Michael Freund Writes to Sarah Baite

(January 27) Shavei Israel chairman Michael Freund, our Newsletter has learned, has written a letter to Sarah Baite. The letter comes after several weeks in which the publicizing of the 2016 rape of Baite’s daughter by a Shavei Israel crony in Manipur has been sending shock waves through the B’nei Menashe community.

Dated January 21, 2022, Freund’s letter reached Baite three days later, having apparently been emailed to a Shavei Israel operative in Manipur and dropped off at her home by an anonymous courier. Its full text is in our Newsletter’s possession. It began:

“Dear Mrs. Baite,

“The other day I received a copy of a letter you had sent [the reference is to a 2018 appeal addressed by Baite to Israel’s Minister of Aliyah and Absorption Pnina Tamano-Shata] containing serious allegations about the shocking sexual assault on your daughter in July 2016.

Shavei Israel chairman, Michael Freund.

This is the first time that I have heard of these accusations, and they are simply horrifying. I urge you to contact all the relevant authorities so that they will investigate the matter thoroughly.”

As pointed out on this site [See our January 23 article “’This Is the First Time I have Heard of These Allegations: Is He To Be Believed?”], Freund’s claim never to have heard until now of the case of Sarah Baite and her daughter strains credulity. Evidently written to deflect mounting pressure on himself and Shavei Israel to explain their long-standing silence regarding the rape incident, his letter continued:

“As a parent myself, I cannot imagine how difficult and painful such an experience must have been, and my heart goes out to you and your family. If you require any assistance, legal or otherwise, we would be willing to help you. I tried several times to speak to you by phone and via other Bnei Menashe community members but have been unable to reach you.”

It is unclear what “several times” Freund had in mind. Before going into temporary hiding this week (see today’s article “Sarah Baite Leaves Churachandpur”), Baite, whose cell phone number is known to Shavei Israel, told our Newsletter that no attempted calls by Michael Freund were recorded on her phone and that the only calls she has received from Shavei officals were the threatening ones of the organization’s Manipur administrator Shlomo Sejalal Kipgen. (See our January 23 article) “Sarah Baite Files Rape Charges In Face of Shavei Intimidation.”

Sarah Baite.

From there, Freund’s letter proceeded to the subject, also raised by Baite in her appeal to Tamano-Shata, of her being denied Aliyah bv Shavei Israel. He wrote:

“I can assure you that no one from Shavei Israel has blocked your Aliya or removed you from any Aliya list. The fact is that the last time that a rabbinical delegation visited Manipur to make an Aliya list was in November 2015, which was 8 months before the incident with your daughter. We checked the list of Bnei Menashe to be interviewed by the rabbis in 2015 which was prepared by the Bnei Menashe community leadership at the time, and your name was never on it, so it cannot possibly have been removed at a later date.

“Shavei Israel does not decide who makes Aliya. This decision is entirely in the hands of the Chief Rabbinate and the Government of Israel. If it were up to us, all the Bnei Menashe would have been in Israel already! It is regrettable that certain people have led you to think otherwise.”

“What is regrettable,” says Degel Menashe executive director Yitzhak Thangjom, “is that Michael Freund, in typical fashion, totally distorted Sarah Baite’s letter to Pnina Tamano-Shata. Nowhere in it did Baite say that she had been removed from an Aliyah list. She said that, despite her many years in the B’nei Menashe community and her difficult situation as a widow with three children, she had never been invited to an Aliyah interview that might have placed her on such a list, as had been many people with less seniority in the community than hers. I find it hard to believe that Michael Freund actually read her letter to the minister.”

As for Freund’s claim that Shavei Israel does not decide who makes Aliyah, Thangjom declared, “it’s simply laughable. Every B’nei Menashe knows that the Aliyah lists are drawn up by Shavei after preliminary interviews conducted by it and that the Rabbinate then re-interviews the candidates who pass. Neither the Rabbinate nor the Israeli government are empowered to add a single person to the first-round list. Both can in principle take names off the list, though they have rarely done so in practice, but they never add any new names. That has been Shavei’s exclusive prerogative.”

On the same day that Freund’s letter to Sarah Baite was written, he posted a Facebook announcement to the B’nei Menashe community, much of it framed in the same language as the letter’s. In it he reiterated his prior ignorance of the rape incident and requested that anyone knowing about it send him “a full and detailed account [of it] as soon as possible.”

“And this,” commented Thangjom, “at the very time that Shavei Israel’s administrator in Manipur, Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen, has been threatening Sarah Baite withdraw her complaint to the police! How can Michael Freund expect to be taken seriously?”

B’nei Menashe Facebook reactions to Freund’s posting were mixed, with some discussants attributing the uproar over the rape case to a Degel Menashe attempt to undermine Shavei Israel and others angrily answering back. “I am fed up with this rape story,” wrote Yosef Khayim Menashe.

And Avidan Menashe wrote: “I feel bad for them [Sarah Baite and her daughter]. But then again, it is never good to bring back the past. It’s unfortunate that this [Sarah Baite’s] family is now being used by an organization to bring down another organization. They should have fought this case when it happened, five or six years ago. [Editor’s note: Degel Menashe was founded in December 2019.] If they’re only bringing up this matter now, they obviously do not have good intentions.”

To which Yonatan Haokip of Sderot replied:

“Just because it happened a long time ago doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be brought up now. Should God, by the same logic, forgive all sins after six years? She [Sarah Baite’s daughter] has been hurt very badly. It’s nothing to make light of.”

And Eliora Mate of Bet-She’an added:

“It’s unacceptable that such things should happen and just as much so that people should be angry at its being dredged up from the past. If it had happened in their own family, I’m sure they would have reacted violently. It’s selfish to think that other people should learn to bear pain that we ourselves would never agree to put up with. And what hurts even more is that this happened in our own Jewish community.”

Sarah Baite Leaves Churachandpur To Flee Threats of Violence

(January 27) Ten days after complaining to the Churachandpur police that she was being threatened by Shlomo Sejalal Kipgen, Shavei Israel’s Manipur administrator, Sarah Baite decided she had had enough. Although she had told B'nei Menashe Council officials the previous day that she wanted their help to answer a letter from Shavei Israel chairman Michael Freund (see today’s article “Michael Freund writes to Sarah Baite”), she left the city on Wednesday without informing them where she was going.

The most recent threats received by Baite came from a small underground faction, a splinter group within the Kuki nationalist movement in Manipur. Although Sehjalal had warned Baite that the main Kuki movement, the Kuki National Organization, would take action against her if she didn’t withdraw her charges regarding the 2016 rape of her daughter by a Shavei Israel crony, his K.N.O. contact, our Newsletter learned from its B.M.C. sources, were low-level personnel who were subsequently told by their K.N.O. superiors to leave Baite alone.

Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen

It was then that Sehjalal turned to the splinter group, which is known for its extremism. As related by Baite before leaving Churachandpur, its commander phoned her and said, “The stick is waiting for you. If you don’t want a beating, you had better get out of its way.”

Asked by the B.M.C. why she was certain that it was Sehjalal who was behind the commander’s call, Baite said, “Who else could it have been? The group wouldn’t have known I existed if Sehjalal hadn’t asked it to get involved. What interest in my case could it have had?”

Although the name of this group and of the commander who threatened Baite are known to our Newsletter, B.M.C. officials have asked us not to divulge them. Both the man and the group are dangerous and unpredictable, they said. The group’s stronghold is the Churachandpur district of Tuibong, in which Sarah Baite lived at the time of her daughter’s rape. That, indeed, was why Sehjalal turned to it.

A resumé of the last two weeks in Sarah Baite’s life makes matters clearer:

January 11: Sarah files an FIR, a First Information Report, with the police in which she details the circumstances of her daughter’s rape and gives the name of its perpetrator, a member of the B’nei Menashe community now living in Israel.

January 12: Sarah is summoned to a hearing by the Village Authority of Tuibong. The Authority’s headman, Satkhohao, had sought to arrange a reconciliation between her and the rapist when her daughter’s case was brought before him in 2016 after Sarah was pressured into not going to the police. At the January 12th meeting, at which Sehjalal and the faction commander are also present, Satkhohao asks Sarah why, despite the agreement reached in 2016, she decided to go the police after all. Sarah explains her reasons. That same day, after the hearing, Sehjalal Kipgen phones her several times, threatening her with K.N.O. retaliation if she does not withdraw her FIR.

January 13: The Village Authority meets again in Sarah’s absence. It rules in her favor and informs her that it has no objection to what she has done.

January 14: Sarah files a second FIR against Sehjalal, accusing him of intimidation.

January 20: The faction commander calls Sarah for the first time. In the week following the Village Authority’s January 14th decision, it would seem, he has been persuaded by Sehjalal not to abide by it.

January 24: Sarah receives a letter from Michael Freund, which she cannot read because she knows no English. She turns to officials of the B.M.C., who translate it for her and agree to translate her reply. Meanwhile, the faction commander continues to threaten her over the telephone. That evening she informs the B.M.C. that she is scared and is leaving Churachandpur the next day, without waiting to answer Freund’s letter. She will, she says, look for work in the rice fields in the countryside.

January 25: Sarah leaves Churachandpur in the morning without telling anyone where she is going.

No one knows when she will return. Michael Freund will have to wait for his answer until she does.

Sarah Baite Files Rape Charge In Face of Shavei Intimidation

(January 22) Bolstered by mention of her case on the floor of Israel’s Knesset by MK Miri Regev, and by the rallying to her side of many B’nei Menashe, Sarah Baite overcame her fears and went to the police on January 11 to file a complaint. In it she charged a fellow member of the B’nei Menashe community with close connections to the Manipur leadership of Shavei Israel with the 2016 rape of her then 8-year-old daughter.

Since the rape’s occurrence over five years ago, Baite, a 43-year-old widow and mother of three, has undergone heavy pressure not to file charges with the police. [See “Sarah Baite Tells Her Story” in our December 30 Newsletter.] Shortly after the incident took place, she was expelled from Churachandpur’s Beit Shalom synagogue, Shavei Israel’s Manipur headquarters, for allegedly appealing for help to a Gentile authority, the headman of the Churachandpur neighborhood of Tuibong in which she lived. (Each of Churachandpur’s many neighborhoods, all formerly independent villages, has a chief with quasi-legal powers.) Subsequently subjected to the additional punishment of being barred from Shavei Israel’s Aliyah lists, she wrote a letter in 2020 to Israel’s minister of immigration Pnina Tamano-Shata, pleading for intervention on her behalf. No answer from the ministry was received. In a December 22 Knesset debate with Regev on the subject of B’nei Menashe Aliyah [see our December 23 story, “Regev, Tamano-Shata, in Knesset Showdown”], Tamano-Shata claimed never to have seen Baite’s letter.

When Baite walked into the Crimes Against Women division of Churachandpur’s police station two weeks ago, she handed the officer on duty, a Sub-inspector in the department, a formal accusation that read (in keeping with its policy to date, our Newsletter is printing only the first letter of the accused’s name):

“I, the undersigned, would like to inform you that an individual, Mr. K--------, raped my daughter (8 years old at the time of the rape), at knifepoint at his residence, L. Semoul Village, at around 6 p.m. on 15th July when she was at his house playing with his children.

“I would like to request you to kindly investigate the matter and if possible book the culprit with the appropriate Indian penal code and serve us justice so that I and my daughter will live in peace.”

A police investigation will now be launched. While the accused rapist lives in Israel, having made Aliya under Shavei Israel’s auspices in 2018, witnesses able to testify to events surrounding the crime are still in Manipur. Moreover, Israeli law makes provision for an accused’s being tried in Israel if the country in which the crime was committed does not request extradition.

Sarah Baite (left) and Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen (right)

On June 12, the day after her visit to the police station, Baite began receiving telephone calls from Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen, Shavei Israel’s chief administrator in Manipur, threatening her that, “for your own good,” she had best withdraw her complaint. After several such conversations, Baite decided to record the next one. Translated from Kuki, here is a transcript of a section of it:

Shlomo Sehjolal Kipgen: It seems you’ve been a very active woman.

Sarah Baite: What have I done?

SSK: I’ve been hearing about you.

SB: What have you heard?

SSK: Oh, I don’t know. Nothing much. I went to the home of Satkhohao [the headman of Tuibong] and was told that you had been there.

SB: I went to his home twice, but he wasn’t in. Did you meet with him?

SSK: Yes, I met with him.

SB: Satkhohao was the headman where I used to live. He was the one who dealt with my case. That’s why I went to look for him now.

SSK: The matter will be discussed by the K. N.O. [the Kuki National Organization] tomorrow.

SB: The K. N. O. is discussing it?

SSK: Yes. They know there was an FIR [a “First Information Report,” i.e., a complaint] filed in your name at the police station.

SB: Oh.

SSK: You did go there, didn’t you?

SB: Yes, I did.

SSK: I thought the case was all over.

[The remainder of the conversation dealt with Sarah Baite’s 2016 expulsion from Beit Shalom.)

The Kuki National Organization referred to by Sehjalal Kipgen is a semi-underground body founded in 1988 with the aim of carving out a Kuki-majority state within the Indian Union and has an armed wing known as the K.N.A. or Kuki National Army. Exerting a powerful influence in Kuki-populated areas of Manipur, it is often turned to for settling intra-Kuki disputes and its decisions are expected to be obeyed. Most Manipur Kukis choose not to run afoul of it.

Clearly, Shavei Israel’s chief administrator in Manipur was seeking to frighten Sarah Baite into withdrawing her police complaint by letting her know that he had K.N.O. contacts that could endanger her. Baite, however, refused to be intimidated. Two days later, on January 14th, she returned to the police station with a new complaint, this time against Sehjalal Kipgen, that said in part:

“I, the undersigned, would like to inform you that an individual, Mr. Sehjalal Kipgen, has been harassing me on account of the FIR which I have lodged against my daughter’s rapist on 11th January at your office….I would like to request you to kindly take stern action against Sehjalal Kipgen so that my FIR is not swept under the carpet and I and my daughter are served justice according to the law of the land.”

Further developments can soon be expected.