“Be Quiet and Obey!” An Editorial

Shavei Israel’s once iron grip on the B’nei Menashe community of northeast India, already under serious challenge in Manipur, is now slipping in Mizoram, too. Two new developments point to this. The first is a petition sent to the Jewish Agency by sixty members of the Mizoram community who have been, so they declare, “driven to their wits’ end by the recklessness of the Shavei Israel organization.” (See our article “Sixty Names That Can’t Be Named” on this page.) The other is a WhatsApp message to the B’nei Menashe of Mizoram posted by Azriel Pachuau, Shavei administrator in Aizawl.

Azriel Pachuau

Pachuau’s message was written in Mizo. Translated into English, it begins:

“By the grace of G-d and the Shavei Israel Organization, another round of Aliyah is finally on the horizon. It appears that about 600 people from the Manipur community will be making Aliyah in this round….Let us be reminded that this current round of Aliyah of some 600 people from Manipur is only for those who have already been selected and approved for Aliyah following an interview with the dayyanim [rabbinical judges].”

Pachuau was referring to a list drawn up by Shavei and Israel’s Rabbinate in 2016. Some 250 individuals on this list, three-fifths from Manipur and the remainder from Mizoram, arrived in Israel last December. The remainder, slated to arrive sometime later this year, are all from Manipur. Addressing the disgruntlement this has led to in Mizoram, one of the subjects of the 60-signature petition, Pachuau’s WhatsAp post continued:

“All of us here in the B’nei Menashe community of Mizoram are undoubtedly highly motivated and eager to make Aliyah. However, let us learn to respect the plans and endeavors of our Shavei authorities. It is of vital importance that we obediently follow their word. Instead, let us devote all our energy to religious observance.”

In other words: Be quiet and obey! Go to synagogue, keep the commandments of Judaism, and don’t think for yourselves, because thinking is Shavei’s job, not yours. And alluding to the many B’nei Manashe who have nevertheless begun to think for themselves, both about Aliyah and other things, Pachuau went on:

“There may be other groups or organizations that seek to interfere in the Aliyah process. Let us be especially wary of them. Let us be reminded once again that Shavei Israel is the sole and only organization which labors for us and our Aliyah. Therefore, let us obediently await its instructions and guidelines for us.”

What “groups or organizations” can Pachuau have had in mind? Was it by any chance Degel Menashe? Certainly, we can claim part of the credit for the B’nei Menashe in Mizoram having begun to ask hard questions about Shavei. “Indeed,” Pachuau wrote, “there is an unhealthy amount of gossip and hearsay that is making inroads into our community. Which is why we must learn to shut our ears to all loose talk and anything that does not come from authorized spokespersons of the Shavei organization.”

Unhealthy? I can’t imagine a healthier development than the B’nei Menashe of Mizoram waking up to the fact that, for long years now, Shavei Israel has been lying to them, deceiving them, and manipulating them. At long last, this is beginning to be talked about.

The petition of the sixty is a sign of this. Sending it to The Jewish Agency while preferring to remain anonymous reveals both courage and fear: the courage to speak out against Shavei’s abuses and the fear of the retaliation this may bring down. But as courage grows, fear decreases. It has happened in Manipur. It’s happening now in Mizoram.

Yitzhak Thangjom

Regev Calls on Government to Fund Emergency B’nei Menashe Aliyah

(April 28) At a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem this week, our Newsletter has learned, Transportation Minister Miri Regev called on the government of Israel to make funds immediately available for the Aliyah of the 5,000 B’nei Menashe still in India. “The B”nei Menashe are our brothers and sisters,” she said in speaking of the need to bring them home to Israel as quickly as possible at a time when the Covid19 pandemic is raging in India.

Immigration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata

According to our sources, Regev’s proposal was seconded at the cabinet meeting by Immigration Minister Penina Tamano-Shata. “This is a life-and death matter,” Tamano-Shata reportedly told the cabinet members, expressing the fear that the pandemic may soon spiral out of control in the remote northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur where the country’s B’nei Menashe live.

So far, none of either state’s B’nei Menashe are known to have come down with the illness. Yet infection rates have been rising in both and there is concern that they may rocket as they have done all over the Indian subcontinent. “We don’t know what is going to happen,” our Newsletter was told by Lalam Hangshing, Chairman of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council. “But a total lockdown seems inevitable. It’s a question of when, not if.”

Regev has long been known for her support of the B’nei Menashe community, which she has expressed on many occasions. “For this, Degel Menashe is responsible,” says her secretary Avi Ovadia. “It was through your organization that she first got to know the community. Since then, she has come to care deeply about it.”

Regev did not, Ovadia said, present an actual plan for a large B’nei Menashe Aliyah. “Her purpose,” he stated, “was to bring the B’nei Menashe’s situation to the attention of the government. She did not go into numbers or timetables.”

Although Minister of Finance Yisrael Katz was present at the cabinet meeting, he did not take a stand on the possibility of an emergency allotment. Nor did the cabinet take any concrete decisions. “We do think, though,” Ovadia said, “that Minister Regev’s initiative has brought about a willingness to look more seriously into the matter on a cabinet level.”

Asked by our Newsletter how Regev, a high Likud figure and outspoken Netanyahu loyalist, planned to pursue her initiative if current coalition talks ended with her party no longer in power, Ovadia declined to reply. “Right now there’s no time to think about such things,” he said. “We’re still racing against the clock to form a right-wing government and it’s too early to say that we’ve failed. We’ll have to take it one step at a time.”

Degel Menashe Leadership Training Project is Launched

(April 28) The Degel Menashe leadership training project, a program designed to develop a new generation of leaders for the B’nei Menashe community of Israel, held its first workshop in Tel Aviv this week. The eleven young candidates selected to participate met with the program’s director Dr. Reuven Gal, a Degel Menashe board member, noted psychologist and author, and co-founder of Israel’s highly successful Institute for Quality Leadership, which he headed in its first years.

The purpose of the workshop, the first of a planned series, was, as Dr. Gal told our Newsletter, “to explore the concept of leadership and the potential for it in each of the participants.” Not everyone who thinks he or she has leadership abilities, he said, turns out to have them – and conversely, there may be those who discover abilities they never knew they had. “Once we identify the potential leaders in a group,” he explains, “it is possible to foster in them the skills and awareness that will enable them to assume leadership roles.”

Although he has conducted many such training programs in the past, the Degel Menashe project is a new experience for Dr. Gal. “Until now,” he told us, “I’ve worked with older populations that already had proven themselves, mostly junior executives and lower-echelon managers in organizations and businesses who were sent by their workplaces to improve their performance and prepare for higher levels of responsibility. This time, we’re starting from scratch. The young people in this program have not occupied positions of leadership before. Working together will be a challenge for both them and me.”

Responses to the workshop were enthusiastic. “I felt that it stirred up sleeping powers in me,” said Yitzhak Lhungdim, a social work student from Kiryat Arba. “It helped me to understand better what I want from my life and what creative forces I can bring to it.”

Alon Haokip from Nitzan, who is studying architecture, said that the workshop “made me think whether I have it in me to be a leader or not. I came without really knowing what I was coming to. I came away understanding myself better and with a clearer sense of what I can and can’t to influence and change.” Yosef Ngaihte of Kiryat Arba, a carpenter by trade, also thought that the workshop “taught me a great deal about myself, about what my strengths are, and about where I need to improve.” And Bat El Rently, a resident of Bet-El currently getting an M.A. in early education, was struck by “the interaction between Dr. Gal and the participants. The workshop was a moving experience,” she added. “It made me curious to get to know better what I’m capable of.”

Dr. Gal felt as positively about the group as it felt about him. “I, too, didn’t know what to expect,” he told us. “I was very impressed by those who took part. They were a highly responsive and articulate group.”

Hillel Halkin speaking to the workshop group

Before the workshop began, Degel Menashe chairman Hillel Halkin spoke briefly. Observing that the B’nei Menashe community in Israel lacked leadership, he said there were two reasons for his. One was common to all immigrant communities, in which the generation of parents and grandparents, in a new country whose language it does not speak and where it finds it difficult to function, quickly loses its authority. The second reason was the way the B’nei Menashe have been settled in Israel, in which everything has been decided for them by governmental and private organizations without consulting them. “This has led,” Halkin said, “to a community that has lost its sense of initiative and faith in itself. You,” he told the workshop, “can become the leaders who change this.”

At the four-hour workshop’s end, a buffet dinner was served. Asked whether they wished to continue in the program, the participants unanimously said that they did. “I think we all feel that we want to go on as a cohesive group that can make changes and break the cycle of unfulfilled potential that our community is trapped in,” said Bracha Haokip of Kiryat Arba, who is about to begin her studies for a degree in interior design. Ruby Gin, also from Kiryat Arba, agreed. “This meeting was gripping for us all,” she said. “It’s precisely what the young people of our community are in need of – a supportive environment that will help us to grow and develop. I hope there will be more workshops.”

Dinner at the workshop’s end

Reuven Gal promises that there will be. “We have to think of how to proceed from here,” he told us. “But we’ve started something that isn’t going to stop.”