By Ruth Eglash, THE JERUSALEM POST
Ethiopian community leaders and social action groups will step up their fight this week against a government decision to wind down Ethiopian aliya in the coming months, as arguments for bringing thousands more Falash Mura immigrants currently unrecognized by Israel are presented to the Knesset’s State Control Committee on Wednesday morning.
According to representatives from the newly-formed Public Council for Ethiopian Jews, which includes such public figures as former Supreme Court Judge Meir Shamgar, Prof. Irwin Kotler, Ethiopian Chief Rabbi Yosef Adaneh, Geulah Cohen, Naomi Hazan and Hanan Porat, the government is reneging on its original promise to bring in all remaining Falash Mura – Ethiopian Jews whose ancestors converted to Christianity under duress a century ago.
They claim that sources inside the Interior Ministry have indicated that the process of checking eligibility of those still in Ethiopia will be stopped by the end of this year. This past summer, Jewish Agency for Israel officials based in Addis Ababa told The Jerusalem Post that aliya from the African nation would be over by the end of 2008, a sentiment reiterated by the Interior Ministry.
“We are not stopping our activities in Ethiopia; we are simply winding down an operation that has reached a natural conclusion,” Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabene Hadad said Tuesday. She confirmed that Interior Ministry operations in Gondar, where most of the Falash Mura are currently waiting to be processed for aliya, would be over sometime in the near future.
“What is important to highlight here is that the government is going back on its original commitment and is refusing entry to roughly 8,000 people who are eligible to make aliya according to criteria outlined in the past,” Avraham Neguise, director of Ethiopian advocacy group South Wing to Zion, told the Post. He was referring to a government decision from February 2003 permitting those Falash Mura willing to undergo an Orthodox Jewish conversion process to come to Israel under the Law of Entry.
“The government’s original decision did not talk about stopping the aliya on a certain date or at a certain point, but said rather that all those with a maternal link to Judaism were eligible to immigrate,” continued Neguise, adding that many of those who either were denied entry to Israel or had not yet been checked for eligibility had close family members already living here.
One such family is that of 24-year-old Telahun Tzegah, who made aliya with his mother seven years ago but left behind family members in Gondar, including half-siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.
“Their bags are packed and they are ready to come, but they [the Interior Ministry] refuse to process them,” he said Tuesday, adding, “They were originally told that they could make aliya, so they left their villages and moved to Gondar. Now they are stuck there with no help. They can’t go back to their villages, and they aren’t allowed to move here.”
Tzegah said that he was regularly forced to send the family a portion of the meager salary he earns as a security guard, “just so they can afford to eat.”
The Interior Ministry explained previously that it was simply working in compliance with the specifications of the 1999 Efrati census, which lists those Falash Mura with familial ties to Jews and hence eligible to come here.
However, Neguise pointed out that the Efrati list originally included three volumes – Falash Mura in Addis Ababa, in Gondar and in the outlying villages.
“The ministry has decided to ignore those people from the villages,” he said. “How can the government make the decision to split up families like this?”
Rabbi Menahem Waldman, director of the Shvut Am Institute and an expert on the Falash Mura conversion process, has joined forces with Neguise and also sits on the Public Council for Ethiopian Jews.
“These people are recognized as Jews according to Halacha and the State of Israel,” said Waldman, who helped to compile the Efrati census. “It is our responsibility as a Zionist state to bring these people here and welcome them with an open heart.”
He said that along with the hearing in the Knesset on Wednesday, the forum was also supporting a legal petition to force the government to honor its original commitment, and added that it would not give up until those 8,000 people were brought to Israel.
4 thoughts on “Activists in Israel fight ending Ethiopian aliya”
so, by “aliya” you mean a journey, an emigration to another country:-))
first I thought it was a person’s name:-))
Israel must take all it’s felashas from our country. Israel has imprisoned so many ethiopians by refusing accepting them as a refugee .we will not forget howisrael’s government has been treating our brothers and sisters who 78ran away from ethiopia to save their life as asked an asylum in israel are being treated like dog. 78 ETHIOPIANS MOSTLY WOMEN have benn imprisoned in the darkest place on earth for more than five years, for the simple reason they asked an asylum in Israel. still over six 600 ethiopians are waiting their deportation where their life will indanger. the shamest side of Israel’s government against ethiopians that when another countries wants to give resettlement programm for ethiopins fron Israel, Israel refused to give exist visa by saying, if they want to go to anothert country, they must go back to ethiopia and take visa from ethiopia. they can not get resettllment proframm from Israel. that is not enough, Israel has been refusing ethiopia’s gedam and is trying to give ethiopia’s church to egypt. Israel is trying buy peace from the arab’s countries by giving ethiopia’s churches to egypt. So we do not need any felasha in ethiopia. Ethiopia has done all what it could, but we know how Israel treats ethiopia and it’s children. So israel must continue with it’s aliya. as far as Israel continues mistreating our brothers and sisters who have been asking an asylum in Israel, we, ethiopians can say, ethiopia belongs to ethiopians. goodbye all felashes via aliya
For almost everything in this world there is a beginning and also an end to it.
“Operation Moses” and “Operation Solomon” that created aliya that became an avenue for bringing thousands of Ethiopian Jews to a false promised land Jerusalem or Zion should have been ended long time ago. In fact, it shouldn’t have been started if Ethiopia has had a democratically elected government – a government that takes care of all its citizens: Jews, Muslims, Christians, and people of no religion at all. If Ethiopia has had such a good government, the Ethiopian Jews had never left or intended to leave Ethiopia in the first place. The misery that most Ethiopian Jews facing now in Israel is more or less the same misery they had been facing while they were in Ethiopia, and aliya is not the one that could solve the problems created by both the Israeli and the Ethiopian government. The Ethiopian government, without understanding the historical background of the ancestors of these Ethiopian Jews who brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, allowed Israel to take thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and Israel failed the Ethiopian Jews to recognize them as the true children of Abraham and strict adherents of the Mosaic Laws.
Besieged by a variety of problems and influenced by unfulfilled promises that Jerusalem is a land that produces milk and honey, prosperity and peace, and at the same time forgetting history that Jerusalem has been in fact a city of conflict and blood shed, a city where Jesus, the savior of the world, was once condemned to death, the Ethiopian Jews left their country, Ethiopia. Later these Ethiopian Jews found out the truth for themselves that the land that produces milk and honey is in fact Ethiopia, not Jerusalem or Zion, though mismanaged by corrupt government officials.
In both countries – Ethiopia and Israel – the Ethiopian Jews have been badly mistreated but not to the level the Israelis have treated them. In Ethiopia they may have been given the name “felasha” (sidetegna), but there are many other good things they have enjoyed in Ethiopia such as having the same language, the same feature, the same Amharic names, the same music, the same culture, the same shema clothe, the same family cohesiveness, the same food – injera and wat – and the same beverage – tella and tegie. In Israel, however, where they think they will get a better treatment than in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Jews find themselves in big problems. First their old Biblical Jewishness is not accepted, and their children are not welcomed by the Israelis’ children in school. An Ethiopian Jewish mother will have a hard time to find a kindergarten in Israel for her little child, because the Israelis do not accept a colored child in their kindergarten. A young Ethiopian Jewish boy or girl in Israel is prohibited from marring an Israeli girl or boy respectively because of his or her color. An Israeli official does not sit next to an Ethiopian Jews in a bus, and the most dehumanizing thing against the Ethiopian Jews in Israel is that the Israelis call the Ethiopian Jews kushi – nigger, and as a result of these dehumanizing factors, it is not uncommon to find some Ethiopian Jews commit suicide or prefer to go back to Ethiopia and live there where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years.
Some scholars say that the ancestors of the Ethiopian Jews were forced to become Christians. It might be so, but what about today’s Ethiopian Jews who are forced to change their old Biblical Ethiopian Jewishness and become a westernized European Jews. This means the old Biblical Ethiopian Jewishness does not qualify any Ethiopian Jews to go to Israel, a land of slavery and discrimination. In addition, the Ethiopian Jews are forced to accept the European Jewish culture because the Israelis consider the Ethiopian Jewish culture as the culture of uncivilized people. How preposterous are the Israeli Jews! How do they know their Jewishness is better than the Ethiopian Jews’ Jewishness?
My advice to both the Ethiopian Jews in Israel and in Ethiopia is to go back to Ethiopia and stay in Ethiopia respectively, because when Ethiopia by the will of its people brings out one of its children to power, it will treat the Ethiopian Jews the same it treats its other ethnic minority groups. In the mean time the Ethiopian government should not allow aliya to continue; in other words, if Israel takes all the Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and if Saudi Arabia or Egypt wants to take all the Ethiopian Muslims to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, and if Somalia wants to take all Somalis who live in Ethiopia to Somalia, then Ethiopia will be the weakest country in the whole world. People are power, money, and prosperity, example, China and India.
My last advice to those Ethiopian Jews still in Ethiopia is: why should you go to a country – Israel – where your Ethiopian Jewishness, your Ethiopian features, your Ethiopian identity, your Ethiopian culture, and, above all, your pure Ethiopian blood are in question?
who wrote the the top articles muslim ethiopian or chritian ethiopian or out sider but he got some senses to me. we all ethiopian let’s live together help each other thanx just wondering with ful of ethiopian luv Adam Abubaker.