I’ve been to 100 countries— so I’m a member of the Century Club… but not so many in Africa. In Africa, I’ve been to Morocco over a dozen times (starting in 1969), Egypt, Senegal and Mali. Roland always wants to go to Africa— and any other place that’s off the beaten track. But I’m 75 and I’d rather go to easy places— Paris, Spain, Italy, Istanbul, Thailand. He always wants to go to Ethiopia. We’re going to India soon and he tried talking me into going through Addis Ababa. I would’ve gone in my 30s or 40s or 50s. But now… I’d rather spend a day at the Pompidou Center or at the Taj Mahal.
Anyway, sorry for the detour down memory lane. Speaking of which… When the 50s turned into the 60s I was walking down Avenue P to PS 197 everyday with my friend Stuie Cohen. Too bad I didn’t know Bernie back then. He lived in the neighborhood too but he was a few years ahead of me. There was a tiny shuel we’d pass. I had my bar mitzvah there. One day one of the elders asked me if Stuie and I would come a little earlier and help them make a minyon-- the quorum of 10 Jews (13 or older) that Jews needed for a prayer session that God would listen to. He offered to pay us $20 each a week, an unheard of sum for either of us and we agreed. Even with us they had trouble making a minyon sometimes. They would use the janitor, a Black guy from Alabama. I asked the rabbi about that one time and he told me the Black guy was a Jewish Ethiopian, which— being a stamp collector and geography buff— I found fascinating. I asked the janitor about Ethiopia once. That’s when I found out he was from Alabama and that he wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have a clear idea about where Ethiopia is.
But the idea of Black Jews from Ethiopia still fascinated me and I tried learning everything I could about them. There was no Internet then and doing research was harder, but I read what I could find at the public library. Yesterday, though, I read a NY Times column by Bret Stephens, Israel’s Unfinished Exodus Story about how Israel is shutting the door on Ethiopian Jews— despite the fact that there still between 9,000 and 12,000 of them still practicing Judaism there— and despite the fact that Israel is open— or supposed to be open— to all Jews… “a refuge for the vulnerable and a beacon for the oppressed.”
I kept crying as I watched this video footage of the evacuation 32 years ago:
“The Ethiopian aliyah,” wrote Stephens, “is in many ways one of the most inspiring episodes in Israel’s modern history— and, in some ways, among the most frustrating. There’s a rich historical debate as to whether the Beta Israel descended from ancient Israelites or were a more recent breakaway sect of Ethiopian Christians who decided to return to the old-time religion. Whichever way, it’s an ancient community. There are reliable contemporaneous accounts of the Beta Israel from the 1480s, and the community began to suffer from state-sanctioned religious persecution from the 17th century onward, including a prohibition on owning land. This led Ethiopian Jews to take up occupations like blacksmithing and pottery— an association with fire that helped further stoke anti-Jewish bigotries about their connection to evil. In 1973, Ovadia Yosef, who was then the chief Sephardic rabbi, ruled that the Beta Israel were Jews who should be brought to Israel. Seven years later, the Mossad (with crucial U.S. help, notably from George H.W. Bush) began bringing Ethiopian Jews to Sudan and then exfiltrating them to Israel in two large operations, Moses (1983-85) and Solomon (1991).”
Most immigration stories to Israel are hard, but the Beta Israel story is harder than any other. Part of this is due to an uncomfortable but unmissable fact: Most Ethiopians arrive in Israel from exceptionally isolated and impoverished circumstances. Unlike, say, Jewish newcomers from Kyiv or Moscow, they don’t come with Ph.D.s in mathematics, lacking only fluency in Hebrew to transfer their skills to Israel’s high-tech economy.
For Ethiopian men especially, accustomed to traditional patriarchal family structures, the move to Israel can be brutal: They struggle with Hebrew, rarely manage to get anything better than janitorial work and are silently humiliated by wives with better-paying domestic work and daughters who are quick to embrace Israel’s expansive social freedoms.
What about that second uncomfortable but unmissable fact— namely, that they are Black? Liat Demoze, who also came to Israel from Ethiopia as a child in the 1980s, told me she “didn’t feel like I was being discriminated against. I did feel like I was different.” Israeli officials like to stress the investment they put into every Ethiopian immigrant, including yearslong stays in absorption centers and enormous subsidies for mortgage payments.
Yet there is also a heavy dose of paternalism in mainstream Israeli attitudes toward Beta Israel, reminiscent of the mistreatment and social discrimination faced by Jews who came from Arab lands in the 1950s…
A more telling example is the attitude that many Israelis have toward those who remain in Ethiopia. For the most part, they are relatives of a secondary group of Ethiopian Jews, widely known as the Falash Mura (though the term is considered derogatory within the Ethiopian community), whose forebears were converted to Christianity by European missionaries in the 19th century but who later returned to their ancestral faith. In 2002, Rabbi Yosef also declared that they deserved to be treated as Jews on grounds that their previous conversion to Christianity had been made under duress.
That ruling allowed thousands of additional Ethiopians to come, bringing the total Israeli population of Ethiopian-born Jews to around 95,000, plus 70,000 or so of their Israel-born progeny. For a state that is constantly worried about shoring up the percentage of Jews living within its borders, this ought to be seen as an unqualified blessing.
But not to all Israelis. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right firebrand who is now Israel’s finance minister, responded to a 2018 Knesset decision to admit an additional 1,000 Ethiopians as if it were a terrifying opening to unlimited immigration of undesirables from Africa. “This practice will develop into a demand to bring more and more family members not included in the Law of Return,” he said, referring to the Israeli law that grants automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. “It will open the door to an endless extension of a family chain from all over the world.”
The sentiment, which has also been pointed at Russians with tenuous Jewish ties, is shared among more liberal-minded Israelis, in part because previous Israeli governments have declared the conclusive finale of Ethiopian Jewry, most recently in 2013. “I was there twice to cover the emigration of the ‘last Jews’ to Israel, and each time thousands more appeared,” one seasoned Israeli journalist told me, asking not to be named to speak frankly.
It is almost surely the case that there are at least some who are simply taking advantage of the social services (including free food) provided to the Jewish communities in Addis and the provincial city of Gondar. The prospect of a ticket to a comparatively rich country is a bright lure, though it’s hard not to guffaw at the thought that the same right-wing Israeli politicians who fear they might take in a handful of Ethiopian freeloaders seem to have fewer compunctions at the vastly more costly freeloading that is the stock in trade of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox politicians.
just as you find that a lot of Hindus are full of hate for islamics... who are of the same tribe or area, you'll find that a lot of jews will be full of hate for other jews who don't look or talk like them. This is a "feature" of the human genome -- xenophobia. Studies have confirmed this for almost a century.
"a minyon-- the quorum of 10 Jews (13 or older) that Jews needed for a payer session that God would listen to."
... um... this is so idiotic. you have a god that is deaf unless there are 10 voices (of the proper age and faith)?
no wonder your god did nothing about the holocaust. those jew…