BMC Organizes Manipur Vaccination Drive; Shavei Threatens Organizer

(June 10) In response to the mass outbreak in New Delhi and Jerusalem of Covid19 among recent B’nei Menashe immigrants to Israel, the B’nei Menashe Council of Manipur has begun a vaccination drive. At a meeting of the BMC executive in Churachandpur on Monday, June 7, the subject was addressed of why Shavei Israel, which was tasked with vaccinating the immigrants, had failed to do so properly and was doing nothing to see to the vaccination of the remaining 5,000 B’nei Menashe in India, more than 4,000 of them in Manipur. The meeting ended with the BMC’s decision to take the initiative itself.

“Getting vaccinated in Manipur is at present not in itself a problem,” our Newsletter was told by Ohaliav Haokip, the BMC’s General Secretary. With the worsening of the Covid19 pandemic in India, vaccination centers have been set up in every town and rural area in the state. The difficulty, Haokip said, lay in informing people of the existence of these centers and getting them to register at them. “Many B’nei Menashe,” he stated, “do not know about these centers at all, and many who do know have no idea of how to avail themselves of them.”

The BMC, Haokip related, has put out notices over the B’nei Menashe social media, supplemented by direct telephone calls, offering to extend help with the registration process to whoever needs it. The response, he says, has been highly positive. “We had over 40 individuals turn to us for help on the first day, and the pace is keeping up,” he said. There was, he explained, a wait of two or three days for an appointment to have the first dose of the vaccine administered. The second dose is generally given some 90 days later.

Getting the jab.

The BMC’s campaign has not gone down well with Shavei Israel. On Wednesday, June 9, Haokip received a brief letter from Shlomo Sehjolal (aka Lalboi) Kipgen, Shavei’s chief Manipur administrator and headsman of Boljol village, a northern suburb of Churichandpur. Entitled “Summons,” the letter read:

”Sir,

I would like to inform you that you have not behaved in accordance with the laws of our village, which could have led to bloodshed. Therefore, you are summoned to come and explain yourself to the Boljol Village Authority on the coming date of 10th June, 2021 (Thursday), at 2 pm.

“If you choose to ignore this notice, only you will be responsible for what happens to you afterwards.”

Sehjalal’s summons

Haokip, who does not live in Boljol, racked his brain to understand what “misbehavior” he was being accused of. Then it came to him. “I work,” he told us, “as a computer consultant for a company belonging to Yosef Chongloi, a B’nei Menashe resident of Boljol. One day two weeks ago, while I was in Chongloi’s home, we had an argument over a work-related matter. Someone in the street must have overheard us and told Shlomo Kipgen about it. It blew over quickly and Yosef and I quickly patched things up, but for Kipgen it was a pretext to issue a ‘summons’ that I of course have no intention of complying with.”

The argument with Chongloi, declared Haokip, was merely a pretext. “What Kipgen and Shavei are really upset about ,” he said, “is our vaccination campaign, which has underlined their own incompetence and indifference to the B’nei’s Menashe health. Why else would Kipgen have waited two weeks after the incident with Chongloi and only written me when the vaccination drive was announced? His letter’s last line, which holds me ‘responsible’ for anything that happens to me, is a threat to resort to violence against me.”

Haokip has lodged a police complaint. Yosef Chongloi, for his part, has told our Newsletter that “the whole thing was blown up out of context. There are always differences about how to proceed at work, and this was one of them. We settled everything between us in a friendly fashion – the proof being that Ohaliav is still working for me.”

B’nei Menashe Covid19 Blackout Intensifies

(June 10) With 100 or more B’nei Menashe immigrants to Israel sick with Corona in isolation centers and hospitals in New Delhi and Jerusalem, the blackout regarding them has become total. Degel Menashe’s sources in both cities have gone silent. As of the beginning of this week, none of the immigrants or their families, nor anyone in Israel’s ministries of health or immigration, nor at New Delhi’s previously forthcoming Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Covid Care Centre, has been willing to divulge information. Most of our Newsletter’s calls have gone unanswered.

One can only speculate about the reason for this. Clearly, heavy pressure not to speak has been applied all around. “It has all the indications of a cover-up,” Degel Menashe’s Executive Director Yitzhak Thangjom told our Newsletter. “Something obviously went wrong with the initial testing of the immigrants in Manipur, which was supposed to have been carried out by Shavei Israel, and there is apparently much embarrassment, as well as fear of word of what actually happened getting out. We know that Israel’s Health Ministry was reluctant to okay the operation in the first place and only did so because, given the gravity of the Covid19 situation in India, it was considered a matter of saving Jewish lives. Now the opposite has occurred: Jewish lives have been endangered and the virulent Indian strain of the virus has massively entered Israel. Hopefully, it will be contained, but this all could have been avoided had proper procedures been followed with a measure of transparency. Instead, Shavei Israel conducted its testing in Manipur under a heavy mantle of secrecy, and no one knows to this day exactly how it was done.”

Thangjom is confident that the truth will come to light. “These things can’t be swept under the rug forever,” he says. “Someone is responsible, and whoever it is will be held to account. A serious probe must be instituted to determine what went on and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Covid19 Rate Soars Among B’nei Menashe Olim In India, Israel

(June 3) As calls for an investigation were sounded, the number of Covid19 cases among the 275 B’nei Menashe immigrants who left Manipur for Israel last week has risen dramatically. Over eighty of the group of 115 that stayed behind in New Delhi due to the illness have now tested positive, while as of Tuesday of this week, 16 of the 160 who reached Israel were declared ill, too. Although since then their number has almost certainly jumped, neither Shavei Israel, the Jerusalem-based organization responsible for their Aliyah, nor Israel’s Ministries of Immigration or Health, have released new figures.

From all indications, the infection was contracted in Manipur by at least one family of the 275 before the group left last week for New Delhi, from which it was scheduled to continue in its entirety to Israel. In New Delhi, the virus spread quickly. Although all of the group was supposedly tested for it with negative results before departing from Manipur, forty of them proved to be virus-positive when tested again in the Indian capital prior to their flight to Israel. These forty remained behind in New Delhi, along with close family that decided to stay with them, when the rest of the immigrants traveled to Israel on May 31.

Now, our Newsletter has learned, the number of B’nei Menashe sick in New Delhi, all apparently with the virulent Indian strain of the virus, has more than doubled. Those known to be infected were immediately transferred from the hotel in which they had been staying to the Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Covid Care Centre, a quarantine station run by the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Managing Committee, a charitable organization run by New Delhi’s Sikh religious community. The Sikh have traditionally engaged in widespread humanitarian work in India that has always been made available, the committee’s president Manjinder Singh Sirsa told our Newsletter, to “all faith and creeds.”

Passing the time at the center

Bhupinder S Bhullar

Although the Care Centre is has a staff of forty doctors and nurses and is equipped with oxygen and emergency facilities, it is not designed to handle serious cases, and six B’nei Menashe, we were informed by the Managing Committee's chairman Bhupinder Singh Bhullar, have had to be transferred to New Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital after developing severe symptoms such as shortness of breath. As of this Thursday, Chairman Bhullar reported, all were out of danger and doing well.

Meanwhile, cases of Covid19 have also broken out among the supposedly Covid-free B’nei Menashe who flew to Israel and are now staying at the Jerusalem Gate Hotel. As stated above, up-to-date figures on the number of those currently sick are unavailable, and there appears to be a total blackout on information regarding them.

Why Covid-positive B’nei Menashe were able or permitted to fly from Manipur to New Delhi in the first place is unclear. Ohaliav Haokip, general secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council, has stated that he was told before the group’s departure from Manipur by Shavei Israel administrator Shlomo Kipgen that Shavei planned to test the olim by means of privately acquired RT-PCR (Rapid Test-Polymerase Chain Reaction) kits administered under medical supervision. In Churachandpur, from which the great majority of the olim came, the supervisor, according to a WhatsApp posting by Shavei activist Yitzhak Seimang Haokip, was Dr. Hegin Kipgen. Yet Dr. Kipgen himself, in a conversation with our Newsletter, denied that he was involved in the procedure and claims to have had nothing to do with it.

RT-PCR kits, which are said to yield results within 48 to 72 minutes, are currently in widespread use in India and can indeed be bought on the private market. However, they are not considered as reliable as standard laboratory tests, and in any case, their findings need to be certified by more than an ordinary physician in order to be valid for official purposes. “The certification must come,” a high Churachandpur police official told B’nei Menashe Council chairman Lalam Hangshing, “from a competent government-approved authority. It can’t just be from any doctor.”

Thus far, Shavei Israel has refused to disclose how testing was done in Manipur or to produce any documentation of it. “The entire incident,” Hangshing wrote in a June 2 letter to Israel’s Minister of Immigration and Absorption Penina Tamano-Shata, “was handled in a most reckless, negligent, and irresponsible manner” and may have involved “faked or unreliable Covid [test] results.”

Further inquiry, preferably undertaken by the governments of India and Israel, may determine what actually happened.