Israel, a safe heaven for oppressed Jews worldwide, indeed....
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.... but hey, keep those niggers away!
Thursday, July 15, 1999 2 Av 5759 Updated Thu., Jul. 15 08:45
Last Jews of Ethiopia
By NAOMI RAGEN
(July 2) I've always had a special love for my brothers and sisters from Ethiopia. So when a lovely young Ethiopian girl approached me with a handout during the Jewish Agency's General Assembly, I took it gladly and read it with care.
The handout - prepared by a group calling itself "The South Wing to Zion" - was nothing less than shocking. It told of Ethiopian Jews being left behind in Jewish Agency transit camps to die of disease and malnutrition and antisemitic attacks because of the racism of white Jewish officials who preferred white, half-Jewish Russians, to black Jews.
To say I was outraged would be an understatement. So I began to investigate.
My first step was a meeting with the director of The South Wing to Zion, Mr. Avraham Neguise, who reiterated much of what I'd read.
He handed me lists with thousands of names, immediate relatives of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, who were allegedly left behind to rot in camps. His theory about the refusal of Israeli immigration authorities and organizations like the Joint Distribution Committee to aid these suffering Ethiopian Jews was clear: Racism.
The Absorption Ministry was in the hands of Russians, who looked out for their own. The Israeli government didn't like blacks, and so it backed up this policy. The JDC was an arm of the Israeli establishment. Asked about his own background, he seemed uneasy. He'd immigrated from Ethiopia. He was a social worker, he said.
That same evening, I called the JDC to confront them with their "treachery." To my surprise, rather than being defensive and hostile, JDC officials were relieved, even eager, to discuss this subject with me.
I went on to read official Jewish Agency documents and protocols of government meetings. I followed up with a long session with Ms. R., a young, religious, Israeli-born woman who works for the Organization for Ethiopian Jewry and speaks Amharic, who spent a year in Ethiopia, investigating the situation first-hand.
And quite a different picture emerged - one completely contravening Neguise's allegations.
Some background. In 1991, the Israeli government brought 14,700 Ethiopian Jews to Israel during Operation Solomon. An additional 1,800 were left behind, found ineligible under the Law of Return because they, or their families had converted to Christianity. They became known as Falash Mura.
The government appointed the Tzaban Committee to decide on the eligibility of these people to immigrate. In the meantime, thousands of additional people flooded the refugee camps in Addis Abba.
By 1997, 5,200 Falash Mura - some of them practicing Christians - had been allowed to immigrate on the basis of family reunification.
In July 1997, Rabbi Menahem Waldman and representatives of The South Wing to Zion built a mikve in Addis Ababa, which the rabbi used to perform conversion ceremonies on 500 women.
Subsequently, these women and their families were included in a list of 3,623 people Waldman submitted to Natan Sharansky. Waldman agreed to close the complex in Addis when these people, and another 551 from the villages, would be allowed into Israel. Sharansky agreed, mostly on humanitarian grounds.
It was agreed that humanitarian assistance groups like NACOEJ (North American Committee on Ethiopian Jewry) and the JDC would close down their operations when the last of these people were brought over. These immigrants reached Israel in July 1998.
ALL OF a sudden, last August these camps and ones in Gondar suddenly filled up again. Numbers ran into the thousands. The NACOEJ and The South Wing to Zion were suddenly submitting new lists with thousands of names, demanding health care and social services in the camps.
Ms. R. told me that there is very bad blood between the Ethiopian Jewish community and the Falash Mura, who are considered dangerous traitors despite close family ties.
The sudden desire of Falash Mura to convert and move to Israel must be examined carefully. Ethiopians have a gross national income of $127 a year. Their country has serious problems in the health, education and employment sector.
Neguise himself, who was - according to a number of sources - a Christian pastor not too long ago, has been demanding huge sums of financial aid from the JDC for the people on his "lists" as a condition to stopping his worldwide propaganda campaign which depicts the JDC as abandoning suffering Ethiopian Jews to disease and starvation.
Ms. R. also met with Waldman in Ethiopia, confronting him with evidence of people eating
pork in local restaurants, while they'd also wear a tallit to his Shabbat services. Waldman
didn't seem troubled by this, insisting that they were all sincere Jews, longing to be in
Israel.
What broke her heart most, she said, was that the aliya of the Jews of Quara, a northern
region in Ethiopia, with whom she spent much time and whose Jewishness is not
questioned by anyone, was being delayed because of the ongoing battles to bring over the
Falash Mura.
Fortunately, some of the Quara Jews have already joined us. Let's hope the truth comes to
light, and the rest join us soon.
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