Passover that Beit Shalom would no longer host the Avichail School and was expelling it. This was accompanied by another announcement that Ronel Letkholien Haokip, who had led both of the two thuggish attacks on the school, would be Beit Shalom’s new chazzan, replacing the former prayer leader Avichayil Manchong. This was an unusual move even by Shavei’s standards, since Avichail Manchong was known as one of the most Jewishly educated B’nei Menashe in Manipur while Ronel Haokip was reputed to have difficulty with the Hebrew alphabet.

Ronel’s comeuppance was not long in coming. Stumbling through the prayers that he led, he began issuing arbitrary orders, the most recent of which, issued at last week’s Friday night services, was that all children under bar-mitzvah age must leave the synagogue at once. An argument followed in which the infuriated congregants demanded to know the reason for this unprecedented fiat. Before Ronel, hardly an expert on Jewish precedents, could finish explaining his action, the crowd set on him and gave him a thrashing and a bloody nose. This time, too, the police had to be called to restore order.

The situation among Manipur’s B’nei Menashe is tense. “There is a pervasive fear that violence can break out again at any moment.” says Ohaliav Haokip, General Secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council. “Pro-BMC B’nei Menashe fear even to attend services at Beit Shalom. If Shavei militants can physically attack one of their own trusted members, it goes without saying that no one is safe.”

“For they have sown the wind and they have harvested the storm,” said the prophet Hosea of the godless of his day. The storm that Shavei is now harvesting would appear to have only begun.

What Now? A Degel Menashe Editorial

(April 28) It has been an event-packed week, as our three new Newsletter stories relate.

It was a week in which Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption confirmed that a joint Ministry/Jewish Agency fact-finding mission will soon be traveling to Manipur and Mizoram to study the situation of the roughly 5,000 B’nei Menashe still there and reformulate procedures for their Aliyah. And it was a week in which Degel Menashe and B’nei Menashe Council leaders met with the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to discuss changes in these procedures. These are important developments. They show that Degel Menashe’s long campaign to have responsibility for the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah transferred from Shavei Israel to The Jewish Agency is finally having results and that both the Agency and the Ministry realize at last that the present system needs to be restructured.

But the week’s most dramatic development took place in a Tel Aviv district court. There, Shavei Israel founder and chairman Michael Freund was found was guilty of forging numerous documents to cover up his apparent embezzlement of 50 million shekels of his family’s money and his transfer of it to the coffers of Shavei. It was with this sum that he was able to turn Shavei into the powerful organization that it has become.

As unexpected as it was, this development did not surprise us. Over and over, we have sounded the warning that Shavei Israel is a morally and financially corrupt organization Over and over, we have been ignored. Now, those who ignored us will have to listen to the courts.

Whether the state of Israel will now file criminal charges against Michael Freund, or whether it will simply wait for the law to make him return the funds he is accused of stealing, remains to be seen. Either way, it is now a matter of official record: Shavei Israel is an organization born in crime and maintained by crime.

This changes everything. For the past two years we have fought to break Shavei Israel’s stranglehold on the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah. We have documented the ways in which Shavei’s monopoly on this Aliyah has led to innumerable abuses and injustices. We have described how Shavei has used its monopoly to control and intimidate the B’nei Menashe community. We have called upon The Jewish Agency to step in and put an end to the anomaly of a private organization deciding who is allowed to live in Israel and who is not. Yet throughout all this, we have never demanded that Shavei Israel be excluded from the Aliyah process. We have held that it could play a constructive role in this process as long as others were allowed to play one, too.

No longer. After the court’s ruling this week, Shavei Israel must go. It must not be allowed to have anything more to do with the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe or with their absorption in Israel. It must be recognized for what it is: a criminal body that belongs beyond the pale. No one in the B’nei Menashe community should have to be sullied by contact with it. No Israeli authority should want to be sullied by such contact, either. It is inconceivable that from now on a single shekel of public money should go to an organization founded on fraud and theft, or that it should be entrusted with any public task.

This makes rethinking the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah more urgent than ever. The sending of a fact-finding mission to northeast India is a first, necessary step. It should take place as soon as possible. And it should set for itself the clear goal of determining how, with Shavei now out of the picture, this Aliyah can be carried out more fairly, quickly, and efficiently. The task should not prove too difficult. There are enough forces in the B’nei Menashe community that, working together with the Ministry of Immigration and The Jewish Agency, can get the job done and do it better than Shavei did. The time to rebuild after an earthquake is at once.

Court Finds Freund, Shavei, Guilty of Forgery, Fraud

(April 28) In a ruling handed down on April 15 by Tel Aviv District Court judge Naftali Shilo, Michael Freund, Shavei Israel’s founder and chairman, was found guilty of having forged his ex-wife Sarah’s signature on numerous forms and documents submitted by Shavei to Israel’s Registrar of NGOs and non-profit organizations. The ruling, following a special hearing at which Freund testified, was given in response to a request by Sarah for a court declaration clearing her of any past involvement or association with Shavei. The request, her lawyers explained, was occasioned by her fear of being accused of complicity in Shavei wrongdoings were they ever to become the subject of a criminal investigation.

Judge Shilo’s decision, first revealed on April 26 by Haaretz reporter Judy Maltz in the newspaper’s English-language edition, must be viewed in the context of a trial, still in a preliminary stage, in which Sarah Freund is suing her former husband for IS50 million – a sum she claims he embezzled from a family trust before their 2016 divorce and transferred to Shavei Israel without her knowledge. Michael Freund has contested this version of events, arguing that the money was given to Shavei with Sarah’s consent. In support of his contention, his lawyers have pointed to her signature on Shavei documents as proof that she was an active member of the organization’s board of directors and regularly took part in its meetings.

The District Court’s judgment that the signatures purporting to be Sarah’s were forged by Freund himself demolishes this argument, thus making it probable that Freund will lose the suit and be forced to return the 50 million shekels. It brands him a serial counterfeiter and liar, leaves him open to criminal charges, and appears to rule out the possibility that Shavei in its present form can be granted future government contracts or continue to assume the responsibility delegated to it until now for bringing B’nei Menashe to Israel. [See today’s Degel Menashe editorial “What Now?”]

Judge Shilo’s 11-page verdict was closely reasoned. Michael Freund and his lawyers, it noted, failed to bring a single witness to testify that Sarah attended any of Shavei’s board meetings or took part in a single one of its activities. Moreover, it stated, Michael’s claim that this failure was due to many of these meetings having been conducted by telephone is contradicted by Shavei’s own bylaws, which did not non-face-to-face board meetings prior to 2020. There were also, Shilo pointed out, numerous inconsistencies in Freund’s testimony, which was often at odds with statements made in the pre-trial brief filed by his lawyers in the embezzlement suit.

Thus, for example, Shilo pointed out, Freund declared in this brief, “I wish to stress that every time that there was a need for Sarah’s signature on some document, I would bring it home with me, show it to her, and have her sign.” Yet pressed in the special hearing to explain why Sarah’s alleged signature on Shavei documents resembled his own, he answered that “there were times when Sarah asked me over the telephone to save her the trouble [of signing] and to sign documents for her.” Such discrepant versions of what happened, Shilo wrote, were “highly damaging to Michael’s credibility.”

Most damning were Shilo’s comments on the nature of the disputed signatures, made after listening to the testimony of two graphologists, one brought by Sarah and one by Michael. “Not even an untrained eye,” the judge commented, “can fail to discern the similarity between the two signatures…One must accept the opinion of Dr. Vardi [the graphologist brought by Sarah] that the plaintiff did not put her signature on any of the organization’s documents and that the person who did this was Michael.” At times Shilo appeared to be more astounded by Freund’s lack of preparation for the questions asked him by Sarah’s lawyers, and by the floundering way in which he answered them, than by the obvious falsity of the answers themselves.

In ruling in the plaintiff’s favor, Judge Shilo assessed Freund, with court costs plus IS 50,000 for Sarah’s legal expenses. Such an assessment is usually made when a judge is impressed by the low quality of a litigant’s case.