Let My People In!

When a friend invited me to join a mission of seven rabbis and three lay leaders to visit the Jewish communities in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, and the northern city of Gondar last month, my initial reaction was, “Are there still Jews in Ethiopia?”

The short answer, as I found out, is: yes, but it’s complicated.

I admit I had only basic knowledge of the story of the exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. I have seen the famous videos of the Beta Israel packed into cargo planes and kissing the ground upon arriving at Ben Gurion Airport. I was also familiar with the daring series of evacuations during the Ethiopian civil war when, beginning in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with the encouragement of Mossad agents, some 8,000 Jews left their ancient villages and traveled to refugee camps in Sudan so they could be brought to Israel—although many died on the journey to Sudan and from the dismal conditions in the camps. I knew of the dramatic airlifts: Operation Moses in 1984-85 and Operation Solomon in 1991, when the State of Israel covertly airlifted more than 14,000 people from the Addis Ababa airport, miraculously enacting the ingathering of exiles.

Having then learned that there were Jews still in Ethiopia, I was eager to find out more. So, I signed on.

Our three-day trip was organized by the nonprofit Struggle to Save Ethiopian Jewry (SSEJ), a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides support to Jews in Ethiopia so that American rabbis could gain a better understanding of this community, witness its situation in those two main cities, and get a sense of its needs, especially with conflict once again engulfing Gondar.

Our 10-person delegation arrived in Ethiopia on March 25. We woke up on one of the days to a cup of delicious Ethiopian coffee at our beautiful hotel near the Addis Ababa airport, then drove 20 minutes to the synagogue at the SSEJ compound for shaharit. We found 100 men already gathered, sitting on wooden benches, wrapped in turquoise striped talitot, about half wearing tefillin. On the other side of a hanging cloth mechitza was an equal number of women dressed in patterned long dresses and elegant white headscarves. The hazan on the front stage recited each section of the service twice: first in Amharic, a Semitic language that sounds soft and soothing, and then again in Hebrew, perfectly pronounced according to the Sephardic rite. The prayers were familiar, as was the Sefer Torah and the Koren siddurim with translation (to Amharic). Except for the fact that the prayers were twice as long due to the rendition in Amharic, I felt right at home, as I would in any Edot haMizrach minyan anywhere.

But everything else was a culture shock. The synagogue roof and walls were made from corrugated metal lined with tarp and colorful cloths. One dark-brown cloth was embroidered with a memorial to relatives who had perished during the walk to Sudan. The mud floor led out to a backyard with a mikveh and an outhouse with no running water.

After prayers, dozens of mothers in a sea of cute toddlers lined up to receive a daily meal of a roll, an egg, a banana, and a cup of milk. A short walk away, we visited a typical home of a community member: a 10-by-10-foot tin box with two cots in one corner, a short table and a chair in another, under three family photos, a dresser with an old TV and some wires, and a tiny stove near the entrance. The mother who rents this shipping container for $40 a month considers herself lucky because she has a job as a laundrywoman.

This weathered but strong woman explained her story as she waved around her flip phone expressively. She grew up in a remote village within a Beta Israel community that prayed daily for more than 2,000 years to return to Jerusalem. When the members of her village heard about Operation Solomon, they left behind their land and belongings and traveled to Addis, hoping to get on the next flight. More than 30 years later, many of them are still waiting.

The leaders of the 2,500 members of the community in Addis expressed to us their desperation and frustration at not being allowed entry into their national homeland of Israel. We ended the prayers singing “Am Yisrael Hai.”

If you take the plight of the Addis community and multiply it many times over, you can begin to imagine the situation in the more remote northern city of Gondar, which witnessed renewed fighting days before arrival. In fact, we barely made it to the city and had to be accompanied by a small army of guards. We traveled there in a propeller plane and drove to the SSEJ compound, where we were greeted warmly by 1,000 men and women waiting for Minha in the synagogue auditorium (again, covered with corrugated aluminum resting on wooden beams). The hazan recited everything clearly in two languages while the congregants sat in silent pious concentration (which was perhaps the biggest culture shock to the congregational rabbis!), answering “Amen” in unison at every prompt.

The hazan is a 22-year-old handsome young man with a charismatic smile named Sesai. He was born in a small village of Goja where Christian neighbors would taunt him as falasha, or “foreigner.” The religious elders of the community, called kessim, know to trace the lineage of each Beta Israel family back seven generations. Sesai moved with his family to Gondar, the processing point for less-well-known airlifts of Beta Israel after 1991, hoping for a chance to merit aliyah. He learned to speak fluent and articulate Hebrew, partly from the Hebrew school the SSEJ built in Gondar that now teaches 2,600 children daily, partly from visiting teachers, and partly from YouTube. Because the religious elders all made aliyah, Sesai and a few other talented and dedicated young men have taken on the roles of hazanim, but they also perform marriages, research halachic questions, teach in the Hebrew school, and serve as mohalim and shohetim (though only of chickens; they passionately want to learn animal slaughter also).

Another one of the teachers, named Binyamin, told me that his father made aliyah in 2007, but he was left behind with his mother. He was three years old then and has not seen his father since. They speak on the phone, and his father writes letters to the government requesting that his family be reunited, but he gets no response.

Binyamin’s story is one of 11,000. When we returned the next day for shaharit in Gondar, the crowd swelled to 3,000, overflowing into adjacent classrooms. Members brought photographs of their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and siblings who live in Israel. They were especially proud to show us pictures of their relatives standing tall in IDF uniform.

So why doesn’t Israel let them in? It’s a complicated issue that Israel has been dealing with for decades, especially since 2015, when it decided to allow family reunifications for the remaining members of the community in Ethiopia. In December 2020, Israel launched the dual-phased Operation Tzur Yisrael to achieve this mission. The operation concluded in July 2023 after bringing in some 5,000 people to Israel.

However, some critics in Israel have expressed opposition, questioning whether all the newcomers were Jewish and thus eligible for aliyah under the Law of Return, and not simply Christians looking to move to a richer country. The opposition is based on the unfortunate reality that most of the community that remained after Operation Solomon are Falash Mura, descendants of Beta Israel forefathers who had converted to Christianity to one extent or another as a result of missionary activity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some conversions were under duress or incentivized with food and education.

Having witnessed their living conditions, one could begin to understand. We have all seen commercials about desperately poor people who live on a dollar a day. But being in Ethiopia and getting to know people in such dire straits is transformative. I have to hold back tears as I write about the teenagers I met who are a foot shorter than they should be due to malnutrition. Shortage of food, leaky mud huts, lack of running water, woeful healthcare, and high infant mortality are compounded by chronic armed conflict, which has reached the streets of Gondar, exposing members to random shooting and kidnappings. We met one woman in her forties whose husband was killed by a stray bullet, leaving her to feed ten children. Yet, if you ask most adults what they want the most, it isn’t more food or clothing or electricity, but rather to rejoin their families and fulfill their tikvah to live in Israel.

In 1991, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef addressed the controversy over the Jewishness of the Falash Mura. He researched the matter extensively and cited the Talmudic dictum “A Jew, even if he sins, is still a Jew.” Halacha does not recognize conversion out of Judaism, and so as soon as an apostate wishes to return to Torah, which this community has already done en masse, they are considered fully Jewish without any need for a reconversion ceremony. Rav Ovadia’s broad shoulders and sensitive heart single-handedly saved this historic tribe of Am Yisrael. Rav Ovadia, whose visage is painted on a mural at Addis, set the foundation for the rulings of Sephardic chief rabbis since. Ashkenazi rabbis agreed that Israel should accept them as olim, with the caveat that they also perform conversion to cover any doubts. Still, there remain various legal, logistical, budgetary, and political obstacles to accepting a new wave of Falash Mura, leaving those still in Ethiopia in indefinite limbo.

This bleak snapshot, however, is part of a much longer story that includes many hard-won successes and inspiring heroes. Since 1991, 55,000 more members of Beta Israel have made aliyah, so the total Ethiopian Jewish population in Israel has grown to 180,000 strong. Seventy-three percent of Ethiopian Israelis who have arrived since 1991 enroll their kids in religious schools—much higher than the national average—demonstrating their devotion to Torah and halachic practice. They also serve with distinction in the IDF, volunteering in combat units that engage in some of the most difficult fighting. Although just 2 percent of the total Israeli population, Ethiopians count for a disproportionately high ratio (about 5 percent) of IDF deaths since Oct. 7.

This community has had a heroic advocate for the past 37 years. Joseph Feit, a Yale-trained lawyer, practiced tax law until age 52 when he experienced a midlife search for meaning. He was involved as an activist in demanding that the USSR “Let my people go!” At the personal behest of Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, he transferred that energy into this new cause, calling on Israel to “Let my people in!” He retired from work and devoted even more time and all of his talent to successfully and repeatedly suing the State of Israel to abide by its raison d’être to be the national homeland for all Jews. His son Jeremy, after serving on the board of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, later founded SSEJ, which has built the various compounds that house the synagogues, feeding centers, Hebrew schools, computer classroom, health clinics, and community centers that are so vital to keeping these communities alive while they wait their turn to make aliyah.

While Joseph remains the head strategist of the effort, his three children, who led and guided the rabbis on the trip, have now taken the reins, raising money, assessing needs, and making daily decisions big and small for the welfare of these now 13,000 souls. The Feit family members have adopted this community with a devotion that continues to inspire and mystify the rabbis as we trail in their coattails. There is a lesson here about how a single insanely passionate individual or small group can literally save tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, responsibility for basic food and healthcare for the poorest Jews in the world should not rest on the shoulders of one family.

Of the 11,000 members eligible for food and services at the Gondar compound, initial investigations estimate that 6,000 have at least maternal lineage and the rest have only paternal lineage. The Israeli government has yet to examine each of these cases to determine who is halachically Jewish, who is eligible under the Law of Return or under the Law of Entry, and who should be turned away. This delay in processing these claims submitted long ago is difficult to explain. While they wait, the least we can do in our own communities is ensure that none of these children lacks basic needs and that no woman should suffer four miscarriages (as one of the hazanim confided to me about his wife) because she has no access to an obstetrician. SSEJ has recently cut four- and five-year-olds out of the daily feeding program due to lack of funding, so now it serves only pregnant and nursing mothers and kids up to three years old. We can do better.

As we headed back to Addis Ababa for the trip back home, one scene from Gondar stuck with me: dozens of men scrubbing down rolling pins, rolling out dough, transferring the flat discs to the woman bakers who place each one on a wood-burning injera grill, all within five minutes, to make 150,000 matzos for what they boast as the world’s largest seder, for 5,000 people, each individual waiting too long to leave their exile and make it finally to the promised land.