Degel Menashe Board Looks Back and Ahead

(August 5) Degel Menashe’s board of directors convened at the end of July for its semi-annual meeting, which was held by Zoom. In attendance were board chairman Hillel Halkin, Degel Menashe’s executive director Yitzhak Thangjom, and board members Sabra Minkus, Reuven Gal, Bat-El Rently, and Elkhanan Fanai.

Hillel Halkin

The meeting was opened by the board’s chairman, who spoke of his satisfaction with Degel Menashe’s accomplishments in its year-and-a-half of existence. “We have proven,” Halkin said, “that we are capable of carrying on a wide range of activities for the B’nei Menashe community.” With the continued help of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico and a large grant recently received from a charitable source that prefers to remain anonymous, Degel Menashe, Halkin stated, is now in a financial position to carry on with these activities and add to them.

Halkin also spoke about Degel Menashe’s campaign to break the monopoly on B’nei Menashe Aliyah granted until now to Shavei Israel and to put an end to the abuses this has led to. “Our intensive lobbying with the Ministry of Immigration and the Jewish Agency,” he said, “has resulted in the Agency’s entering into an agreement with Shavei whereby the two organizations will share joint responsibility for the Aliyah of the B’nei Menashe in the future. This is not all we had hoped for, which was to have the matter taken out of Shavei’s hands entirely. Yet if the Agency keeps its promise to monitor Shavei’s administration of Aliyah and ensure that it is fair and transparent from now on, we can consider it a victory. Our job will be to be the watchdog that barks when promises aren’t kept.”

Executive director Thangjom then gave a rundown of some of Degel Menashe’s activities in 2020-21.

Some of the major ones were:

Yitzhak Thangjom

• Four rounds of food relief to Covid-19-affected B’nei Menashe in Manipur and Mizoram. All in all, some 50 tons of rice, oil, pulses, and other essentials were distributed to nearly 1,000 needy families.

• A scholarship program for young B’nei Menashe in Israel who wish to pursue professional studies in an academic framework. To date, 19 grants totaling IS 80,000 have been awarded.

• A leadership training project under the direction of Dr. Reuven Gal, a prominent psychologist and Degel Menashe board member. Designed to prepare young B’nei Menashe for leadership roles in their community, the project kicked off with a workshop last spring and is slated to continue in collaboration with the Israeli Institute for Quality Leadership.

• An oral history project involving the interviewing and recording of the personal stories of dozens of elderly members of the B’nei Menashe community in Israel. Twelve of these interviews are soon to appear in a book called Lives of the Children of Manasia, put out by the Gefen Publishing House of Jerusalem.

• Hebrew education in India. In partnership with the B’nei Menache Council of Manipur, Degel Menashe opened a Hebrew school in Manipur’s second largest city of Churachandpur last May that had to be temporarily shut down because of Covid-19. It will be re-opened as soon the ending of the Covid lockdown permits. A similar school in Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl is also planned. Degel Menashe has been conducting talks with the Mumbai branch of ORT, the global Jewish education network, in regard to a possible partnership in both schools.

• Ties with the Indian embassy in Israel. Degel Menashe has developed an excellent relationship with the embassy and its top officials. The embassy has asked Degel Menashe to represent the B’nei Menashe in the planning of a year-long celebration of the 75th anniversary of India and Israel’s independence and of the close relations between the two countries. In addition, the embassy has offered Degel Menashe use of its new Indian Cultural Centre in Tel Aviv for the holding of B’nei Menashe cultural events.

• The Degel Menashe Website. Updated weekly to keep readers abreast of developments in the B’nei Menashe communities of India and Israel, our Website has over 1,000 regular subscribers and many more occasional visitors.

In the discussion that followed, board member Elkhanan Fanai suggested that Degel Menashe sponsor an annual B’nei Menashe sports and cultural heritage festival in Israel that would bring the scattered community together once a year and strengthen its identity and pride in itself. The idea met with unanimous approval and Elkhanan and Bat-El Rently were appointed to a committee that would further the idea.

Elkhanan Fanai

Bat-El Rently

At the meeting’s end, Hillel Halkin announced his decision to step down as board chairman at the end of this calendar year. Although, Halkin said, he would continue to be an active board member, he wished to cut back on his organizational commitments and make way for a younger leadership drawn from the B’nei Menashe community. Halkin recommended that Yitzhak Thangjom be chosen as his successor. “I’m confident,” he said, “that I’ll be passing on to him an organization in good shape that will continue to grow and expand in the years ahead.”

Some Show Bravery, Others Don’t, As Jankholun Kipgen Is Buried and Mourned

(July 29) Jangkholun Kipgen, the B’nei Menashe’s first Covid-19 fatality, was laid to rest and mourned this past week in his native village of Gamgiphai in central Manipur. Kipgen was buried in a grave dug on his family property after the B’nei Menashe community of Gamgiphai, under apparent orders from Shavei Israel, denied him a place in its cemetery. It did so in retribution for Jangkholun’s son Michael, currently hospitalized for Covid-19 too, having volunteered to take part in Degel Menashe’s Summer 2020 emergency food campaign that Shavei fought against tooth-and-nail. Ever since then, the Kipgens have been ostracized by the Gamgiphai community and barred from participating in its Jewish life.

Not only was Jangkholun denied burial with his fellow B”nei Menashe but the Gamgiphai community refused to let his family say Kaddish for him in its Beit Shalom synagogue during the Shiva week. “The irony and hypocrisy of it is staggering,” Ohaliav Haokip, general secretary of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council, commented to our Newsletter. “The same people who kicked Michael, and his wife, children, brothers, sisters, and parents out of their community had previously filled their bellies with the rice that he helped to distribute! What sin did Michael Kipgen commit by volunteering to feed his own people?”

Jangkholun Kipgen passed away early on the morning of July 23 at the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Imphal. “I rushed there as soon as I heard the news,” relates Ohaliav Haokip. “We had to act quickly. It was Friday and Shabbat was just hours away. When an ambulance came to transfer the body from the hospital to the mortuary, there was no one to help. Not a soul from Gamgiphai was there. After a while, some B’nei Menashe from the Beit-El synagogue in Imphal arrived. Even then, it wasn’t easy to get the bureaucratic paperwork done and it was even harder to find a coffin, because shops were closed due to the Covid lockdown. We ran from place to place until we finally found a plain black box and headed back with it to the morgue. Oved Kipgen, Jangkholun’s son-in-law, and I put on protective Covid suits, placed the body in the coffin, and nailed it shut. It was afternoon by the time we got to Gamgiphai for the funeral.”

Ngamsei Haokip, chairman of the Beit-El synagogue, was not with the group from Imphal because he was indisposed that day. Still, he encouraged whoever could to join it. “It’s our duty to help every B”nei Menashe however we can,” he told our correspondent. “We worship the same God, so why should some of us be treated differently from others? If one of us thinks someone else has done wrong, it’s up to God, not us, to be the judge.”

The group from Imphal was joined at the funeral by a second contingent from the nearby village of Phalbung, one of the few in Manipur whose B’nei Menashe have refused to submit to Shavei Israel’s authority. Together, the two groups were enough for the minyan needed for the Kaddish to be said. “We did what was the least we could do,“ said the Phalbung’s leader, Yechiel Haokip. “I was very disturbed to hear of the way the Kipgens were treated. Helping to distribute rice last year was a mitzvah. Whoever was involved in it should be praised, not punished.”

Since Michael Kipgen was not permitted by the hospital to attend the funeral and say the Kaddish for his father, it was recited by Jangkholun’s son-in-law Oved Lun Kipgen, also a resident of Gamgiphai. In talking to us, Oved tried not to be too hard on his fellow villagers. “As the funeral was underway,” he said, “I could see people from Gamgiphai watching from a distance. I’m sure they must have shared our grief and wanted to join us, but they were afraid to bring down the wrath of Shavei by showing sympathy. Some approached us secretly afterwards and advised us to ask Shavei for forgiveness so that things could be patched up. But what is it we need to be forgiven for for? Feeding hungry people?"

The B’nei Menashe community of Phalbung also invited the mourning family to pray in Phalbung’s synagogue during the days of the Shiva. “It was kind of it,” says Oved. “But even though Phalbung is just four or five kilometers away, we couldn’t go there on a daily basis because of the lockdown.”

The Kipgen family rose from its Shiva at the week’s end, with Michael still recovering in the hospital. “I don’t know which hurt more,” he told us, “the behavior of the Gamgiphai community or missing my own father’s funeral. My only hope now is that I’ll be able to take my mother and the rest of my family to Israel one day. Is that too much to ask?”

If Shavei Israel has its way, it may be.

Shutting Jangkholun’s coffin.

The coffin sets out for Gamgiphai.

Leaving the mortuary in the rain for Gamgiphai.

Digging the grave in Covid suits.

The coffin is about to be lowered.

Jangkholun Kipgen at rest.

After the funeral.

Kipgen family sitting Shiva.

Sitting Shiva. Foreground (with glasses): Jangkholun’s wife Sarah Hatlam Kipgen. Left rear: Oved Lun Kipgen. At right (wearing turban): Oved’s wife, Jangkholun’s daughter Khanna Hoineo Kipgen.

First B’nei Menashe Dies of Covid-19

(July 23) The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in its first B’nei Menashe fatality with the death Thursday night of Jangkholun Zvulun Kipgen, 69, of the Manipuri village of Gamgiphai between Imphal and Kangpokpi. Kipgen was the father of Michael Kipgen, who has also fallen ill with the Corona virus. [See “Letter from Manipur” in today’s Newsletter.) Jangkholun passed away in the Regional Institute of Medical Science hospital in Imphal, to which he was taken a few days earlier after suffering from shortness of breath.

Jangkholun Kipgen was born in Leikot, a village not far from Gamgiphai, whose Jewish community he joined in 2015. A practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, he also farmed and owned rice fields. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Hatlam Kipgen, and three children, Khanna Hoineo, Mercy, and Michael.

No announcement of Jangkholun’s death was made by Gamgiphai’s B’nei Menashe community and only a few of its members, our Newsletter has learned, have expressed their condolences. The Kipgen family was expelled from the Shavei Israel-controlled B’nei Menashe community of Gamgiphai a little less than a year ago in retaliation by Shavei for Michael’s participation in Degel Menashe’s emergency food distribution campaign last summer. Arriving at the local Beit Shalom synagogue for services on the holiday of Simchat Torah, the Kipgens were told, scant weeks after the synagogue’s officials and congregation had taken the food that Michael helped distribute, that they were no longer welcome. Since then they were barred from participating in the village’s Jewish life.

“The B’nei Menashe of Manipur have lost one of their heroes,” declared Ohaliav Haokip, general secretary of the B’nei Menashe Council, upon hearing of Jangkholun’s death. “He was steadfast in fighting alongside the BMC against the hypocrites who abuse us all.”

Denied access to the Jewish cemetery of Gamgiphai, Jangkholun Kipgen was buried on his property in a private ceremony.

Jangkholun Kipgen is laid to rest.

Yehi Zikhro Barukh. May his memory be a blessing.