Waiting for the Promised Land

Thousands of struggling Ethiopians with claims to Jewish roots have been blocked from immigrating to Israel. But their luck may be changing.

Serash Asnakew has six children, a cross tattooed in the middle of her forehead, and a vivid dream of the promised land that keeps her going despite her utter destitution. She shares dream and destitution alike with nearly 20,000 other Ethiopians now huddled in miserable mud huts and lean-tos on the fringes of Addis Ababa and Gonder, the country's major cities, hoping to immigrate to Israel before they fall victim to the current famine, the oncoming malaria epidemic, or some other Ethiopian calamity.

Daily life is bitterly difficult, but these people's greater struggle is for identity. They say they are as Jewish as the 70,000 Ethiopians who left for Israel before them, an assertion supported by prominent religious authorities in Israel and the United States. But the government of Israel, which received earlier waves of Ethiopians jubilantly, has its doubts. After all, skeptics say, until a few years ago these people said they were Christians. Some even converted formally.

Serash and most of the others readily acknowledge this. They say they portrayed themselves as Christians to escape the curses, abuse, and discrimination of their neighbors in the villages around Gonder, the onetime center of Ethiopian Jewry. But when word began filtering into the countryside that the Jews, who historical legend holds were dispersed to Ethiopia more than 2,000 years ago, were returning to Israel in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, they shed their Christian identities and walked away from the material world those identities had made possible.

Serash, her husband, her parents and children, aunts and uncles, and thousands like them left behind homes and villages, farms and businesses 10 years ago, risking everything to be in Addis Ababa when the time came for the next wave of the exodus. Thousands more gathered around aid compounds established by North American Jewish organizations in Gonder. All had faith they would soon follow the approximately 9,000 Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984 and 1985, the 14,000 who departed in 1991's Operation Solomon, and about 50,000 others who immigrated in smaller groups.

Quietly, starting in the early 1990s, and in recent months openly, the Jewish state balked at taking in people trying to immigrate on the basis of returning to Judaism after generations of posing as Christians. Some of the reasons are replete with irony. Secular politicians say the issue is that the Ethiopians' Jewishness is questionable. Liberal politicians worry about the expense of absorbing immigrants who are penniless and, in many cases, uneducated.

In the early stages, officials of the Jewish Agency, a powerful, quasi-governmental organization with tremendous influence over immigration to Israel, blocked the returning converts from participating in Operation Solomon. After the operation, the agency persuaded major Jewish charities not to assist them.

The number left behind was not huge, and for a time their plight was obscured by the general euphoria in Israel over the successful immigrants. But as more and more people came to the cities from the villages, their numbers swelled to a size that was harder to ignore. Leading clerics, most notably the Sephardic patriarch, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, ruled that they clearly were Jews and should be welcomed in Israel. By early this year, the pressure was so great that the Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously to take the Ethiopians in.

Despite the vote, despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's promises to do everything possible to bring them, despite the unequivocal declaration of the rabbis that the Ethiopians are Jews and thereby entitled to enter Israel as a matter of law -- and despite the Cabinet vote to act immediately -- immigration remains but a trickle. Sharon's government recently convened a committee to study the problem.

But the situation is not cooling down as it did previously when promises were made and committees were formed. Advocates for the Ethiopian Jews are pressing a case before Israel's high court. American politicians and Jewish leaders are adding their voices to the chorus demanding to know why the Ethiopians, whose cause is extremely popular among the general public in Israel, still are being admitted only in small numbers.

"I do not know why I am still here," says Serash, who lives in a barren cabin that clings to the side of Yeka Mountain in Addis Ababa, a 45-minute walk from the compound operated by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, where she gets food and education for her children and religious instruction for the whole family.

"It is very hard," she says. "My husband cannot get a job. We live on some weaving that I do, and on the children's distribution" -- actually on bonus food that is given to families whose youngest children show up for both of the feedings for toddlers and nursing mothers provided daily at the compound.

Two of Serash's sisters and her uncles and aunts made it to Israel. Her mother died waiting. Serash, her immediate family, her remaining sister, and her sister's seven children are in limbo.

Twice a day, with her youngest child on her back, leading the next-youngest by the hand, she makes the 90-minute walk from the cabin to the compound and back. They eat, and she picks up the bonus ration that helps feed the rest of the family. The remainder of the time she weaves and minds the children.

Her sister Asafu and her children, who live nearby in an overcrowded mud hut with a rough dirt floor, are in much worse shape. Asafu stayed in the family's home village with her Christian husband when the rest of the family came to Addis. She and the children suffered abuse and deprivation that finally caused them to flee. By the time they got to Addis, it was too late to register for even the meager food and medical assistance that most of the waiting Ethiopians receive. They are hungry now. Some of the children show signs of malnutrition.

Serash may not understand why she is still waiting in Addis, but many supporters of Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel say they believe she is being held back because of racism, or at the very least discrimination, because of the Ethiopians' poverty and generally low education level.

The Ethiopians' advocates say discrimination started with the Jewish Agency. Jewish Agency officials say they took their lead from the government. Most government officials avoid comment.

But as pressure builds to resolve the situation, hot-button issues pushed aside during nearly three years of intense Israeli-Palestinian struggle are returning to the fore: Who is a Jew? Does Zionism have a racist component? Are the Jews a religion, or are they a nation-tribe whose members are linked by ancient bloodlines?

"There is racism because they are black. It is a big reason" why so few Ethiopians are being admitted, says Rabbi Menachem Waldman, who represented the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Ministry of Religious Affairs on a 1991 committee created by the government to look into the Ethiopians' Jewishness and make recommendations regarding their admission to Israel. The committee, and another, similar panel that followed it two years later, found that they were Jews and recommended they be admitted.

"Ethiopia is a very religious country," says Waldman, a specialist on Ethiopia and Ethiopian Jewry. He strongly resents the whispering campaign among Israeli politicians and bureaucrats who suggest -- never openly -- that the Ethiopians are simply poor Africans who want to escape to a prosperous, highly developed country. "People's minds are pure about religion there," Waldman says during an interview in Jerusalem. "When they say they are returning to the religion of their fathers, it is very serious and deep. They repent their fathers' conversions."

The spectrum of rabbinic support for the Ethiopians extends from some of the most conservative to some of the most liberal clergy, from Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar in Israel to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of Reform Jews in the United States.

Amar, who visited and queried the Ethiopians, wrote and publicly released a letter to Prime Minister Sharon certifying that "they are completely Jewish without any doubt" -- a fact that under Israeli law should entitle them to immigrate. He urged Sharon to implement the government's February decision to bring them to Israel as soon as possible. "It would have been better if it had already been done an hour ago," Amar wrote.

But the current government seems determined to go slowly. Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, the Israeli official with principal responsibility for the Ethiopian issue, dismisses the February Cabinet vote as the action of a previous government. A member of the stridently secular Shinui Party, Poraz is quick to note that "some rabbis say they are not Jewish." He says he cannot remember those rabbis' names.

In 2000, then-interior minister Natan Sharansky was instrumental in bringing more than 6,000 Ethiopians to Israel over the objections of the Jewish Agency, the absorption ministry, and the finance ministry. This time around, Sharansky, who now is minister for relations with the Jewish diaspora, warns that taking in destitute Africans without carefully checking whether they are in fact Jews could lead to an avalanche of fraudulent applicants.

Sharansky says he thought that after the 2000 operation, the compounds at which would-be immigrants receive food and other support would be closed, putting an end to the pressure that is exerted on the government when a large number of impoverished applicants congregate in one or two places. But now, "three years after that operation, there are two camps with 20,000 people, and the pressure is even greater to take all these people immediately. . . . We should bring all the Jews of the world who want to come, but we cannot solve all the problems of the Third World."

Rejecting allegations of racism that have been leveled by some leaders of the Ethiopian community in Israel and American advocates, he asks: "Is there another country that is so open to black people from Africa and gives them citizenship automatically?"

Even on weekdays, hundreds of adults attend daily prayers at the compound in Addis that is supported by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry. The men wear homespun prayer shawls of blue, white, and silver. Children's voices are raised in almost constant, always vigorous Hebrew song. After morning prayers, many adults attend religion and culture classes. Many others work in the embroidery business they have started, stitching familiar biblical scenes, peopled entirely with black people, into pillow covers and bags for religious objects.

Unlike earlier groups of Ethiopian Jews, they do not live in compounds or camps; they are scattered in huts and shacks across the slopes of nearby mountains. But the compounds here and in Gonder, in the north, are clearly the centers of religious, educational, and communal life.

One of the most eloquent pieces of testimony to the Ethiopians' dedication is mute -- five long scrolls of black cloth, embroidered in yellow thread, that hang at the front of the children's synagogue. They bear the names and ages, in Amharic and English, of "our loved ones who died on the way to join our families and the rest of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel." Of the 182 names listed, 70 are of children younger than 5, 24 of people older than 60.

After morning prayers, Temesgen Asmamaw, chairman of the community, climbs down from the rough-hewn podium surrounded by bright, enamel paintings of the exodus from Egypt and talks about growing up Christian in Dembia, a town near Gonder. His story is typical of the general experience of the waiting Ethiopians.

Temesgen's mother was married to a Christian soldier, and she presented herself to the neighbors as a Christian, but Temesgen's grandmother observed Jewish holidays and would not light a fire on the Jewish Sabbath, for which she prepared a special bread and put on fresh clothes -- traditions followed by Jews throughout the world. His grandmother made toys of pottery and told him stories of her own mother, who was more observant still.

"Because she made pottery out of clay, she was insulted by local people, who called her kaila -- the evil eye," Temesgen says. "All skilled workers -- potters, blacksmiths, and weavers -- were called kaila, and almost all the Jewish people were skilled workers.

"The Jews were few in number, and they hated to be insulted by the local people," he says. To avoid that, "they had to marry with local people and observe local customs. . . . My mother did not convert except to live with the Christians. . . . She remained a Jew everywhere but on the surface."

The hatred dates to the late 19th century, when Ethiopia's king declared, during a devastating invasion by Muslims from neighboring Sudan, that everyone in the northwestern section of the country should be Christian. One in four Ethiopian Jews died in the war and the conversion crusade, according to Waldman, the specialist in Ethiopian Jewish history. Another 30 percent were converted, and social pressures on Jews were set in motion that were still causing people to convert as recently as 30 years ago.

Whole communities were converted, Waldman says, but the gentiles around them often continued to regard them as Jews and keep them at arm's length.

"The Christians knew who we were, they knew we were Jewish," Temesgen says. "They did not allow us in their churches," but would allow people who followed Christian social conventions and did not practice Judaism to live in peace.

When his grandmother died, Temesgen's mother continued to teach him about Jewishness, and when his mother died, her brothers told him about the religion. The brothers left for Addis in 1990. By the time Temesgen followed, they had departed for Israel in Operation Solomon.

He threw in his lot with an estimated 2,800 people who were left behind when Operation Solomon ended in 1991 and Israel declared the evacuation of Ethiopian Jewry complete.

While the Israeli public welcomed earlier waves of Ethiopian immigrants and strongly favors admitting those now waiting, Joseph Feit, who was president of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry in the early 1990s, says the Jewish Agency and the government have been consistently reluctant to accept Ethiopian Jews in general and been particularly hostile to the return of converted Ethiopians.

In 1990, as the Ethiopian civil war neared its climax and thousands of Jews began streaming into Gonder and Addis from their rural villages in hopes of immigrating, Feit went to Addis to assist them.

The head of the Jewish Agency in Ethiopia "warned me that amongst the people coming down were people whose ancestry was Beta Yisrael," the local term for Ethiopian Jews, "but whose grandparents had converted," Feit says. "He said that they are Christians and that obviously you don't want to give Jewish money to people who don't qualify and are Christians.

"I bought into that," says Feit, who is an Orthodox Jew. "I was wrong. It was a mistake."

For a few years, through Operation Solomon and subsequent, smaller waves of immigration, Feit and his organization refused to assist the converts. "I began to have misgivings when I saw them returning to the practice of Judaism on their own, despite my efforts to stop them by keeping them out of the compound," he says. "When they persisted without help, in some cases with opposition, I more and more thought something was wrong."

Feit made the conference's assistance available to the Ethiopians. Then he began bringing suits on their behalf in Israeli courts. Finally, he retired from his New York law practice and devoted himself to their cause.

"I kept thinking about the St. Louis," he says, referring to a World War II refugee ship whose passengers were sent to their deaths in Nazi-occupied Europe because no country would accept them. "There are 2,000 years of Jewish practice and precedent that say we must help them."

Just as the Ethiopians now struggling to reach Israel have hopes and fears similar to those of the desperate passengers on the St. Louis, the Ethiopians who preceded them to the promised land are experiencing trials and triumphs familiar to earlier generations of immigrants to Israel.

They are not fully integrated into society, they say, but are making steady progress. They have had their first Ethiopian rock star, their first member of the national soccer team, their first member of parliament, their first trainee in the elite Israeli Air Force pilot-training course. They have big plans.

Lieutenant Awoka "Uri" Yaso, 24, left Ethiopia with his father, mother, and eight siblings in Operation Moses. The youngest died in a Sudanese refugee camp on the way. The others became teachers, police officers, and shop clerks. None are unemployed. Yaso is pursuing a career in the army.

"It's been 20 years, there should be some progress," Yaso says, explaining the family's general success in accents and mannerisms that seem very far from Africa. "Some Ethiopians are still closed in [on] themselves, afraid Israeli society won't accept them. Some bridge the gap."

Though they are ever more integrated in Israeli society, they remain connected through the old Judaism of Ethiopia, which became isolated from the Judaism of the rest of the world millenniums ago, and developed some distinctive customs -- especially Sigt, a holiday on which Jews in Ethiopia fasted, went to a high place, and prayed to go to Israel.

Now, Yaso says, "we preserve it as a tradition, and we pray for the people who are still there."

He does not know much about those currently waiting to come -- "I don't have any family in the next wave" -- but he is certain not all the Jews of Ethiopia have come to Israel yet, and that they should.

"The whole world is talking about it," he says, with what might be a touch of Semitic overstatement. "If they are Jews, they should come."

Charles A. Radin is the Middle East bureau chief for the Globe. He can be reached at radin@globe.com.