Fifth Annual Degel Menashe Scholarships Awarded

Degel Menashe scholarship winners for 2023-24 with guests, family and friends.

(December 15, 2023) At a festive ceremony held on December 13, Degel Menashe announced the recipients of its 2023-24 academic scholarship program. This is the fifth year in a row that scholarships have been awarded since the program’s inception in 2019-20. 

A sumptuous Indian dinner.

The ceremony, at which an Indian-style meal was served and a check presented to each scholarship recipient, was held on the evening of the seventh candle lighting of Hanukkah in the town of Zichron Ya’akov. Hosting it was Rafi Bhonker, a high-tech entrepreneur and prominent member of the Bene Israel community that immigrated to Israel from India in the years following the state’s establishment. Bhonker was one of three speakers at the event, which was attended by 15 of the 20 scholarship winners and their families. (The other five have been called up by the war in Gaza and are now serving in army reserve units.) This, our Newsletter was told by Yitzhak Thangjom, Degel Menashe’s managing director, brings to 79 the total number of scholarships distributed so far. 

This year’s scholarship money, according to Thangjom, is the largest sum ever, amounting to nearly 100,000 shekels. One of its recipients is enrolled in a Masters’s program; eight will earn their bachelor’s degrees in the course of 2024; nine are in various stages of their undergraduate studies, and two are teenage athletes awarded special achievement grants.. The subjects being studied, Thangjom says, range from bioinformatics, microbiology, electrical engineering, communication technology, and business administration to nursing, psychology, music, and Chinese medicine, while the schools attended include the Hebrew University, Ariel University, Ben-Gurion University, the Open University, the Holon Institute of Technology, Ashkelon Academic College, and Reedman College. 

Watch Hanukkah lamp lighting by Hillel Halkin: https://youtu.be/2byE7eKuhLk?si=MiASgKN0Ii4m_fxh

Distinguished speakers (from the left): Ephraim Lev, Hillel Halkin and Rafi Bhonker.

In addition to Bhonker, the evening’s speakers were Ephraim Lev, Dean of Humanities at the University of Haifa, and Hillel Halkin, Degel Menashe’s Chairman of the Board. Each spoke from his own experience. Bhonker stressed the need for developing interpersonal skills along with professional competence on the way to building a career. Lev, whose own area of academic specialization is traditional medicines, spoke about the importance of preserving B’nei Menashe traditions and preventing them from being forgotten and lost. Halkin, whose book Across The Sabbath River attempts to understand the B’nei Menashe’s relationship to the biblical past that has been claimed for them, concluded his remarks by saying:

“Degel Menashe is honored to be once again assisting young members of the B’nei Menashe community who have the drive and determination to acquire a higher education. It’s natural that nearly all of you scholarship winners have chosen to study practical fields that will help you to get ahead in Israeli society. And yet I’ll make a confession. I could only go so far in my own research into the mystery of the B’nei Menashe’s past because I did not have the linguistic and ethnographic tools to go further. That’s something you have a head-start in. My dream is that one day I will stand here and present an award to one of you who says, ‘Computers and engineering and the technologies of our times are all fine, but what I want is to study the story and history of my own people. I intend to be the world’s first professor of B’nei Menashe studies.’ That will be the day on which our scholarship program will have achieved all I had hoped for.”

Books presented to scholarship winners by hosts Nurit and Rafi Bhonker,

Enjoying festive and celebratory meal.

Two Wars and the B’nei Menashe: A Degel Menashe Editorial

B'nei Menashe residents of Sajal being evacuated by the Indian Army, early May 2023. File photo.

(November 16, 2023) Although 2023 still has a month-and-a-half to run its course, it’s not too early to say that, for the B’nei Menashe, it will have been a pivotal year, defined by two wars -- one the ethnic conflict between Kukis and Meiteis in Manipur, the other Israel’s war against Hamas. Seen from an Israeli and a global perspective, the two can hardly be compared. The conflict in Manipur is a small-scale local one that had aroused little interest elsewhere, while the Gaza war has riveted the world’s attention. Yet for the B’nei Menashe both have been equally momentous.

Seen in retrospect, the war against Hamas will be seen as the turning point at which Israel’s 5,000 B’nei Menashe made the transition from becoming Israeli to being Israeli. Until now, Israel’s B’nei Menashe community has been, understandably, concerned mostly with itself. A small immigrant group that arrived in Israel without many of the means to deal successfully with the demands of the dynamic, competitive, technologically oriented society that it suddenly found itself in, it has had to learn to adjust and transform basic patterns of thinking and behavior. This process has taken place, naturally, at a faster pace among young, Israeli-born-or-raised B’nei Menashe than among their elders who reached adulthood in India, but it has been shared by all. Not that Israel’s national problems haven’t mattered to its them, but these have seemed distant, almost abstract, next to their own struggle to cope and get ahead.

B'nei Menashe IDF soldiers on duty, serving with pride and distinction.

The current war has changed all this. With many hundreds of B’nei Menashe serving in the army and many hundreds more volunteering on the home front, and with the entire B’nei Menashe community of Sderot evacuated from its homes after living through a Hamas attack in the first days of the war, the B’nei Menashe are now fully part of Israeli reality as they have not been before. For the first time, they can feel that they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellow Israelis and giving to their country instead of just fretting about what services they can get from it. They have become participants and not just lookers-on. And although all this is a result of the war, it will not end with it. The change will be permanent. If Israel, as one often hears said these days, will emerge from the war a different country, its B’nei Menashe are already a different community.

B'nei Menashe women help with the shortfall in labor, southern Israel.

But so, as a result of their own war, are the 5,000 B’nei Menashe still in India, three-quarters of them in Manipur. Although they have dreamed day and night of joining their brothers and sisters in Israel, life in India, while waiting for the dream to be fulfilled, has been supportable until now. It no longer is.

While India’s B’nei Menashe have thus far not had to confront anti-Semitism, they now realize that they are sitting on an ethnic powder keg. This exploded last spring and early summer, leaving many of them homeless and destitute, and it can explode again, and even more violently, at any moment. Their Aliyah to Israel, until now a desirability, has become an urgent necessity. For the moment, the other war, the war in Israel, has put this Aliyah on hold. It cannot be allowed to remain there, however. The long period between 1990 and 2023 in which India’s B’nei Menashe acquiesced in immigrating to Israel in dribs and drabs is over for them. As soon as the war against Hamas is won, they must insist on being admitted to Israel immediately, all 5,000 of them. The war in Manipur has changed everything for them, too.

And one more thought. Readers of this Newsletter know about Ma’oz Tsur, the 200 acres of land outside of Lamka (the former Churachandpur) on which B’nei Menashe families in Manipur that have lost their homes to ethnic cleansing are now re-establishing themselves as a jointly run farming community – “a kind of B’nei Menashe kibbutz,” as B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing has put it. But this undertaking, as promising and exciting as it is, will not outlast the B’nei Menashe’s hopefully short remaining stay in India. Why then, it might be asked, go to such effort to build it?

A farm at Ma'oz Tsur, a possible solution for the future.

Recently, Degel Menashe has been in contact with Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption about the possibility of turning Ma’oz Tsur into the nucleus of a B’nei Menashe farming community in Israel. The ministry is interested. “The B’nei Menashe have always been farmers,” a senior ministry official said to us. “It’s been sad that in Israel this aspect of them hasn’t so far been given expression. Suppose we could put the two things together: the B”nei Menashe’s love of the soil and the need that there will be after the war to resettle the agricultural kibbutzim and moshavim near Gaza. It may sound right now like a fantasy, but we need to think about how Ma’oz Tsur could contribute to this.”

We really do!

Sderot’s Displaced B’nei Menashe “Eat and Sleep,” Weed and Pray

The entry to Kibbutz Zrachia.

(November 9, 2023) “I must say I enjoyed working like this,” said Rivka Chong Guite to our Newsletter after weeding cabbage fields this week in the farming village of Zrachia in southwest Israel. “It’s been a long time since I did anything like it. All we’ve been doing in our hotel room these past weeks is eat and sleep. All our chores are performed by the hotel staff. When the time comes to go back to Sderot, we won't need a bus, because we'll all have gotten so fat that we’ll just roll all the way there! Seriously, though, the day at Zrachia made me feel nostalgic. We B’nei Menashe grew up doing farm work. We’ve always been close to the soil. It's in our blood.”

Rivka was one of twenty of Sderot’s displaced B’nei Menashe now staying at government expense in hotels in Jerusalem who traveled to Zrachia this week to help the village’s farmers. “Actually,” we were told by

Volunteers working at a greenhouse, Zrachia .

Yitzhak Thangjom, the managing director of Degel Menashe, which provided the group with transportation, “we would have had many more volunteers if we could have afforded more than the single minibus we were able to rent. Sderot’s B’nei Menashe are now without work or a meaningful daily routine and are thirsting for something to do, especially if it aids the war effort.

Doron Rafaeli gives a ride to the volunteers. Yosef Demsat Haokip is at the back, with a 'thumbs-up'.

“These are people who have worked hard all their lives and aren’t used to just sitting around,” said Thangjom, who joined the group. “And though they haven’t practiced it in Israel, farming comes naturally to them. Almost every one of their families had its own plot of land or rice field back in Manipur. I’m one of the exceptions, because I’m a city boy from Imphal, grew up in New Delhi, and at first I was indignant when I saw two older Bnei Menashe women laughing at how I was weeding the cabbages. ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked. “‘You look like you're plucking a chicken,’ they said and showed me how to do it.”

Zrachia’s Rafaeli family, in whose fields the volunteers worked, was appreciative. “These people really knew how to work. We’re grateful for their skill and dedication,,” said Doron Refaeli, who like many Israeli farmers has been hard hit by a war that has left him without hired labor. For their part, the volunteers felt they had gotten as

Rivka Guite (left) and Dvora Tuboi (right) at the Old City Jerusalem.

much as they had given. “Working the land,” said Yosef Demsat Haokip, “especially the land of Israel, is an honor. I haven’t done any farm work since my Aliyah from Manipur two years ago. It’s something we’re cut out for. We sweated a lot, but when we were done my body felt lighter and healthier.”

Another group of Sderot’s displaced B’nei Menashe left their Jerusalem hotel rooms this week for the Western Wall, where they recited Psalms and prayed for Israel’s victory over Hamas. “By now we’re all homesick and tired of being looked after by the government all the time,” said one of them, Dvora Tuboi. “We want to get back to a normal life. But then again, if it weren’t for this war, we wouldn’t have had the chance to spend so much time in Jerusalem, walking its streets and praying in its holy places. We’ve seen and done things we would otherwise never have had a chance to, like getting up in the morning, sending our children to the makeshift school they’re attending, and going to the Wall to pray for our country. We’ll do it again and again until the war is won.”

Some members of the prayer group at the Western Wall.

At the time of this article being published, it has been reliably learnt that another group of B'nei Menashe are planning to volunteer at a farm next week.