(January 23) One of Degel Menashe’s greatest difficulties has been to document its accusation that Shavei Israel systematically uses its control of B’nei Menashe Aliyah as a club with which to keep the B’nei Menashe community in line. Although it’s no secret that Shavei does this all the time, promising Aliyah to its followers and threatening to withhold it from its critics and their families, it has always done this carefully by means of whispers, innuendos, and word of mouth alone. Neither the promises nor the threats have ever been put in writing, thus making it possible for Shavei to deny that it makes use of them. Now, the cat is out of the bag.
The “cat” is a January 21 Facebook post in the Kuki language by Eliezer Baite, who holds the official position of Shavei Israel Information Secretary. Writing in the Shavei Facebook site Menashe Chate Kadam Na Uve, of which he is the moderator, Baite, who is not related to Sarah Baite, addressed the growing outrage in the B’nei Menashe community at the story, recently come to light, of how Shavei Israel leaders in Manipur sought to suppress the 2016 rape by one of their cronies of Sarah’s daughter Nelhoithem. Whoever joins in denouncing Shavei’s appalling handling of the incident, Eliezer Baite sought to make clear, will never make Aliyah. Here, translated into English, is an excerpt from his remarks:
“Aliyah is not something that can be yours just because you wish it to be. I am telling you this for your information, brothers. You need to be strong in your religion, because all of you who indulge in hearsay and say horrible things about Shavei must know that if you continue, you will not come [to Israel]….If you say bad things about your leader and do not listen to him, don't ever hope to enter the Holy Land….If you still don't understand me, [let me say that] if you want to share someone else’s food, you had better please him and not go about complaining and telling others that it’s too strongly spiced or makes you want to puke…. Your mistake [if you do this] will be like a flame at the edge of your clothing that will quickly engulf you. You’ll know it was a mistake when you never enter the holy land all the days of your life.
“And yet if you realize your mistake in time and come to us with repentance, you can be forgiven.
“Obedience to the leader is the beginning of wisdom.
“I am saying this because I love and care for you.”
Moderator, Menashe Chate Kadam Na Uve
Eliezer Baite
Eliezer Baite's Facebook post.
Thank you for your love, Eliezer. And for telling the truth about Shavei and its leader to whom obedience is owed, though he wrote in a Facebook post of his own this week (see today’s story “Is He To Be Believed?), “I realize the fact that the B’nei Menashe community is independent and has its own institutions.” Because of you, we now at last have Shavei’s idea of B’nei Menashe independence in writing. Don’t think we’re not grateful.
(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.”
(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 portionbegins 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.
