By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz
ADDIS ABABA – Holoager Kasa gathers her older children around her. Subalo is 7 and Bainchjlem is 5. The three-month old, Dastayo, is fastened in a carrier on her back. They are dressed for the final stretch of their voyage.
In the last 10 days, Kasa has been staying with some 50 other Ethiopians in a small compound near the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa. In two hours they will board the bus that will take them to the airport.
Her husband, Tafso, is out making last-minute purchases. Holoager’s delicate face registers incomprehension when asked how she obtained a permit to go to Israel. “I have two brothers and sisters and an uncle in Israel,” she says. “One of them applied for me, and five years ago I was called to Gondar for an interview.”
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She does not know where her Israeli relatives live or where she is supposed to stay once she arrives, but they told her it was near Jerusalem. She doesn’t speak a word of Hebrew and the only thing she knows about Judaism is Sabbath, but she knows that in the past her family was Jewish.
Tafso is Christian, but his wife says that he agreed to covert to Judaism in Israel, and this made their trip possible. Asked what she expects in Israel, she says, “I don’t know. I just want a good life.”
She will miss nothing from her life in Ethiopia.
Kasa’s family is one of the last to leave Ethiopia for Israel. Only 474 Falashmura with permits to immigrate to Israel remain in Gondar – eight more flights. The Jewish Agency office in Addis Ababa is to be shut at the beginning of June. More immigrants to Israel have passed through this office in recent years than through any other Jewish Agency office in the world – 300 a month, 4,600 a year.
“However, throughout 2007 we brought only one woman to Israel,” says Jewish Agency envoy Uri Conforti.
He says that 95 percent of the immigrants to Israel in recent years have been Jews according to the halakha, while the rest have Jewish parents or grandparents. The former receive a blue immigrant card on arrival, and that is replaced by an identity card a few days later. The others receive a green immigrant card, and only after a year and a half are they eligible for citizenship, after converting to Judaism. Then they also receive their Israeli housing grants and be eligible to vote.
The Ethiopians are a calm, reserved people. Unlike immigrants from the West, they don’t sing Hebrew songs, wave flags, kiss the holy soil and weep when they arrive. They have already been through a complex process to get to this point. They have waited for a long time, sometimes years, before receiving a date to report to the Jewish Agency’s compound at Gondar. They are photographed for the travel card, interviewed about their medical condition, briefed about travel arrangments to Addis Ababa, the capital, and receive an allowance for expenses and lodging on the way. Every Sunday a busload of immigrants, accompanied by paramedics and an armed guard, leaves the compound.
The immigration candidates are sent to a private hospital for x-rays of their lungs, to make sure they don’t have tuberculosis. If they do, their trip to Israel is delayed for preliminary medical treatment. In a clinic operating out of the embassy compound, the immigrants are vaccinated against various diseases. Their medical files will be sent to an Israeli health maintenance organizations (HMO).
The would-be immigrants are shown films to prepare them for life in Israel. They learn what a toilet bowl, refrigerator, stove and disposable diapers are, as well as how to open a bank account and what an HMO and absorption grants are.
At the airport’s entrance, they are briefed about regular stairs and moving stairs, the latter of which they are warned not to use, to avoid accidents. They sit quietly by the gate. Nobody goes to shop in the duty free. The immigrants are afraid to use the toilets on the planes and the Jewish Agency envoy makes sure they all go to the airport toilet before the flight.
On the Ethiopian Airlines plane they are seated in the back, by the galley. Holoager and Tafso are enjoying every moment of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Once they have landed at Ben-Gurion airport, the mothers are led to a diaper-changing corner. The rest are ushered into small rooms, sign for immigrant cards and receive their first immigrant grant, based on the size of their family.
9 thoughts on “From Gondar to Mevasseret, for perhaps the last time”
how long are we going to talk about these flashas? we have free place for resettlement programm to the place where they have lived. they will not see any more their villages in gonder.
as far as i am concerned ,this felasha portriat is a misguided ficsion.i have no appetite to such stories !!!
First they created this fiction that the Falashas are the chosen people of Israel with their real country the so called Holy Land, later hammered it on their head. The Judaism in the Horn of Africa came from Sabean-Yemen across the sea and has nothing to do with the State of Israel. It is like a Catholic in the Filipino or Argentina claiming Rome and the Vatican as their country.
We know why they are taking them to Israel, Israel has birth rate problem that can not compete with the Israeli Arabs.
Worse, they are changing their Habesha names and forcing them to get reconverted because our Judaism is not “good enough”? What an insult!
It is poverty stupid as they say, otherwise the Israeli jews would have created a reverse story and would have immigrated to Gonder. Just for your the record, Ethiopia was one of the candidates, to be exact the present Eritrea, selected for a permanent Jews homeland during and after the second world war around 1941 when the Italian were kicked out. We would have had a worse kind of war: Jews vrs. Abyssinian Orthodox on our door steps.
There are no so-called black jews in Ethiopia since the beginning of time. Of course, there are some people who professed judaism bit not in a strictest sene. Poor Ethiopians are repeating the history of Black Americans for leaving their African homeland and live as a second class citizen in the land that they never knew. Five or so years ago the Mayer of Jerusalem dumped the Ethiopias’ blood collected by red cross for hospital use because according to the Mayor, Ethiopians blood was not pure. Unfortunately no science has told us that the whie man’s blood is purer than the black race’s blood. I shall die her 100 times in America than to touch the zionist state of the middle east
As as I am concerned they should be first abeshas and then Falshas. But, I think they are using this excuse to get the hell out of Ethiopia. But, there is no guarrantee they are going to be any happier in the land of the Jews?
ከፍተኛ የሆነ መደናገር አለ:: አሁን የኢትዮጵያ ይሁዳዉያን ተብለን የምንጠራ ሰዎች መሰረታችን የአሁኗ እስራኤል ሆነም አልሆነም ኑሯችን ደህና ቢሆን ኖሮ ኢትዮጵያን ጥለን (እንደማንኛዉም ኢትዮጵያዊ) ባልወጣን ነበር:: በዚህ ጉዳይ የኢትዮጵያ ይሁዳዉያንን የሚለይ ነገር የለም:: እስራኤል ሃገር ገብተን የሚያጋጥሙንን ችግሮች አስቀድመን ብናዉቃቸዉ ኖሮ ግን እግራችንን ለማንቀሳቀስ አንሞክርም ነበር ብዬ አምናለሁ::
አብርሃም
ኢየሩሳሌም
I have lived in Iseril for 10 yrs,and there is no countery in the world as resest as the “choosen people”.
I pity you people,you better stay in Gonder chopping your GUAYA.
Not a land of milk and honey but of hatred and human tragedy!
A Christian husband and a Jewish wife –both Ethiopians – with their three children who are not old enough what faith they will adhere to – leave Ethiopia for Israel.
Had not the Christian husband, Ato Tafese, promised to his Jewish wife and to the Jewish agency in Ethiopia that he would be converted to Judaism, their trips to Jerusalem would have never been materialized? The Jewish wife, Wizero Hulager Kasa, wants nothing in Israel but “good life.” Would she get it?
In the United States and in many other countries, a person is not required to first become a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew in order to earn his citizenship, but in the land of white Jewish Israel, Ethiopian Jews must first be converted from Ethiopian Judaism or Christianity or Islam to the White Jewish Judaism if they want to get the Israeli citizenship.
How cruel, rigid, and inhumane are these Israeli white Jews who require change of religion from an Ethiopian Jew for a Jewish citizenship in the land of Israel? These white Israeli Jews are the descendants of the lost ten tribes who left Judea for Samaria after the death of King Solomon and built golden calves there and worshipped them, sacrificing human blood and flesh for them against the law of God and waging wars between Judea, worshipper of God, and Samaria, worshipper of idols. It is from these ten tribes that murderous Ahab and his wife Jezebel descended, and the children of these idol worshippers, Ahab and Jezebel, are the present Israeli white Jews who shamelessly force the Ethiopian Jews to change their religion into their Ahab’s and Jezebel’s religion, which is not pure Judaism of Judea but pure Judaism of Samaria, which is idol worship.
It is heart breaking such calm, loving, humble, and religious Ethiopian Jews have to live with these uncultured, arrogant, superficial, pompous, and conceited white Israeli Jews who do not respect either God or the children of God – the Ethiopian Jews.
Some times, one is compelled to praise Adolf Hitler for what he did to the parents of these white Israeli Jews who are humiliating and dehumanizing my Ethiopian Jews. The way these bigot white Israeli Jews identify the Ethiopian Jews from other western Jews at their first arrival at the Bong Orion Air Port in Israel is that the Ethiopian Jews don’t sing Hebrew songs, don’t wave Israeli flags, don’t kiss the holy ground, and don’t weep. This means, if one is a true Jew, according to these pharisaic white Israeli Jews, one should cry loud, weep, scream, and kiss the bloody dust of the Jewish land upon arrival; otherwise one is not considered a true Jew. The Israeli White Jews expect such humiliating things being publicly performed by these proud, religious, well cultured Ethiopian Jews. I myself as an Ethiopian, I’m hundred percent sure that the Ethiopian Jews pray in their hearts a silent prayer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob upon their arrivals at the white Israeli air port in their Amharic or Tigrigna, or Orominga language, but these superficial white Jewish rabbis believe any prayer held in other languages but in Hebrew, does not reach Heaven. The Ethiopian Jews are accustomed to silent prayer, not to a showy prayer as their Ethiopian Christian brothers and sisters do, following Jesus’ words: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men” (Matthew 6:5). Therefore, upon arrival at the land of Israel, the Ethiopian Jews should not have to kiss the soil of Jerusalem. The leprous Naaman had a reason to kiss and take the soil of Jerusalem to his country, Aram, but the holy Ethiopian Jews have come to Jerusalem mostly for economic reasons, not to be healed from leprosy, for they do not have any: they are healthy and holy Ethiopian Jews.
The article says that “she (Hulager) will miss nothing from her life in Ethiopia.” I would say she will miss many good things in Ethiopia and learn many bad things from the white Israeli Jews such as inequality and lose of self identity. The purpose of her coming to Israel is to have “a good life,” but when she observes the ugly hatred in the face of each white Israeli Jew against her, she would be obliged to think twice why she has come to the land of hatred and inequality. When she sees her children being barred from attending the same school with the white Jewish children and even being ridiculed, teased, and dubbed “tikur, go home,” then the good life she has been expecting for herself and for her children will turn nasty and ugly. Engulfed with tears, she would say to herself: “In Ethiopia, no body called my children ‘tikur’ and why these white Jewish children are spitting and throwing stones at my children? In Ethiopia I can go any where I want and never get lost, but here I cannot even walk half a mile without getting lost.” Then she chats in her dream with her Ethiopian friends she had left at home in Gondar, but when she wakes up, she realizes she is in a strange land with unfriendly white people whose children never play with her children.