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Show kissed, rapidly alternating from one cheek to the other. The last kissed was a lean young man of about 17, Assa K.. who spoke some English. He told me that three of his older brothers and their families were already in Israel. He beamed. Soon they would all be together. From the edge of a steep precipice, we watched him disappear into the darkness below the village huts. Then the priest led us back to the village synagogue, where prayers for those who had left were said all night by those too old or infirm to go with them. I had gone to Ethiopia to report on the famine which, by December 1984, had felled some 300.000 people and to check the story of Operation Moses, the secret airlift of an estimated 7000 to 10,000 Ethiopian Jews, at that time an unconfirmed rumor. I was not prepared for what 1 saw: In Addis Ababa, government officials drove in elegant black Mercedes e limousines to sumptuous parties of meals. For New Year's Eve, truffles and champagne were flown in to the main restaurants and hotels. But less than 200 miles away, cattle of little more than skin and bones roamed over a parched countryside. Farther north, at Majete, human figures, mostly women and children, straggled along the dry hillsides searching for edible leaves, tufts of grass, anything remotely suitable for eating. At Hara Buri, a Red Cross feeding post, I saw human skeletons walking, children of 2 or 3 years with limbs thin as sticks and eyes, deep in their inflamed sockets, covered by swarms of fat black flies. In the camp's sick bay. women and children in extreme states of dehydration lay on makeshift beds on the dusty ground. Disease was rampant: measles, diarrhea, yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis. The death toll ranged between 30 and 45 each day. From the hardest hit areas. I flew to the region of Gondar. where most of the Falashas live. When we landed at the airport. Ethiopian soldiers were unloading sacks of flour from a British Royal Air Force transport plane. The drought had reached these parts, but there was still no famine. And yet. I found that the sight of those on the brink of famine they still had a handful of beans was almost as upsetting as seeing the emaciskeletons of the ated. starving. In the next few days. I visited four Falasha settlements in the hills of central Begemdir. Nearly all the inhabitants were subsistence farmers. They too had been hit by the drought but were not yet starving." as one farmer put it. At one village, I was told that more than half the inhabitants already had gone north to Sudan. Those left behind were mostly older people, who hoped to leave soon. If they let us." said an old man. An old priest who spoke halting He Inside Sudan, in reception camps for the refugees, many more Falashas died 1 non-Israe- eight-cours- PARADE MAGAZINE APRIL 28, 1985 PAGE 5 of dehydration, dysentery and other diseases rampant there. Outside only one Sudanese camp last January, a writer for The Times of London counted 1500 Falasha graves. Back in Israel. traveled to Ashkelon. where some of the youngerarrivals from Ethiopia have been given temporary housing for the winter at a seaside resort hotel. Here they are offered a crash course in Hebrew and training in manual and technical professions. A few are still treated, at a nearby government hospital, for tropical diseases that have not been seen in Israel for decades. A li visitor to Ashkelon might well be struck by an overriding paradox. Israel, after all. is in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history, a 400 percent inflation rate, spreading unemployment, on the very brink of bankruptcy. And yet it is the only country today that has gone to such lengths to import 10.000 blacks, many of them illiterate, some incurably ill. The paradox seems less incongruous to the Israelis. Yoram Kaniuk. an Israeli novelist, says that this was. after all. why Israel was created: to be brothers in deed to all suffering and persecuted Jews in the world. There are, of course, bigots in Israel as in other countries. However, as most newcomers from Ethiopia are still in absorption centers learning trades and the Hebrew language and have not yet entered the labor market, the real strength of the bigots has not yet been tested. Not that there is much concern about it in Israel. We have had black immigrants before." says Dr. Clinton Bailey. aTel Aviv University political scientist. As a nation, so far. we have been colorblind. The tensions, such as they are. e residents and newbetween comers are cultural or social. There have been complaints, however, about the Ethiopian newcomers from mayors in the more depressed cities of the south, worried about scarce jobs and housing. The mayor of Mitzpe Ramon, a town in the Negev, has publicly protested the "preferential treatment" given to newcomers from Ethiopia at the expense of veteran residents. But these have been isolated cases. The only open objection to the unconditional absorption of Ethiopian Jews so far has come from the orthodox chief rabbinate in Jerusalem. Because the Falashas observe slightly different dietary, marriage and divorce laws, the chief rabbinate has ruled that the newcomers must submit to symbolic rites of conversion for example, before they can be married in a local synagogue. But Judaism is a notoriously decentralized faith. A chief rabbi is not like a Roman Catholic pope. Each local rabbi brew said, Next year in Jerusalem." His eyes were shining as he spoke. A few years ago. he said. Hebrew was taught in the village school, but the revolutionary government put an end to it. An American had sent them Torah scrolls, but the authorities had tak-e- n Top: Ethiopia Falasha children at religious service. them away. Bottom: Israel groom with rabbi who married him. They burned them." the old man said. Why? "Because they don't want us to be Jews." Two of the village youngsters had been arrested they were accused of being CIA agents. A young woman had been hung upside recognize you w the dS JeWS, without prodding Tdbbl . . told the yOUUQ ' down for hours while she was being interrogated by the police. In one hut. I was show n photographs of close relatives who had disappeared and of others who had marched north a few weeks earlier. "Please pray for them, for us," my host entreated. I would discover later that this is what most visitors are asked to do by their Falasha hosts. In another hut. a learned man spoke of the history and traditions of the Beta Israel (House of Israel), as the Falashas prefer to be called. He was sure they were descended from the lost tribe of he said, had Dan. His one day set out for Jerusalem, to fulfill prophecy." but upon reaching the Red Sea at Massawa. he had been forced to turn back by the ruining Italian authorities in Eritrea. He spoke of the past, a little nostalgically, and of a future uncertain in the extreme. His present world was doomed. "Operation Moses," the secret airlift of the Falasha Jews from airfields in Sudan to Israel, was organized by the Israeli government. But its role in bringing the Falashas out of Ethiopia and into Sudan has been exaggerated. Most Falashas left for Israel . newlyWeuS and by their own means. When, in 1981. word reached the Jews of Ethiopia that the Israelis were fi them as immiwelcome to nally ready grants under the Law of Return which grants automatic citizenship to every Jew who immigrates to Israel an independent movement began toward Sudan . from where the Falashas hoped to be flown out. In the beginning, hundreds, later thousands, of Falashas simply got up to fulfill prophecy" and started to trudge their way north. The apparent spontaneity of the exodus endowed it with a dimension of great faith, but also of great tragedy. The terrain was wild and inhospitable, infested with snakes, robbers and guerrillas of all shades and denominations. Many Falashas. it is said, were killed or starved to death en route. nt old-tim- continued |
