Ethiopia’s Jews caught between waiting for imagined heaven and living in daily hell of racism in Israel.

GONDER, Ethiopia – In a makeshift synagogue painted in the colours of Israel’s national flag, thousands of Ethiopian Jews listen as a sermon is relayed live by mobile phone speaker from the Israeli city of Haifa.

“You are all sons and daughters of Israel. God will give you what you deserve,” says rabbi Menachem Waldman in Hebrew as a young interpreter translates into Amharic, Ethiopia’s de facto official language.

“We haven’t stopped our long struggle to bring all of you home,” he adds to passionate nods of approval.

His words offer hope to the 12,000 members of Falashmura — Ethiopian Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 19th century but who remain closely attached to the Jewish tradition — in Gonder, 600 kilometres (370 miles) northwest of Addis Ababa.

Israel brought home 35,000 Ethiopian Jews under Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991. Today the total number of people relocated stands at 100,000.

Two years ago, Israel promised that a final group would be relocated before the end of 2007. That deadline expired, leaving many in areas like Gonder and also around the Israeli embassy complex in Addis Ababa.

The Falashmura say previous relocations split families, leaving one half living in Ethiopia and the other in the fabled Promised Land.

“We have been registered for three years but we are still here separated from our father,” says 22-year-old Abere Yimenu, who along with younger brother Andebet, are students in a rural Gonder hamlet.

“I was shocked when they only allowed our elderly father to leave back then while we, who can contribute more to the country, were left behind.”

Rabbi Waldman supports Aliyah — the Israeli law of return — but his view is not shared by others in Israel where some quarters are accused of racial discrimination against the Falashmura.

“They even allowed Russian Jews to bring their cats and dogs,” says Getu Zemene, a local representative of the US-based advocacy group the North American Conference of Ethiopian Jewry (NACOEJ).

“Jews here are black so it is a completely different matter,” he adds.

The trigger for the earlier exodus was the 1974 coup that toppled Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and brought in Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. The latter’s Marxist-Leninist dictatorship fanned anti-Semitism in a country with a proud Christian Orthodox tradition and where Jews had long been a target of missionaries.

According to reports from the time, an estimated 2,500 Jews were killed and some 7,000 made homeless in the first weeks of the coup, the start of a bloody reign in which tens of thousands of Ethiopians who were slaughtered or disappeared.

After taking office in 1977, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin asked Mengistu to allow 200 Ethiopian Jews to leave for Israel aboard an Israeli military jet that had emptied its military cargo in Addis Ababa.

Mengistu agreed and that may have been the precursor of the mass exodus.

But times have changed. Despite a favorable government in power in Addis Ababa since 1991, fierce debates among political and religious leaders in Israel over the Falashmura’s Jewishness have delayed, if not hindered relocation.

The debate is nothing new however, Ethiopia’s Jews were only allowed to enter the country in 1975 after the Jewish state’s rabbinate recognised them as members of the lost tribe of Dan.

Until February 2007, 200 people a month were arriving in Israel, according to the Israeli embassy here. But that now seems to have stopped.

But even for those who made it, life has not been easy with many Ethiopians complaining of discrimination and racial abuse.

“We are fighting against discriminations such as school segregation and covert racism in jobs that hinder assimilation of our group into the mainstream Israeli society,” says Getnet Awoke, a 38 year-old preacher who recently returned to Ethiopia to help prepare his fellow Jews for aliyah.

“We’ve had several cases of suicide in the community in Israel. Some have thrown themselves off buildings and some have hanged themselves,” he says.

“Even conscripts serving in the army have shot themselves after being unable to cope with the racial abuse,” he adds.

“They face a world of difference once they arrive in Israel. The younger ones take less time to assimilate but those from the remote areas and the older ones face a massive culture shock,” says Getnet.

But in impoverished Gonder, there is still hope.

“It’s only a matter of time. We will all make it some day to the Promised Land,” says Getu.

– Middle East Online

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia has warned American citizens against taking part in the Great Ethiopian Run because of the threat of terrorism.

Friday’s message says embassy staff and their families should not to take part in the 6.2-mile race set for Nov. 23. The message followed an unspecified terror warning from the Ethiopian government about the race featuring tens of thousands of runners from Ethiopia and around the world. The race is led by distance great Haile Gebrselassie.

The message did not say if the event was named as a specific target but reminded U.S. citizens of deadly bombings this year in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia is fighting insurgent groups and supporting the U.N.-backed government in Somalia.

By Susan Braden | The Globalist

While the land may be green and crops are growing, there is not enough food to go around in Ethiopia. Though innovations in therapeutic feeding products keep people alive, Susan Braden of Save the Children points out that the underlying conditions of starvation still remain.

Two years ago, I visited northern Ethiopia’s historic trail, which included stops at Lake Tana, Gonder, Axum and Lalibela.

At the time, I was both entranced by Ethiopia’s history as one of the foremost kingdoms of the ancient world — and overwhelmed by its poverty. Wherever I went, I was encircled by visibly malnourished children.

Nothing to eat

Over the past month, I went back to Ethiopia, but this time to the Southern Nations Nationalities Peoples Region (SNNPR) in the Great Rift Valley below Addis Ababa.

Like most African countries, Ethiopia is also a net food importer, and the price of food on the global market has skyrocketed.

What I saw did not differ that much from what I had seen in the north two years earlier.

The area is green, raining at times and crops are growing. Yet, people don’t have enough food to eat. To cope, families are reducing their daily intake of food and selling off their livestock.

Children are migrating to surrounding towns and cities to find work and food. Out of a population of 82 million people, 6.4 million are in need of emergency assistance, and approximately 84,000 children will require therapeutic feeding between now and the end of the year.

Another 7.2 million people are already receiving food assistance from the government’s safety net program. What is going on? Why are so many people going hungry?

Global turmoil and drought

The reasons vary by region, but basically come down to bad weather and high food prices, coupled with high birth rates and poor land management.

The delayed onset and poor performance of the March to May rains, combined with drought conditions the previous two planting periods, have resulted in below normal harvests throughout most of the country.

In addition, although Ethiopia has an agriculturally based economy, like most African countries, Ethiopia is also a net food importer — and the price of food on the global market has skyrocketed.

The reason for the high price of imported food includes bad weather in major food-producing countries, high petroleum prices and therefore rising fertilizer and transportation costs, which are then transferred onto the consumers.

The diversion of grain into biofuels and livestock feed are also factors in the increasingly high food prices globally — as are the trade policies of some countries. The poor are, of course, the least able to bear the increased cost. The average annual income in Ethiopia is $108 U.S. dollars.

Feeding the hungry

Meanwhile, unlike in Ethiopia’s famine of 1984, the international community now has the ability to reverse malnutrition in severely malnourished children almost immediately with a product called “plumpy’nut.”

The area is green, raining at times and crops are growing. Yet, people don’t have enough food to eat.

This is a high protein, high energy food designed by a French scientist in the late 1990s. It comes in a small tinfoil package and is now used in relief operations all over the world.

It is an amazing product because it is easy to transport, use and digest, and it reverses malnutrition in the severely malnourished within two to four weeks.

A child’s future

In one health center I visited, there was a mother with twins, one of whom was healthy and the other starving. If the child in question survives, and the statistics on plumpy’nut suggest it will, the two children could well grow up to be virtually indistinguishable in terms of their overall health.

Yet, how will these children grow up? The overall situation in Ethiopia is not likely to change anytime soon. Families are large. According to the CIA World Factbook, most households have six children. Jobs are scarce. Unemployment among Ethiopia’s youth hovers around 60%.

The land does not produce enough food for everyone to live on, and farmers cannot sell it or use it as collateral to take out a loan because under the Constitution, all land belongs to the state, which provides long-term leases to the tenants. The price of imported food is also likely to remain high because the variables that make them high are not likely to change.

Without any options

So what is Ethiopia to do? What will become

The land does not produce enough food for everyone to live on — and farmers cannot sell it or use it as collateral to take out a loan.

I met a woman in another therapeutic care center who was herself fending off starvation with plumpy’nut.

She was 27 years old, but looked as though she was in her 40s. She worked as a maid in another family’s house and was HIV positive.

When asked about her children, she said she had two, one of whom had been at the center but was now fine.

She paused — and then added that she was looking to give up her children because she could not take care of them.