By Stuart Laidlaw | Toronto Star

When Yuvi Tashome was a little girl in Ethiopia, Jerusalem was a mystical place known to her only through the Torah and the tales children tell one another.

“I grew up with stories about how, in Jerusalem, everybody takes care of one another and keeps the Shabbat,” Tashome, 32, says in a phone interview from Gedera, Israel. She will be telling her story next week in Toronto as part of Passover,

“I thought there is no death in Jerusalem. It was like heaven. There was candy on the trees.”

That it could be real, and that she could go there, seemed impossible.

The story of how she and more than 120,000 other Ethiopian Jews eventually made it to Jerusalem will be told by Tashome Monday evening at Beth Tzedec Synagogue at the New Israel Fund’s Liberation Seder for Passover, which begins today and celebrates the escape of Jewish slaves from ancient Egypt.

“The parallels (in Tashome’s story) to the Exodus story are just amazing,” says Rabbi Lawrence Englander of Mississauga’s Solel Synagogue.

Englander will give the Seder address Monday, calling all worshippers to consider themselves to have escaped Egypt and found freedom.

“The idea is to connect with people like Tashome still going through that journey,” he says.

As civil war ravaged her homeland in the mid-1980s, Tashome’s widowed mother decided the family (which included Yuvi’s little brother and grandmother) had to leave for Jerusalem, part of a massive migration of Ethiopia’s Jewish minority to Israel in what came to be known as Operation Moses.

Just like Moses, Tashome and her family wandered the desert in search of refuge, which they found after about two months in a refugee camp in Sudan.

“I don’t remember a lot about Sudan, just the deaths and that everybody was hungry,” Tashome says. “I was hungry all the time.”

At age 5, she had also been separated from her mother and brother, and travelled with her grandmother instead. They were eventually airlifted out of the camps. Tashome’s most vivid memory was the flight crew.

“We were up in the sky, and they were all wearing white. I thought they were angels,” she says, the sight seeming to prove that Jerusalem was heaven. “When we arrived, I remember the grown-ups all getting down on the floor and praying.”

Cut off from European Judaism for almost 2,000 years, the Jews of Ethiopia shared little with others of their faith in terms of tradition or ceremony. Tashome’s mystical ideas about Jerusalem are a reflection of that disconnect.

But the idyllic image of Jerusalem – which, for Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, meant all of Israel – soon started to tarnish as unemployment, limited acceptance by Israeli society and the accompanying crime among the Ethiopian community began to take its toll.

Growing up, Tashome tried to be a “good Israeli girl,” in her words, going to a kibbutz for high school and serving in the army. But when it came time to get a civilian job, she found prospects dried up.

“All they could see was an Ethiopian girl,” she says.

Tashome turned her attention, instead, to working with troubled Ethiopian youth. Four years ago, she founded Friends by Nature, a grass-roots organization that helps young people stay in school and out of trouble. Her group is partly funded by the New Israel Fund, which supports such community-based organizations in hopes of building a civic society within Israel, says Jay Brodbar, executive director of the New Israel Fund of Canada.

Such efforts, Tashome says, help Ethiopian youths stay in school and even go to university. And along the way, she says, they are building the next generation of Ethiopian Jewish leaders.