Associated Press
August 17, 2008
GONDAR, Ethiopia - Sitting in a leaky, flyblown hut, a few dozen Ethiopian villagers are anxiously waiting to be transported to another world.
They have just been given word that their years of waiting are over and they soon will make a 2,000-mile journey by land and air with what is probably the last wave of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel.
In doing so, they are flying into the teeth of a dilemma that touches the heart of Israel's founding philosophy.
For people like 48-year-old Abe Damamo, his wife and eight children, wrenching change awaits.
Like most Ethiopians with Jewish roots, they have come from the Gondar region of northern Ethiopia. Their remote village uses donkeys for transportation and has no bathrooms. Damamo has no formal education and speaks no language but his own.
He is moving to an industrialized democracy where he will have to learn Hebrew, master a cell phone, commute to work and find his place in a nation of immigrants from dozens of countries.
But to him, being Jewish is all that matters.
"I am so happy to go and live my religion," he says through a translator.
Not everyone at the Israeli end is happy, however. In the initial stages of an immigration that began three decades ago, all the Ethiopians emigrating to Israel were recognized outright as Jews. But those now seeking to make the trip are the so-called Falash Mura, whose ancestors converted to Christianity, the main Ethiopian faith, at the end of the 19th century to escape discrimination.
Initially, Israel balked at accepting their claim of Jewishness, but relented after American Jews led a campaign for the Falash Mura.
About 40,000 moved to Israel, a country of 7 million, joining 80,000 already there. Their presence touched off a fierce debate in Israel over where to draw the line.
Ethiopians with any hope, however faint, of eligibility for Israeli citizenship have descended on camps in the city of Gondar, scrambling to prove their Jewishness. Men in prayer shawls attend makeshift synagogues, and children in skullcaps sit on mud floors learning the Hebrew alphabet and Jewish holidays.
Centuries of intermarriage and a lack of documentation have made it extremely difficult to prove who is a Jew, and the group awaiting their flight to Israel last month was supposed to be among the last. The Israeli government has decided that the influx must stop.
Those able to meet the criteria for immigration will have to undergo conversion to Orthodox Judaism after arriving in Israel.
Besides cutting to the heart of the age-old debate over who is a Jew, the dispute between the Israeli government and the U.S. Jewish activists who finance the Gondar camps raises uncomfortable questions about a central tenet of Israel's founding philosophy.
Israel's Law of Return guarantees citizenship for any Jew in need, and these days the country is especially concerned about boosting its Jewish population to compete with the Arabs. But the Ethiopians have proved the hardest immigrant group to absorb, and the Falash Mura, some critics feel, are pushing the limits.
Like every other immigrant group, Ethiopian-Israelis have made their mark on the human mosaic of Jewish nationhood - giving it top-notch soldiers, funky musicians, world-class athletes and two members of parliament. They also have a powerful backer, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party in the ruling coalition, which capitalizes on the Ethiopian vote.
But as a whole they are poor, plagued by crime, violence and substance abuse, feeling shut out of a world very different from rural Africa.
The steep learning curve is evident even before they depart for Israel.
Those approved for immigration are taught what a refrigerator looks like, how to cook on a stovetop, how to flush a toilet. Nurses teach the women to use female hygiene products. The families are introduced to TVs and are shown videos of life in their new world. They are warned to mind the "magic stairs" - the escalators - at the Addis Ababa airport.
Before leaving, they undergo extensive medical checkups at an Israeli Embassy compound in Addis Ababa, and their African surnames are replaced with Hebrew ones.
But despite all the preparations, most Ethiopian immigrants over age 35 go straight onto welfare after reaching Israel, according to the Jewish Agency.
The Israeli government, lacking a universally accepted definition of Jewishness, has long welcomed immigrants whose links to Judaism were tenuous, many of them among the hundreds of thousands who came from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Israel has struggled for years to figure out which Ethiopians should be admitted. Each time it has tried to end the immigration by emptying the Gondar camps and airlifting their inhabitants to Israel, thousands more have flooded into the camps, scrambling to prove their Jewishness.
The argument now seems to have come down to numbers: Israel says the last of the Falasha Mura who qualify for immigration arrived in Israel this month; the American groups say 8,700 have been left behind.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has upheld the Israeli list.
