Reporting from Jerusalem and Beijing— As a child growing up in Kaifeng in central China, Jin Jin was constantly reminded of her unusual heritage.

“We weren’t supposed to eat pork, our graves were different from other people, and we had a mezuza on our door,” said the 25-year-old, referring to the prayer scroll affixed to doorways of Jewish homes.

Her father told her of a faraway land called Israel that he said was her rightful home, she recalls. But “we didn’t know anything about daily prayers or the weekly reading of the Torah.”

Jin has since fulfilled her father’s dream. On a hot summer day in Jerusalem, where she works as a tour guide for Chinese citizens visiting Israel, Jin, who now goes by the Hebrew name Yecholya, wore a long khaki skirt, indicative of her conservative religious views, and Teva-like sandals, the national footwear of Israel.

Jin and her relatives belong to a community of Chinese Jews that was established in the 9th century by Persian traders who traveled along the Silk Road to Kaifeng, at the time China’s capital.

Records documenting the group’s history are spotty, but experts do know that some of the Jewish traders settled in Kaifeng and eventually built a synagogue with official recognition from the emperor. After the last rabbi in Kaifeng died in 1809, many began to forsake their religious practices while holding on to certain traditions, like the prohibition against pork and the celebration of a communal meal on Passover.

Then in 2005, Shavei Israel arrived. The privately funded conservative religious organization, based in Jerusalem, specifically targets descendants of Jews who have lost their connection to the religion, such as those forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition in Spain.

“Chinese have a strong reverence for ancestry,” said Michael Freund, founder and chairman of Shavei Israel. “Even though they don’t know how to read the Torah, they know they’re Jewish.”

So far the organization has helped 14 Jews, out of an estimated 3,000 who live in Kaifeng, move to Israel. But Freund complained that Israel’s bureaucratic and religious red tape has prevented Shavei Israel from bringing over more of these Chinese Jews.

Because the community intermarried and based Jewishness on patrilineal heritage rather than matrilineal, the norm in Judaism, Kaifeng Jews who want to move to Israel need to undergo Orthodox conversions under Israeli law.

The process takes a year or more of study at an Orthodox yeshiva, and requires a final examination before a rabbinical court.

Jin was brought to Israel with three others from her hometown by Shavei Israel specifically to begin the conversion process. Once converted, she was eligible to remain in Israel under the country’s Law of Return. The statute allows Jews to claim citizenship, which she did along with her three Chinese classmates. Jin’s father remains in China, although she said he hopes to join her soon.

At first, Jin and others were indignant about the need to formally convert to Judaism.

“According to me and my family, we were always Jewish,” she said. “I was confused why we needed to go through the conversion process.”

But after she started studying in Jerusalem, Jin said, she realized how little she knew of Jewish traditions and rules.

Jin eventually became such an expert in prayers before meals, Freund said, that she stumped him at a dinner with other Jews from Kaifeng at a kosher sushi restaurant, where they discussed which prayer should be uttered first: the one for the rice or for the fish.

“This is something that I, or most Jews for that matter, would never have given a second thought,” Freund said. “It shows how much they can add to Judaism.”

The first family of Kaifeng Jews to immigrate to Israel was almost sent back to China. Shlomo and Deena Jin (no relation to Yecholya Jin) had overstayed their tourist visas in 2005. As they faced deportation, Shavei Israel worked with authorities to allow them to stay after going through the conversion process. Shlomo, at the time in his late 40s, endured a circumcision to complete the conversion.

More recent arrivals have been in their early 20s and most have felt more at home in Israel than in Kaifeng.

Wang Yage said he stood out his whole life. His house was filled with Hebrew books, a language no one in his family understood, and even his name was different: It’s the transliterated version of Jacob, a biblical name.

After studying one year at Henan University in Kaifeng, the 25-year-old jumped at the opportunity to move to Israel. He hasn’t looked back.

“I feel Israel is my home and I’m more comfortable here,” said Wang, who now refers to himself as Yaakov. “Israelis help you out when you need it; it’s like belonging to a big family.”

After his conversion, Wang plans to become a rabbi to help Kaifeng Jews immigrate to Israel. If he succeeds, he will be the first Chinese rabbi in almost 200 years.

Despite this progress, bureaucracy in Israel and China may prevent larger-scale immigration. According to Shavei Israel, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior has been reluctant to give visas to a group not officially considered Jewish by Israel’s chief rabbinate.

Meanwhile, because Jews are not among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups and Judaism is not one of the five officially recognized religions, the Chinese government is suspicious of the Kaifeng community’s efforts to organize.

“The government is still worried about religion and its negative effects,” said Xu Xin, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University. “They worry it will affect stability and encourage fundamentalism.”

Ultimately, the government sees organized religion as a challenge to its power and state-sponsored atheism.

Along with a newfound freedom of religion, the 14 Kaifeng Jews are looking forward to stretching their political wings.

“The first time I went to vote, it was raining hard and three of us went together,” Jin recalled. “I was so proud. For everyone else there it was just another election, but for us, it was the beginning of a new life.”

Haas is a news assistant in The Times’ Beijing bureau.

Originally published here.

Tablet

Malkamu Chani spent 10 years in a camp in Gondar, Ethiopia, waiting for permission to move to Israel. In early January, he finally flew to the promised land and moved with his wife and child to a spare, two-room immigrant-housing apartment in Mevasseret Zion outside Jerusalem. His neighborhood was a sea of clotheslines strung across modest backyards. The acrid smell of green coffee beans roasting in nonstick frying pans filled the tiny space that serves as his living room and kitchen. Chani, 28, who worked as a nurse in Ethiopia, wore a striped collared shirt and a knit blue yarmulke on his head.

“Ethiopia is a good country,” Chani said in halting English outside his new home when asked why he wanted to leave Africa. “The government is good. The main problem is that everything is expensive.”

Chani is one of the last 8,000 Ethiopians claiming Jewish roots who will immigrate en masse to Israel, following a government decision in late November. It marks the end of a dramatic transfer of Ethiopia’s entire 2,000-year-old Jewish community, which began fleeing pogroms and persecution in 1970s. In covert operations in 1984 and 1991, Israeli pilots flew 22,000 Ethiopians to the Jewish state in overflowing airplanes. Since 1991, Ethiopians known as Falash Mura have claimed Jewish roots and the right to immigrate, although their ancestors converted to Christianity in the late 19th century. Until November, these Falash Mura gathered in transit camps in Gondar, Ethiopia, while Israeli officials debated whether to accept them. November’s decision, which requires the new immigrants to convert to Judaism upon arrival, marks the end of that debate.

But as the newest immigrants arrive and settle in Israel, the 120,000-strong Ethiopian-Israeli community has seen only limited success in integration.

According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008 the unemployment rate of 13.8 percent among Ethiopian immigrants was more than double the national average. Ethiopians were statistically younger than the overall Jewish Israeli population, with four times as many single-parent families. While 17 percent of Jewish Israelis were on some sort of welfare, Ethiopian-Israelis receiving state support ran at 61 percent. Their children scored lower on school tests and were more likely to drop out of high school than their veteran Israeli counterparts. This is surprising because a third of Ethiopian-Israelis were born in the Jewish state, which would seem to portend better integration.

Read the full story here:

New York Times

JERUSALEM — The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site.

“We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jerusalem man of God. It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez.

“My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said, using the Hebrew word for soul.

Read the full story here:

The Interior Ministry’s controversial Oz immigration police unit has been accused of beating and verbally abusing members of an African-American family from Kansas City whose members converted to Judaism several years ago, and are living in Ashkelon pending a decision on their citizenship request.

Kristien Garrett, 24, who is seven months pregnant, was taken by ambulance to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital after the Oz unit operation. During the operation, several officers detained her husband Sean, telling family members that his name did not appear “in the system” of the ministry’s Population Registry.

Witnesses said Kristien Garrett’s one-year-old daughter and Garrett’s mother Trina Woodcox were struck a number of times as the officers moved to detain Garrett’s husband. Sean Garrett was allegedly handcuffed, beaten repeatedly and subjected to racial slurs while in custody; he was later released when ministry officials determined that his visa was valid.

The Oz unit, which spearheads a high-profile Interior Ministry campaign to track and expel foreign nationals who lack valid permits to remain in Israel, admitted to having detained a family member in error, but denied allegations of use of physical force. It countered that family members had attacked them with “cursing and swearing.”

The family had come to Israel at the invitation of the Interior Ministry, which asked to interview them prior to a final decision on their request for immigrant status. Ministry officials held a hearing on their case last month, a step in the process toward receiving citizenship.

When Woodcox, who held the family’s documents, asked to accompany Sean Garrett in the police van, “officers grabbed her by her hair and her head, and pulled her by her leg,” dragging her out of the vehicle, Kristien Garrett told Haaretz Thursday, after her release from the hospital.

The officer with her mother “turned around and started hitting me and my child in the face,” she said. Her husband tried to help her, “but two other officers jumped on him, handcuffed him, and beat him up while the other officer was hitting me and my daughter.”

Neighbors left their houses to come to the family’s aid. “Everything was just a big frenzy,” Garrett said. “One of the neighbors came and took my daughter away from me, so that she wouldn’t be hit any more. The police officer was kicking me and hit me in my stomach, and I hit him back, to get him off of me.”

Another neighbor called an ambulance. Kristien Garrett was taken to Barzilai with cramps, and hospitalized overnight. She has now been discharged on bed rest.
The lawyer for the family, Nicole Maor of the Israel Religious Action Center, said that they had been subjected to racial abuse by the police officers, who reportedly yelled at them: “Afro-Americans, kushim [darkies], we don’t need you here.”

Family members said the officer who had struck Kristien Garrett later returned and apologized to Sean for beating his wife. “He said that he had never hit a woman before, and that he felt bad for the mistake that had been made,” Woodcox said.

Oz unit official Yehuda Ben-Ezra denied that the officers had used physical force against the family, saying that his inspectors had filed a police complaint alleging that the family had attacked them with profanity.

Questioned regarding Garrett’s hospitalization, Ben-Ezra told Army Radio, “The woman is not in the hospital because of violence by inspectors. Really not.” Pressed by news anchor Yael Dan, Ben-Ezra said “I have no idea why she was hospitalized – why she went to the hospital.”

“You mean there was no violence there?” Dan asked.

“Not on the part of my inspectors. On the part of the residents, yes. On the part of my inspectors, truly no.”

The morning after the incident, Trina Woodcox went to the Ashkelon police station to file a complaint against the police, but was rebuffed.

“They called her a liar, and said that they couldn’t accept her complaint,” said Maor.

Wilcox wrote Kansas City Reform Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, who had converted the family to Judaism, “My heart is breaking right now.

“We have so much love for Israel. But it seems like Israel does not love us back.”

Originally published here.

Recently, the State of Israel paid tribute to some 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who perished on their way to Israel in the first large wave of Ethiopian immigration to Israel in 1983-84. Approximately 12,000 Jews from the Beta Israel community had set off by foot from the remote Gondar region, where they had lived as a distinct Jewish community for more than 2,000 years. The perils they faced on the exhausting three-month walk to Israel were too numerous and horrific to recall. This included hunger, thirst, attacks by bandits and wild animals, and living in refugee camps with rampant disease and malnutrition. One-third of their number died along the way.

For the survivors, painful memories of those arduous times were quickly buried and never really dealt with, producing an endless stream of new problems when these newcomers began the process of integrating into a society that did not understand the grueling trials they had just experienced.

As these new Ethiopian immigrants began settling in Israel, local aid agencies focused on providing them with food, shelter and clothing – the basics of life. Yet the trauma of their long and arduous journey remained hidden inside – an unseen root that hindered their ability to adjust to their new, modern surroundings.

Such were the traumatic beginnings of the Ethiopian Jewish community’s return to Eretz Israel – a dream they had carried for centuries, which met with a harsh reality along the way.

The Israeli government had officially accepted the Beta Israel as Jews in 1975 for the purpose of the Law of Return but required that they undergo a pro forma Jewish conversion process. Their return seemed inevitable, but it soon became an urgent matter as civil war and famine engulfed Ethiopia.

When that first mass wave of returnees exacted a heavy toll, Israel launched rescue efforts dubbed “Operation Moses” in 1984 and then the larger 1991 emergency airlift known as “Operation Solomon,” which brought nearly 15,000 Ethiopians Jews to Israel in just one weekend. The latter involved an unprecedented and secret 36-hour flight plan carried out by 34 El Al planes whose seats had been removed to accommodate more passengers. Several children were born on the way. Some of the passengers were so unused to the modern surroundings, they even lit cooking fires aboard the planes.

As the final line of planes tipped their wings over Jerusalem and landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on a quiet Shabbat afternoon 19 years ago, word began to spread of the new arrivals, and Israelis rejoiced at their coming.

However, their assimilation into Israeli society has proven more difficult than imagined. Most members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community of more than 120,000 people now reside in Israel. Their absorption into Israel has presented many unique challenges. From the outset, workers from the absorptions centers did not understand that they should have been helping the Ethiopians adjust to more than just a modern world of sinks, toilets, elevators and paying bills on time. Many Ethiopians Jews faced the shock of trying to transition from living in a close-knit rural community that shared everything to an increasingly urbanized setting where family life often becomes fractured.

Today, some 70 percent of Ethiopian Jews in Israel live below the poverty line. The rate of suicide attempts is significantly higher within the Ethiopian community than in Israeli society overall. Many youngsters end up dropping out of school and are eventually placed in detention centers. Most Ethiopian Jews still struggle to adjust to Israel and feel greatly discriminated against by fellow Israelis.

The Israeli media has contributed to the negative portrayals of Ethiopian immigrants, according to a study by the University of Haifa conducted by Germaw Mengistu. The study, based on newspapers surveyed between 1970 and 2004, showed that media reports on cultural aspects of the Ethiopian community have been mostly negative, for the most part focusing on immigrants’ ignorance of basic technological skills compared to immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who were presented as “belonging.”

“When the media continuously portrays immigrants in a negative light and attaches stereotypes to them, the public, whose main source of information is the media, begins to internalize these stereotypes,” Mengistu explained to The Christian Edition.

The results of another poll released in January revealed that a majority (52%) of Israelis blame immigrants from former the Soviet Union and Ethiopia for the rise in crime.

The Israeli Ministry of Immigration and Absorption’s chief researcher, Ze’ev Khanin, believes the results indicate that Israelis are not necessarily xenophobic but are prejudiced.

Still, some great strides have been made, and more and more Ethiopian Jews are rising above the obstacles and rejection to become successful and respected members of Israeli society.

Recently, The Christian Edition surveyed a number of community leaders to learn of their accomplishments and how they are now helping others to succeed as well. They are overcoming racism and becoming leaders who break through the walls of misconceptions and ignorance that had held others back. They are not forcing acceptance but are reshaping attitudes and beliefs about the Ethiopian people so that the walls come down naturally. Together, they are rewriting the story of Ethiopian Jewry’s difficult return home to Israel.

DAVID YASO was 14 when he left Ethiopia via Sudan to reach Israel. He remembers the harsh conditions that Ethiopians had to face for endless days in refugee camps before the Operation Moses rescue operation airlifted them into Israel. But dire circumstances did not hold him back. Yaso has been working as the director of the Ethiopian Department at the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption since 2002.

“This office is special because it is the only government office geared toward Ethiopians,” he told The Christian Edition.

Since 1992, his department has been dealing with all areas of immigration, education, employment and housing — essentially trying to provide everything necessary to help Ethiopian Jews fit into society from the moment they arrive.

“New Ethiopian immigrants come from primitive villages and must learn how to do everything we consider simple. The process is hard but is successful,” Yaso explained.

“The biggest challenge we face is that we have been given a budget to integrate, but Israeli society still does not accept them even after a new immigrant has received some education,” Yaso added. “Besides that, for the individual the biggest challenge is getting a job. But once they get their foot in the door, they prove to be efficient workers.”

Yaso notes three main positives in his dealings with new immigrants from Ethiopia: 1) the sheer success of physically journeying and arriving in Israel; 2) the funds for living expenses provided by the government for these immigrants who came with nothing; 3) the ability to receive higher education for free.

ASHER RAHAMIM had an easy absorption process when he arrived in Israel as a teen, but he has dedicated his life to helping other Ethiopians work through the hardships most face upon coming here. Today, he is the coordinator of services for the Ethiopian community at the Center for Psychotrauma at Herzog Hospital.

“In the process of integration, new immigrants don’t always get what they need in terms of psychological healing and help. The basic missing piece is that they need to know and recognize the trauma they’ve been through,” Rahamim explained.

With so many Ethiopians living below the poverty line, psychological healing “usually gets forgotten, as daily needs are continually pressing. The first thing a person needs is to eat and drink, so that is obviously the focus, and inner healing is secondary,” he added.

However, after 26 years in Israel, Rahamim acknowledged that the proper authorities are now more aware of the unique problems and the best solutions for Ethiopian olim. Much of this is thanks to Dr. Daniel Brom, head of the psychotherapy unit at Herzog, who helped found a trauma unit especially for the Ethiopian newcomers. His workshops showed that their higher suicide rate was a result of not dealing with trauma, stress, cultural conflict, socioeconomic differences and not feeling accepted in Israeli society.

Rahamim said, “For example, just the perilous journey to Israel through Sudan alone brought many unspoken traumatic issues to the new immigrant. It is believed that 4,000 died in Sudan, and many living in the refugee camps there witnessed countless burials, [and] experienced starvation and disease.”

Rahamim uses his education, training and own cultural knowledge to create a safe place for Ethiopian patients to deal with private emotions. The trauma center team documents their experience(s) via video because they believe that therapeutic video documentation can help the patient heal.

“When they tell the journey, the whole atmosphere changes,” he said. “Documentary [video] enables them to see the process they’ve been through and essentially closes the circle.”

EDDIE SAHALO is an Ethiopian Jewish student who immigrated with his family in 1990 at age 10. He was an excellent athlete, ranked as the seventh-best runner in the world for 400 and 800 meters. However, he couldn’t finish sports training professionally because of health issues, so he finished regular high school and then joined the army.

Today, he is a promising student at the Ruppin Academic Center, a prominent college in Israel that has an innovative program for Ethiopians. Within the Institute for Immigration and Social Integration, Ethiopian students can participate in a leadership program that offers a full scholarship and an extensive support network to earn a BA in business administration and professional training in community volunteering.

“Though I cannot say I personally have the same problems because I have a very supportive and warm family that loves me, still I am aware of what the community is going through,” Eddie said.

He started his academic studies at the Wingate Institute, a prestigious national sports school near Netanya, but he had a dream to study business administration. But a barrier was in the way – the psychometric exam. Many Ethiopian students find it difficult to pass this entrance exam for university studies because the test is based on Israeli cultural standards, putting them at a disadvantage.

Eddie has one more year in the program, but he has already opened his own business with his brother. And twice he has received the President’s Award for volunteering and starting new volunteer initiatives.

PNINA FALEGO-GADAI journeyed from Ethiopia to Israel with her mother and sister as a very young girl, so she cannot recall the difficulties of that long trek in 1984. But she does remember the challenges she faced growing up in Israel, such as being the only Ethiopian student in her school.

Falego-Gadai is now the director of the Hillel chapter at Tel Aviv University, making her the first Ethiopian Jew to head one of the 500 centers of the largest Jewish campus organization in the world. Her job is to direct and supervise Jewish cultural and educational activities at the university.

Falego-Gadai sees three main challenges to fighting ignorance. First, “Ignorance starts in education,” she insists. “If Ethiopians don’t see their own face everywhere, how will they know which sector of work is possible to pursue?” For example, she notes that there are only 90 Ethiopian teachers in all of Israel.

“The sense is that we don’t exist, except in the news and then it’s negative. And it’s sensational,” she adds. “We’re not good with sharing and don’t talk about [the positive things that] happen in the community – we’re very quiet. We need to give more respect to ourselves first, by sharing our real stories.”

The second challenge she sees is a lack of motivation and self-respect. “The gap between parents and the next generation is huge. Kids from three to 12 can be integrated very well, but with parents who are above age 40, it’s too late because learning a new language is difficult and they tend to only know agricultural or cleaning skills.”

Finally, she says there is a disconnect between mainstream Jewish community life today that follows evolving rabbinical rulings and the Beta Israel from Ethiopia who adhere to a strict observance of biblical laws from several millennia ago.

“Are we Jewish?” she asks rhetorically. “According to Israeli standards, the question is not resolved.”

DANNY ADMASU was 10 when he immigrated to Israel in 1984 through Sudan. Today he is the executive director of the International Association of Ethiopian Jews. Admasu chose not to focus on his absorption process because he sees it as the smallest of challenges when compared to others. But his integration experience became a catalyst to helping others integrate successfully.

He believes the IAEJ is in a good position to help Ethiopian Jews because it it is not government funded, “so we can really focus on the problems. We are trying to give tools to the community so they handle as a group what their rights are as citizens.”

IAEJ successfully campaigned for the annual Sigd festival to become an official national holiday in Israel in 2008. Sigd, which refers to prostrating oneself, is the day on the Ethiopian Jewish religious calendar when the community fasts to commemorate the nation’s acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. But it also marks a return of the community to the homeland with hopes of rebuilding the Temple.

The greatest disappointment Admasu sees is Israel’s “recognizing the Ethiopian community as part of society but, at the same time, seeing that there are special needs for someone integrating from that place to here. For the bureaucrats, it’s very difficult for them to understand because on one hand we are asking for equal opportunity, and on the other hand we are asking for help.”

He then lists his greatest joys. “When you see Ethiopian Knesset members on Channel One TV; that you can change the law for the Sigd holiday; to see the institute for Ethiopians who died in Sudan set up on Mount Herzl; when you see more Ethiopian organizations trying to effect change; when I see the Ethiopian community represented in the Prime Minister’s Office.”

He says that “As human beings, we always want more and more, but in 30 years from the place we come from, to learn another language, in short, to overcome – the most important things haven’t been done, but there is a hope that if you work hard, you can do it.”

In terms of the future, Admasu hopes for “more legal action against racism and discrimination” so that people do not get refused a job because of color. He also wants his people “to be a part of society and be able to say what they really feel – not what sounds good, not what is expected.”

“I am first a human being, then a Jew, then a Jew who came from Ethiopia, and then Israeli. Israel cannot be my first identity because of my history experience,” Admasu said. “Don’t put me where you want me to be; I choose my identity.”

Originally published here.

NEW YORK (JTA) — After months of fits and starts, advocates for Ethiopian aliyah are hoping that a visit to the African country this week by Israel’s minister of immigrant absorption will help set in motion a process that will bring some 7,500 additional Ethiopians to Israel.

So far, the Israeli government has committed to checking only 1,800 of them for aliyah eligibility and bringing those who qualify to Israel.

But advocates for Ethiopian aliyah want a total of 8,700 Ethiopians checked for eligibility — all those they say have been waiting in the Ethiopian city of Gondar and are part of a list compiled in 1999 of potential immigrants. These advocates have been pressing their cause with Israeli government officials.

“It could either be done by a Cabinet resolution or the Knesset could adopt legislation,” said Joseph Feit, a leading board member at the North American Conference for Ethiopian Jewry, or NACOEJ, the U.S. Jewish group that has been leading the campaign for Ethiopian immigration. “The hope is the government will adopt a resolution and the legislation forcing the issue will not be necessary.”

NACOEJ has led a campaign for the 8,700 Ethiopians for about three years and, before them, for tens of thousands of other Ethiopians who have immigrated to Israel since the early 1990s. That’s when Israel began accepting Falash Mura — Ethiopians claiming to be descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity generations ago or claiming to have links to such people, but who now seek to return to Judaism and immigrate to Israel.

The Israeli government has declared an official end to mass Ethiopian immigration several times. Each time, however, aliyah from Ethiopia resumed after pressure by advocates convinced a key government official — usually the prime minister — to reopen the gates.

After the most recent declared ending of Ethiopian aliyah, in August 2008, it took a few months for the Olmert government to reverse course and agree to check the aliyah eligibility of 3,000 additional Ethiopians. Since then, some 1,200 Ethiopians have been brought to Israel.

In May 2009, the Netanyahu government affirmed that once all 3,000 were checked, Ethiopian aliyah would be over.

But now advocates say they are close to reversing that decision, too.

Thanks to aggressive lobbying by NACOEJ and its supporters, the number of Israeli officials and lawmakers who support an increase is growing. In recent weeks Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which is responsible for immigration to the country, has endorsed NACOEJ’s position, calling for Israel to examine the eligibility of all 8,700 would-be petitioners in Gondar and speedily bring them on aliyah so Israel can end mass Ethiopian immigration.

“The aliyah from Ethiopia must be completed,” said the director of the Jewish Agency’s immigration and absorption department, Eli Cohen, who works with Sharansky and accompanied Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver on her trip to Ethiopia this week. “The time has come to complete the mission. The longer we wait, it will not be solved. It will get more complicated.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who attended a ceremony at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport the last time he was prime minister, in 1998, welcoming what his government said was the last planeload of Ethiopian immigrants — has yet to approve an expansion of the list to 8,700.

But in the meantime, the Jewish Agency and NACOEJ have revived an agreement reached more than five years ago but never implemented under which the Jewish Agency would take over NACOEJ’s aid compounds in Gondar and bring all remaining eligible Ethiopians to Israel. The NACOEJ compounds, which provide schooling and some employment and food aid, have been blamed for providing an incentive for Ethiopians of all stripes to congregate in Gondar and claim links to Israel.

Under the agreement, NACOEJ would shutter the compounds and cease all operations in Ethiopia once the last of the eligible Ethiopians is brought on aliyah.

Now the job is to convince the prime minister, Feit said.

“Everybody’s on board,” Feit told JTA. “The 8,700 people in Gondar have been waiting there from two to 10 years. Even if more people come down from the villages, they won’t be allowed to make aliyah. It’s a closed list.”

Part of what makes the immigration from Ethiopia so complicated are the special circumstances surrounding the Falash Mura.

Unlike the Ethiopian Jews who made aliyah in Operations Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991, the Falash Mura, whose ancestors converted to Christianity, did not maintain Jewish customs and were not identifiably Jewish. Until they left their villages, many practiced Christianity, had crosses tattooed on their foreheads and did not know what being Jewish was.

In 1991, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir decided they were not Jews and kept them off the planes during Operation Solomon. Subsequent Israeli governments reversed that policy, but due to the difficulty of finding evidentiary proof of their Jewish lineage, the Falash Mura were brought to Israel under the Law of Entry, a humanitarian measure aimed at family reunification. Other immigrants come to Israel under the Law of Return, which guarantees the right of Israeli citizenship to anyone with a Jewish grandparent, including Ethiopians.

Numerous officials involved in Ethiopian aliyah — from Jewish Agency officials working in Ethiopia to Israeli interior ministers in Jerusalem — have questioned the legitimacy of the 8,700 people, 1,200 of whom are already in Israel. Sounding a common refrain among critics of the Falash Mura aliyah, they have described the aliyah petitioners remaining in Ethiopia as mostly Christian Ethiopians deceptively claiming Jewish links and adopting Jewish observances in a bid to escape Africa’s desperate poverty for the relative comfort of the Jewish state.

Though the Israeli Rabbinate has determined that the Falash Mura have Jewish roots and should be welcomed back to the faith, critics say the Ethiopians left in Gondar are masquerading as Falash Mura.

That criticism, and concerns over the cost of absorbing the immigrants, has held up implementation of government decisions to bring Falash Mura to Israel — including the government’s decision to check 3,000 Ethiopians from among the 8,700 in Gondar.

Before Landver’s trip this week, which was organized by the Jewish Agency, the minister of immigrant absorption told The Jerusalem Post that she hoped her visit to Ethiopia would help her better understand the issues.

“Once I have seen what is going on, then I will be better equipped to sit with the prime minister and discuss what the goal of the Israeli government is regarding this aliyah and what exactly should be done,” Landver told the newspaper. “I have already sat with many organizations that either advocate for or against this aliyah, with kessim [Ethiopian religious leaders] and many more experts. I just want to create my own opinion on this complicated topic.”

Originally published here: