Heads of Degel Menashe, Jewish Agency, Meet to Discuss Changes in B’nei Menashe Aliyah

(January 14) In a meeting held on January 11, senior figures in the Jewish Agency and Degel Menashe discussed the issue of B’nei Menashe Aliyah. Both sides agreed on the need to quicken its pace and to transfer responsibility for it from the private organization that is now in charge of it to a public body. Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog, who presided over the meeting, expressed his interest in the Agency’s assuming such a role.

Taking part in the meeting on behalf of the Agency, besides Herzog, were Shay Felber, Director of the Agency’s Immigration and Absorption Unit; Benny Lidsky of its Conversion Department; and Arielle de Porto, head of the Aliyah Division for Special Operations. Representing Degel Menashe were its Executive Director Isaac Thangjom, its Chairman of the Board Hillel Halkin, and Board member Reuven Gal. Originally planned for the Jewish Agency’s offices in Jerusalem, the meeting was rescheduled as a Zoom session due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

The Zoom meeting from Isaac Thangjom’s computer. From left to right, top row: Hillel Halkin, Isaac Thangjom, recording secretary Tal Gelbart. Middle row: Reuven Gal, Benny Lidsky, Isaac Herzog. Bottom row: Arielle de Porto, Shay Felber

The session culminated months of contacts between Degel Menashe and two high Jewish Agency officials, Aliyah Director Felber and recently retired Deputy Chairman David Breakstone. On the day preceding it, January 10, Halkin, Thangjom, Felber, Lidsky, and de Porto participated in a preparatory conference call in which Halkin reviewed the main points of a Degel Menashe position paper that had been previously submitted to the Agency. These called for:

1. The abolition of the administrative monopoly on the B’nei Menashe ‘s Aliyah that has, for the past two decades, been granted to a Jerusalem-based NGO.

2. The full delegation to either the Jewish Agency, the Ministry of Immigration and Integration, or a joint body composed of both of the task of bringing the approximately 6,000 remaining B’nei Menashe in India to Israel and arranging for their initial absorption.

3. The speeding up of this process so that it can be brought to completion within a period of three to five years. It is time, the Degel Menashe paper argued, to end the system in place for the past 30 years whereby small groups of B’nei Menashe have come to Israel in dribs and drabs with long intervals between one group and the next.

4. The creation of an alternate channel for B’nei Menashe Aliyah that would allow individuals and families in the community to immigrate to Israel on their own if they had the wherewithal to do so.

In the discussion that followed, Aliyah Director Felber endorsed the position paper’s first three points while being skeptical about the feasibility of Point 4. It was therefore agreed not to raise it in the meeting with Herzog the next day. Felber concurred with the view that it was undesirable to drag out an Aliyah process whose prolongation only caused continued uncertainty and distress to B’nei Menashe families in both India and Israel. He attached great importance to the fact, brought to his attention by Degel Menashe, that the B’nei Menashe community in Israel possessed three fully ordained rabbis who have not until now been involved in its Aliyah. The three, he felt, could play a key role in the future.

At the Zoom session the next day, Halkin and Felber were again the main speakers. After listening to both, and asking the other participants for their opinions, Jewish Agency Chairman Herzog stated his agreement that the privatization of an entire community’s Aliyah was highly irregular and should not be allowed to continue. He expressed his belief that the Jewish Agency was best equipped to take over the administration of the B’nei Menashe’s Aliyah and his intention of taking up the matter with Immigration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata in the days ahead.

David Breakstone

Asked to comment on the meeting, former Deputy Chairman David Breakstone , who was instrumental in putting the B’nei Menashe on the Jewish Agency’s agenda, spoke of his satisfaction with what took place. Breakstone agreed with Shay Felber that the three B’nei Menashe rabbis could be an important part of the process. “The real stumbling block here,” he told our Newsletter, “is Israel’s Ministry of the Interior. The Jewish Agency can only help bring B’nei Menashe to Israel if the Government makes a decision to allow their entry, and this calls for the Interior Ministry’s agreement. The ministry, in turn, has been controlled by the [Sephardic religious] Shas Party, which has been antipathetic to unconventional cases of Jewish identity like the B’nei Menashe’s. If the B’nei Menashe’s own rabbis can be mobilized for the cause, and if their standing is recognized by Shas rabbis, they have a key role to play.”

Reuven Gal

Degel Menashe board member Re’uven Gal was also happy with the meeting. “I think,” he said, “that all of us Degel Menashe participants felt that we were given a sympathetic hearing and good reason to hope that a new chapter in the B’nei Menashe ‘s Aliyah is about to be opened.” Gal was impressed by how much the Jewish Agency’s Chairman knew about the B’nei Menashe community and added: “You could see by the questions he asked that he was really curious about it.”

At the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, Almog Moskowitz, Senior Advisor to the Minister, assured our Website that he was being kept fully abreast of the developments. “I’m in close contact with the Jewish Agency in everything regarding the B’nei Menashe,” he said, “and I was informed immediately of the content of your January 11 meeting.”

No One Comes or Goes in Nordiya

(January 14) A month after their arrival in Israel on December 17, the 252 B’nei Menashe immigrants in the Nordiya absorption center near Netanya have seen no more of the country than they did from the windows of the El Al plane that brought them. Nor, for that matter, has the country, or even their close relatives, seen anything of them.

In part, this can be put down to circumstance. Subjected to a two-week Covid-19 quarantine upon reaching the center, the immigrants were barely done with it when a national lockdown was imposed. Yet this does not explain the security guards at the center’s gates who have instructions to let no one but Shavei Israel personnel enter or exit, or the strict orders that the immigrants have been given to talk to no one but their immediate families on their cell phones. There have been reports of relatives coming to visit and being turned away or of shouted conversations being held with them through the gate. Finding out what is happening at the Center, our Newsletter has discovered, is only slightly easier than investigating conditions in North Korea.

What we have been able to learn is this:

B'nei Menashe immigrants room at Nordiya

Most of the immigrants are housed six to a room, in three pairs of bunk beds. Their day begins with breakfast, which is served in two messes, one for the olim from Manipur and the other for those from Mizoram. (All meals are prepared by a catering service and served by volunteers from the group.) Afterwards, at 8a.m., come morning prayers, followed by lessons in Judaism until lunchtime, with intermittent breaks. After lunch are more lessons until it is time for evening prayers and dinner. After dinner and before bedtime, the immigrants are sometimes given a talk on Israeli life or other subjects by Shavei International Coordinator Tsvi Khaute. There are no organized recreational activities and nowhere to buy drinks or snacks.

The teachers at Nordiya are all Shavei staff. None are known to be deeply versed in Jewish history, law, or tradition. Although the B’nei Menashe community in Israel numbers several rabbis, as well as a number of teachers authorized by the Rabbinate to instruct their communities, none is employed at the absorption center.

Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the immigrants attend giyyur or conversion classes to prepare them for the rabbinical court they will have to face. Several conversions, announced by Shavei on a Facebook page, have already taken place. Yet the converts, it is said, will have to remain for two more months at Nordiya like everyone else. Hopefully, by then they will have gotten a first glimpse of Israel, and we, a first glimpse of them.

B'nei Menashe at Nordiya before rabbinical conversion court

You Don’t Have To Be Donald Trump

(January 14) You don’t have to be Donald Trump to cry “Fake!” when you lose an election.

Shavei Israel’s new Manipur Administrator Sehjalal (Shlomo) Kipgen did the same this week when he sought to convene a rump session of the state’s B’nei Menashe congregations in Churachandpur on January 10 in order to overturn the elections held for the B’nei Menashe Council last November 5.

Sehjalal’s maneuver was the most recent in a series of Shavei moves designed first to thwart and then to reverse the November vote. At the start, Shavei opposed the holding of BMC elections and threatened to retaliate against anyone taking part in them. When this failed, it ran its own candidate, who was none other than Sehjalal Kipgen, for BMC Chairman, saw him go down to defeat, and tried to form a breakaway organization. When that, too, led nowhere, Shavei switched to its latest stratagem, namely, to call for new elections on the grounds that those conducted in November were invalid.

The current Shavei stratagem was launched on January 5, when former BMC General Secretary Seimang (Yitzhak) Haokip, who did not run for re-election in November, sent out a letter on BMC stationary that fraudulently represented him as still the holder of his office. Declaring that the November balloting was not “free and fair,” and was “thrown into chaos and confusion by people with bad intentions,” the letter called for a revote.

Seimang Itzkhak Haokip's fraudulent letter misrepresenting him as BMC General Secretary

What “bad intentions” those who pushed for the November election had had apart from the wish to restore to the BMC the independent voice Shavei had deprived it of, Seimang did not say. Nor did he explain what was “chaotic and confusing” about a vote that took place calmly after an open debate in which all 24 of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe congregations participated and whose democratic nature not even the losers challenged at the time.

The BMC's FIR

On January 8, the BMC’s currently elected General Secretary, Ohaliav Haokip, filed a First Information Report or complaint to the Churachandpur police, accusing Seimang of having “impersonated and misused” the BMC’s letterhead with the help of Sehjalal Kipgen. Meanwhile, the rump session convened by Seimang met at Beit Shalom synagogue in Churachandpur on the 10th. The results were disappointing for the organizers. Delegates from only 7 of the 24 congregations bothered to show up, among them none from the larger ones, including Beit Shalom itself. No one came from Imphal, Kangpokpi, or Moreh. Of the 15 congregations in the Churachandpur area, only Monglienphai, Zohar, Boljol, Sijang, and Patlen were represented.

Ohaliav Haokip

Despite the poor turnout, the rump faction announced its intent of staging a new election on January 25. “Although there is clearly no popular desire for it,” Ohaliav Haokip told our Newsletter, “Sehjalal and his associates are campaigning aggressively by all available means. There have made both promises and threats. Rumors are circulating of people being told that the new election’s supporters will be given priority on the Aliyah lists that Shavei draws up.”

The Churachandpur police, Ohaliav says, have been slow to act on the case. Consequently, the elected BMC has engaged a lawyer to request a stay order from Churachandpur’s District Magistrate’s Court. Such an order would forbid the rump faction from holding an illegal BMC election and would enjoin Seimang, Sehjalal, and others from using BMC stationary or posing as BMC officials. Once the necessary papers are filed, the court’s decision will be awaited.