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.

160 B’nei Menashe Immigrants Reach Israel, Covid19 Strands, Separates, 115 in New Delhi

(May 31) As 160 B’nei Menashe from the state of Manipur landed at Ben-Gurion Airport today, another 115 found themselves initially confined to their rooms in a New Delhi hotel after they or their family members had tested positive for Covid19. Then, on Thursday afternoon, after spending a day, as one of them told our Newsletter, “staring at the walls” of their hotel rooms, all of the positives were removed by the Delhi police to a Covid isolation center. Since few of them speak Hindi or English, they can be expected to have difficulty communicating with the center’s personnel. It is not clear how many if any of them have developed Covid symptoms, and at the time of this article’s posting, a pall of uncertainty hung over them all.

The Hotel Good Times reception desk

Under the auspices of the Jerusalem-based organization Shavei Israel, which has been entrusted with the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah, the entire group of 275 flew last week in three contingents from Manipur to New Delhi, where it was put up at the Hotel Good Times in the city’s center, near the Karol Bagh market. While there it was sent, as per Israeli government regulations for all travelers to Israel, for Covid19 tests.

Allegedly, the 275 had been proven Covid-free before leaving Manipur, where Shavei Israel required each family to test negative before boarding the flight from Imphal to New Delhi. Yet on May 30, several days after the last of the three contingents reached Delhi, Shavei’s Information Secretary Eliezer Baite announced that 115 of the group “have been afflicted with an illness that is common these days” and will be kept in isolation for two weeks in India. “This,” declared Baite, “is God’s will.”

Baite’s announcement was inaccurate. Not all 115 had tested positive, nor, at this moment, is the exact number of those who did known. Many who did not apparently stayed behind to remain with infected family members.

How a supposedly zero rate of Covid19 in the group turned into a high incidence within a few days is unclear. One rumor making the rounds is that a large B ‘nei Menashe family already carrying the illness boarded the Imphal -New Delhi flight with erroneous or counterfeit test results and quickly passed it on to others. So far, however, there has been no corroboration of this.

Leaving Imphal for New Delhi

The immigrants remaining in the Hotel Good Times, our Newsletter has learned, are being looked after by Shavei Israel’s travel agent in India, Malka Moses. As far as is known, no Shavei officials have visited them or come to their aid, nor has Shavei issued any clarification regarding them. Neither has any been provided by Israel’s Ministry of Immigration. A senior ministry official told our Newsletter that the ministry would act vis-à-vis the detained group in accordance with Ministry of Health guidelines and that he could release no further information.

The Jerusalem Gate Hotel

Meanwhile, the 160 olim who arrived in Israel Thursday afternoon were bused directly from the airport to the Jerusalem Gate Hotel at the western entrance to nation’s capital. There they will spend two weeks in quarantine before beginning the course that will lead to their rabbinical conversion to Judaism. All were reported to be in good health.