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.”

A Letter From Mizoram

(February 3) Pûkpui, a village of some 2,200 inhabitants in southern Mizoram, lies several kilometers to the north of the state’s second largest city of Lunglei (population 190,000) and boasts a history that long predates the British colonial presence in the Mizo Hills. Courage and valour in battle are an integral part of it. In the mid-19th century, the chieftain of Pûkpui, Seipuia, commanded the loyalty of two famed warriors in Mizo history, one of whom, Chawngbâwla, is prominently interred on a hilltop of the village. And in the post-colonial era, Laldenga, the father of Mizo nationalism, was born in Pûkpui.

At the head of the Mizo National Front, Laldenga led an independence movement that took up arms in 1966 on behalf of Mizoram’s secession from India. In the bitter warfare that followed, Lunglei was the one major population center captured by the MNF. Although it was subsequently retaken by the Indian army, and Pukpui was razed to the ground before being rebuilt in 1973, the MNF rebellion was a partial success that led to the eventual granting of statehood to Mizoram within the Indian federal union.

Pûkpui derives its name from the great number of puk or caves in its hills. Many of these have been sealed over time, it being a traditional belief that demons afflict whoever ventures into them. A more probable explanation is that the lack of oxygen in the caves’ inner reaches causes hallucinations that have been assumed to be supernaturally induced. In former times, indeed, groups of Mizo men, their numbers depleting the oxygen level even further, would penetrate deep into such caves as a demonstration of their virility,

During a week that I recently spent with Pûkpui’s small B’nei Menashe community, I heard more than one story about the visions of the intrepid cave explorers of old. One of these was had by a foreigner, James Herbert Lorrain, an early Baptist missionary to the Mizo Hills known to Mizos as Pu Buanga. While in a cave in Leite, to the east of Pûkpui, he is said to have fallen asleep in a puk and dreamed that the people to whom he had come to bring Christianity were of Israelite descent but that he must keep this knowledge a secret lest it lead to their refusal to accept the Christian faith. Whether true or not, such a story helps explain the reluctance of the first British missionaries to speak publicly about the seeming traces of biblical traditions in the native religion they sought to uproot.

Yet another vision, dating to shortly before the missionaries’ arrival, was supposedly had by a local seer named Dârphâwka at Dârkhuang Tlâng or “Gong Mountain,” a dramatically shaped peak located in the vicinity of Pûkpui.

Darkhuang Tlang.

Having supposedly seen in it that “there will be a fair-skinned people who will come from across the sea,” Dârphâwka reportedly told the people of Pûkpui. “Pay heed to what they will have to say to you.” When the British came to the area with their troops and missionaries not long afterwards, this vision was widely taken to refer to them -- and in fact, when the earliest Baptist ministers began evangelizing in the Mizo Hills, it was in Pûkpui that they made their first converts to Christianity.

Ever since then, the Baptist Church has had a stronghold in the southern region of Mizoram, whereas the Presbyterians have been dominant in the north. One of the B’nei Menashe families that I met while in Pûkpui is still one-quarter Baptist. While its Jewish component, consisting of Merabi Khupchawng and her two daughters Tamar and Gabriella, have severed their association with Christianity, Merabi’s husband Lalthangliana has remained an Elder of the local Baptist congregation.

Born Lalbiakzami,Merabi took the biblical name of King David’s wife Merav (Mirab in the King James Bible) when she took up the practice of Judaism in 2018, adding to it the Mizo female gender suffix “i.” Convinced by their reading of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian “Old Testament,” of Judaism’s truth, even though they were told that it was a “dead religion,” she and her mother were the first in Pûkpui to adopt it. Although they were subsequently successful in getting five other village families to join them, Lalthangliana was not among the persuaded. At the outset, Merabi told me, she tried her utmost to make him change his mind, just he tried his best to get her to remain a Christian.

Merabi lighting Hanukkah candles with daughters.

But though neither wanted to live in a religiously mixed home, neither was able to prevail, and in the end, caring too much for each other and for their daughters to separate, they agreed to respect each other’s decision and stay together.

Somewhat ironically, given the fact that he has no sons, Lalthangliana’s main problem with Judaism, as far as I was able to gather in talking to him, was less its rejection of the divinity of Jesus than its insistence on male circumcision, which he takes to be a backsliding from the “spirituality” of the New Testament. And yet his Christian faith has also given him the belief that religious observance that derives from compulsion is of little value and that at the end of the day sincerity and authenticity are paramount in matters of faith. “We decided,” he told me, “that my wife and daughters would do their own thing religiously and I would do mine.”

This is unusual for Mizo society, in which a woman is expected to follow her husband’s wishes obediently, especially in matters that are considered to be situated in the public domain, of which religion affiliation is one. Even if they belong to different denominations of the same faith, it is thought to be a woman’s duty upon marriage to leave her denomination for her husband’s. a sentiment well-reflected in the old Mizo proverb, Hmeichhia leh chakai in sakhua an nei lo, “a woman and a crab have no religion of their own.”

This has been the attitude toward her, Merabi told me, of Pûkpui’s Baptists as a whole, who unlike her husband have never stopped trying to get her and her daughters to return to the Christian fold. The argument they have most resorted to, she says, one traditionally used in Mizoram to get non-Christian holdouts to submit, has to do with death and bereavement. Mizo culture has always attributed great importance to being properly buried and mourned, and in a close-knit village in which participation in mourning is a sign of communal solidarity, the absence of one’s neighbors at such a time is particularly painful. Merabi has often been asked by the Baptist Elders of Pûkpui to consider the grim prospect that, should she continue to cling to Judaism, no Christian clergyman will eulogize her or preside at her funeral. “I tell them,” she says with a calm determination, “that I don’t need a Christian clergyman. I have my fellow Jews for that. And if there aren’t enough of them in Pûkpui, I’m sure they’ll come from Aizawl [Mizoram’s capital in which most of its B’nei Menashe reside] to do the honors.”

She has steadfastly stood her ground. If anything, she says, the pressure on her has grown more intense as pandemic-induced fears of death and its spiritual reckoning have become greater in Pûkpui. Yet recently, despite Lalthangliana’s pleas that she not do so, she took the final step of formally requesting the removal of her and her daughters’ names from Pûkpui’s Baptist registry. To herself, her daughters, and her husband, as well as to her neighbors and relatives, this is her declaration that she will never consider turning back from her journey to Judaism.

Asaf Rentlei

(This is the first of a two-part series)