Ethiopian Jews in Israel – Gondaronline.com

Israel: Ethiopian Aliya is not over

JPost
By JEROME M. EPSTEIN

Although some have declared the Ethiopian Aliya over, it is clear that it is not complete.

Although some have declared the Ethiopian Aliya over, it is clear that it is not complete. It is true that although most of those who left their Ethiopian villages and registered in either 2003 or 2010 to make aliya have come to Israel, but there are still approximately 3,000 in Gondar and 1,800 in the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, who are desperately waiting.

These are not people who recently decided to leave Ethiopia. Their dream has shaped the mission of their lives for many years.

While some may not be Jews based on standards of halacha, these are people who live as Jews, study as Jews, pray as Jews and whose mother or father is Jewish. Those who are not yet recognized as Jews are prepared to convert. Most have first-degree relatives who received permission to make aliya in the recent past and have become contributing members of Israeli society.

Some of those who did not receive permission for aliya were rejected because their mother was not Jewish – even though they met the conditions of the Law of Return which permits those with a Jewish father to immigrate. Others were summarily rejected without being given a reason for being denied the right to join their families in Israel. Certainly, Israel has the right to reject applicants for good cause, but the individuals should be entitled to a know the rationale – if only to be able to provide evidence that the rejection was based on information that was in error. Recognizing the problems inherent in this situation, the Knesset established a committee to examine the circumstances of those who were “left behind.” Originally, it was anticipated that this committee would be able to complete its work by July 2014. Now, we are told that its mandate is being extended until December.

In the meantime Jews living in Ethiopia are suffering. Most have no jobs because they left their occupations and homes behind in the villages far from Gondar and Addis Ababa. They live in horrid conditions.

They live in uncertainty. All they have is their dreams. Until recent years the world Jewish community reached out to them. There were visits of solidarity.

There was direct support from agencies, including many communal federations in the Diaspora. Most of this aid has now vanished. It is no wonder that these individuals feel abandoned.

There are many who have observed that the war in Gaza has seriously wounded Israel’s economy and state that discussions of resolving the issue of those waiting in Ethiopia must be delayed again. Budget projections made earlier in the year are no longer relevant. Ministries that may have had the elasticity to absorb new immigrants who will require extraordinary support are suffering slashes to their budgets.

They find it difficult to serve the current citizens of Israel without the additional challenge of serving the needs of those coming from Ethiopia. The pain of meager existence in Ethiopia is now compounded by the uncertainty of the realization of their dreams.

Yet, the damage from the Gaza war will not last forever. The economy will certainly improve. With that anticipation, I wish to make a modest proposal: The current committee that is considering exceptions should finish its work without delay and definitively determine the names of the overwhelming majority of those on the 2003 and 2010 lists who will be given the right to make aliya – without respect to funding their aliya or absorption. Concurrently with this determination a realistic projection should be made by the relevant ministries as to how many Ethiopian olim they can support each month in a sensitive time-frame – understanding that lives are at stake and a schedule should be developed. Such a process and decision will give those who have been waiting – some for over a decade – as well as the Israeli government a sense of certainty that will let them live with the reality of the present and have a realistic vision of their future.

The author is a rabbi, president of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry (NACOEJ) – and a recent immigrant to Israel.

Ethiopian-Isreali soldier who was killed in Gaza remembered by family, friends

Ynetnews.com

20-year-old Jerusalemite was killed in IDF operation in Gaza; the Golani soldier ‘was a happy person’ who followed his brother into combat.
Noam ‘Dabul’ Dvir

Staff Sergeant Moshe Melako, a 20-year-old resident of Jerusalem, was killed Sunday during IDF operations in the Gaza Strip, it was released for publication Monday morning. Melako, who served in the Golani Brigade, is survived by his parents and seven siblings. His funeral will take place at 4 pm in the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl.

Melako was raised in the Neve Ya’akov neighborhood of Jerusalem. “He went into the combat units following his brother,” said his cousin. “He was a happy person. He always helped around the house and supported his family and his little twin sisters.”

The family members said that Melako spoke with his mother on Friday and told her everything would be okay and that she had no reason to worry. He never spoke to her again.

Last Friday night, before he went into Gaza with his unit, Melako sent a message to Eli Fantia, a close friend. “I am sending you a message because I won’t be able to talk with you for a while,” he wrote. “I love you, brother. Shabbat shalom.”

Family members, friends, and acquaintances of Melako said he had dreamed of enlisting in Golani – and achieved his hopes. “Moshe was an amazing person,” said Eli, “He loved Golani and enjoyed what he was doing. We are deeply pained.”

A family friend, Noy, who was lightly injured in the fighting, arrived at the Melako family home on Sunday. For a number of minutes Noy stood silent, finding it difficult to console Moshe’s mother.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “We have been friends from birth. I met him; they drove in the APC in front of us, and then happened what happened.”

Rachel, a neighbor of the family, said that she knew Moshe from an early age. “This is a very special family. The family had experienced a tragic event in the past. He was an amazing man who always wanted to be one of the guys and join Golani. He was raised well and was modest and loved.”

Danny Adeno Abebe contributed to this report.

The New Envoys – An Ethiopian And A Bedouin Flying The Flag For Israel

By Simon Rocker

Eginsu Meyer emigrated to Israel as a child. Now she is in the UK helping British Jews to make aliyah

Eginsu Meyer, her husband Joel and their one-year-old daughter Eliya have been living for a year in Golders Green. About the only thing it has in common with her birthplace – an Ethiopian village called Gayne – is that it begins with “G”.

Mrs Meyer is the director of Habayta UK, which promotes aliyah for the World Zionist Organisation. She is – as far as any one knows – the first Israeli shlichah (emissary) from Ethiopia to serve here.

The 31-year-old made aliyah herself as a child. She served as a lieutenant in the Israeli army’s education corps, and organised the Jewish Agency’s programme at the UK Limmud conference last winter before taking the Habayta job.

“From the beginning it was hard to understand why anyone would not want to make aliyah when you can just come and open a file to go,” she said.

In London, life is good. It’s hard to get talking about aliyah

“But when I got to understand that there are a lot of people who want to make aliyah but they can’t because of language or jobs, that’s why in Habayta we try to help them.

“I know it is tough because in London life is good – it’s hard to get talking about aliyah. I don’t talk about my own experiences so much. When people ask me, of course, I will answer.”

Mrs Meyer’s experience of making aliyah was rather more complicated than going to an office and opening a file.

Gayne – a settlement of a few hundred, mostly Jewish, people near Gondar city in northern Ethiopia – “was a village from the olden days,” she said, “There was no electricity. People built their houses from mud and wood.”

By local standards, her family was prosperous – they owned a farm. Every Friday night, 40 members of the extended family gathered around the Shabbat table where her grandfather, the religious head of the village, would cut the dabo, the round challah-like loaves.

“Every time my grandfather told a story about Yerushalayim, he described it as the most beautiful place on earth – everything was clean, everything was made of gold. This was a place for the Jews.”

Her eldest brother Yosef, sister Daphna and her husband were first in the family to make their escape to Israel.

“My father took them to the next village, where they met the guide who knew how to get to Sudan. They walked two weeks in the desert; they didn’t have enough food or water. They spent more than a year in Sudan, where they needed to hide that they were Jews. We couldn’t tell what happened – there was no phone, no letters,” she said.

Only some time after did the family learn of their safe arrival in Israel. But Daphna’s infant son perished on the way.

Mrs Meyer was only seven when it was the turn for her and most of her remaining siblings. They had left Gayne and spent a year in a rented house in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“I remember someone woke me up to say we were going to Israel. I said I have toys and clothes I want to take, and they said, no, you won’t need them in Israel, you will have better things,” she said.

But the family’s joy was tinged with sadness because they had to leave behind her father. Devakulu Ayele’s role in helping other Jews to leave had got him into trouble. He spent three years in jail, facing a death sentence; but the wife of Mrs Meyer’s uncle worked in the justice system and they were able to bribe a judge in time. He joined the rest of his family in Israel a year later.

Until she boarded the plane to Israel, the only white face Mrs Meyer had seen had been that of Jewish Agency representative, Micha Feldmann. “In Ethiopia, we thought we were the only Jews left in the world – we didn’t know there were more Jews outside, especially white people,” she said.

While she and her siblings integrated into Israel, adjusting to a new society proved harder for her father’s generation. The absorption centre in which the family spent their first few months isolated them from other Israelis. But her father never regretted his Zionism. When told her British-born husband’s parents were still living in the UK, he could not believe they were Jewish – how could any Jew free to move to Israel not go?

“It was hard to explain,” she said. “I said to Joel give me your parents’ ketubah just to show my father.”

The couple met in Israel in 2011. Mr Meyer, 33, from Reading, made aliyah after university and is now the UK shaliach for his former youth movement, Hanoar Hatzioni, as well as for students and young adults.

Mrs Meyer says she has never encountered prejudice from Jews in the UK.”No, it is a very nice, a very welcoming community,” she said.

“It is amazing, after making aliyah from Ethiopia, to come to another country to represent Israeli people. There is no word in English to describe it. When I told my father I was going to be a shlichah, he was so excited. He said: ‘I’m really proud of you – now you can explain about Israel, this is the Jews’ country’.”

source: http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/120077/the-new-envoys-ethiopian-and-a-bedouin-flying-flag-israel?

Today in History: IDF Airlifts 14,500 Ethiopian Jews to Israel

Israel Defense Force

“Next year in Jerusalem” are words spoken by Jews all over the world. For the Jews of Ethiopia, this dream was a promise.

Exactly 23 years ago , the IDF carried out Operation Solomon, a massive airlift that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel. After 34 planes and 36 hours, the Israel Air Force safely carried 14,500 Jews to Israeli soil. The mission remains the largest aerial expedition in Israel’s history.

In the 1970′s, the Israeli government made the decision to authorize the use of the IDF to enable the immigration of thousands of Jews who were living in Ethiopia, a country that at the time prohibited its citizens from emigrating to Israel. Beginning in 1984, the IDF brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel in three airlift operations, the last of which was Operation Solomon in 1991.

“Operation Solomon truly represents what Zionism is,” said Israel’s air force commander of the time, Maj. Gen. Avihu Ben-Nun. “It demonstrates the purpose for the State of Israel: to provide a home and shelter for Jews around the world who have suffered and were prosecuted merely for bearing the Jewish religion.”

It was a great operation on a global scale. “Never before, did so few pilots transport such a great number of people in such a short time,” Maj. Gen. Ben-Nun said.

Turmoil in Ethiopia

In 1991, Ethiopia was experiencing great political instability. The acting government was weak, and the likelihood of it falling to Eritrean rebels was high. Ethiopia’s Jews were in danger. On March 7, Uri Lubrani, an Israeli diplomat, reported on the worsening military situation in Ethiopia, and advised the formulation of “an emergency plan, for the protection and evacuation of the Jewish community.”

Leading up to the operation, $35 million were raised almost overnight in order to pay the Ethiopian government to allow the Jews to leave.

The operation begins

The Israel Air Force allocated six Boeing 707 and 18 Hercules planes capable of carrying 18,000 people. The mission had two stages: a three hour flight to Addis Ababa (using the Boeing 707 plane) and another five hours to Israel, using the Hercules aircraft. A modern version of the Hercules, the C-130J-30 Super Hercules, is still in use in today’s IDF missions.

The first Hercules landed in Addis-Ababa around 10:00 AM, and the crew immediately began assembling the command room. “The first control tower in the northern part of the country did not even respond to our call, as the local city was taken over by rebels, hours earlier,” recalled Lieut. Col. A., who landed the first Boeing in Ethiopia. “There was a lot of traffic over the airport at Addis-Ababa, and we had to wait for 30 minutes before we could land. The airport itself was very organized, and ground services worked very well”.

The ground plan involved gathering everyone at the Israeli embassy, and transporting them to the planes using specially designated buses. Each bus was to be escorted by an Israeli soldier, of Ethiopian origin.

In order to accommodate as many people as possible, the seats of the planes were removed and up to 1,200 passengers were able to board a single plane. Those who planned the operation expected that the planes would hold only 760 passengers, but the Ethiopians – many of whom were malnourished – were so light that many more were able to fit.

Almost 20 years later, IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, who led the ground operation as commander of the IAF’s elite Shaldag commando force, spoke of the mission: “As commander of Shaldag Unit, I had to deal primarily with technical details. Only during the mission did I get a sense of how meaningful it was to be part of this crucial event. It’s a turning point in my service which encompasses both my Zionist values and the meaning of our existence in this country.”

“I vividly remember those images from Addis Ababa,” recalls Maj. B., an IAF pilot at the time. “An incredible number of people walked towards the plane, organized in groups of 200. The doctors and paramedics provided ongoing support.” The first Boeing plane took off at noon, followed by the rest. At one time, 27 planes were in the air.

On the ground

At 5:00 P.M. the first plane landed in Tel Aviv. As the passengers walked out, Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir and other leaders greeted them on the ground in Israel.

The children came out first. “Everyone looked tired and scared”, described Anat Tal-Shir, a reporter for the newspaper “Yediot Aharonot.” “The people who arrived during Operation Solomon fled their country with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. The children stayed close to their mothers. A young man carried his elderly father on his shoulders. They both bent down and kissed the Israeli soil”.
The arrivals were met with cheer and celebration. “We didn’t bring any of our clothes; we didn’t bring any of our things,” said 29 year old Mukat Abag at the time. “But we are very glad to be here.” After one of the most complex and emotional operations in IDF history, Ethiopia’s Jews had finally landed safely in Israel.