Near a river crossing in Ethiopia, several dozen Jews made an unplanned and risky stop on their long journey to Jerusalem 40 years ago.
The travelers, all hailing from the same northern village near Gondar, discovered a young girl from their group had gone missing somewhere on the way.
The group’s armed guides, locals hired to accompany the Jews to the border with Sudan, urged them to keep moving. Staying in open terrain invited robbers on the lookout for exactly such an opportunity, they said, promising to go back later to look for the girl.
The group flatly refused, recalled Mare Maru Senebato, who was 12 when she witnessed this with her family. “No one budged. It was all for one, and no one got left behind,” she said.
The scene encapsulated the courage, solidarity and determination behind Operation Moses—an oft-overlooked but dramatic modern-day exodus whose 40th anniversary is being celebrated this year. Initiated by American Jews and Israel’s government, it allowed some 6,000 pioneers to reach Israel.
They established a growing community that, despite some setbacks, is thriving. In recent years, its young members have begun to look for new ways to reconnect to Ethiopian Jewry’s rich traditions—despite internal communal tensions and race-related challenges.
At the river crossing, the group waited as several of the men retraced their steps. They found the girl a few miles back. She had dozed off under a bush during the previous stop, said Senebato, who was traveling with her parents and four younger siblings.
Traveling occurred at night for safety. Each group comprised several families. Each family had food rations, mostly dried goods. Several horses or mules carried the food and those unable to walk. The group had no tents, only mats to sleep on, usually in forests for protection.
Fighting to survive
These fears and hardships paled in comparison to what happened to the group after they crossed into Sudan, Senebato recounted. “The guides left and we had no water,” she recalled. The group survived on puddles for cattle. Senebato’s mother fell ill and she and her husband got separated from their children. Senebato walked with her sister, who was severely dehydrated, not knowing where the rest were.
Men would venture out ahead of the group and double back to bring water to the stragglers, who tended to be weakest. Senebato begged the men for water for her sister, but they passed the sisters by, assuring them that “there’s water up ahead.” Senebato didn’t realize at the time they were fetching water for the weakest in the group, and she cursed one of the men, she recalled.
“At that point, the solidarity of the trek’s earlier stage had dissipated. People stopped sharing food and water. We were fighting for our lives,” she said.
Eventually, the family was reunited at a refugee camp set up with indirect Israeli involvement for the prospective immigrants to Israel, or olim. Life in those camps “was perhaps more difficult than the grueling journey,” Senebato said.
There was no running water and the Jews were often preyed upon by Muslims from the surrounding villages, as well as non-Jewish refugees fleeing famine.
The Jews with better connections and more money had better lives in the camps. That privileged group got priority when flights to Israel began in late 1984 through 1985. Senebato’s father had no such connections and her family stayed as last at their camp. Non-Jews kicked them out of their shelter there until they were evacuated thanks to the intervention of a relative.
Preparing to die
No one from Senebato’s family died on the journey. Others weren’t that lucky.
Manalush Sanbto, 63, lost two of her nieces to typhus. She carried her bereaved sister, who was also ill, through the desert in Sudan, Sanbto said. But she couldn’t keep up during the last stretch, in which they had to walk to a truck to be taken to an airport.
“Slowly the group vanished from sight. We had no water. The sun was setting. And I sat down with my sister. I didn’t give up hope but I was prepared to die. There were many ways to do this—dehydration, hyenas, murderers—and very few ways to survive but I told my sister we’ll ride it out and that I won’t leave her,” said Sanbto, a mother of four from Kiryat Yam near Haifa.
A relative noticed that Sanbto and her sister were missing and alerted an employee of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which coordinated, with U.S. help, the clandestine extraction from a hostile Muslim country. The relative sent back a fellow coordinator, who carried Sanbto’s sister to the pickup point. The sister collapsed during the flight and medical teams treated her. She was hospitalized for a month in Israel and nearly died.
By the time Sanbto’s plane landed in Israel, many of the villagers aboard distrusted the announcement they’d landed in the Jewish state. “There were rumors that we’d been taken back. We didn’t know anything anymore,” she recalled. But when the stairs truck bearing Hebrew letters pulled up to the aircraft, “there was a burst of relief. We kissed the ground when our feet touched it. We had made it,” she recalled.
Reaching Jerusalem and dreaming of Zion was a major ideological drive for the trek, during which the travelers routinely prayed, as all Jews do, facing Israel’s capital city.
Those who stayed behind
With the arrival of some 6,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in Operation Moses, a path was paved for the rest. In 1991, more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were flown directly from Ethiopia to Israel in Operation Solomon, the largest airlift in Israel’s history.
Decades later, the Ethiopian-Israeli community has about 170,000 members, many of them at the forefront of Israeli society. But it is being held back by elevated levels of criminality and, many say, racism.
Amid their rapid integration into Israeli society, some Ethiopian Jews are noting that their community’s moving away from centuries-old traditions, knowledge and wisdom, which they wish to preserve.
Ayanawo Ferada Senebato, Mare’s husband, is observing a watering down of Jewish and Ethiopian identity in his community’s youth and even intermarriage between them and non-Jews, he said. “We came here to remain Jews, and now here in the Jewish homeland we’re assimilating again,” he said.
To offset that, community activists need to engage the younger generation and instill a sense of pride in them, he said. One of the first steps is dedicating a museum for Ethiopian Jewry that he is planning.
Recentering identity
He already has the first exhibit: An ancient scroll of the Orit, Ethiopian Jewry’s version of the Hebrew Bible. In 2022, Ayanawo Ferada Senebato and some of his relatives retrieved this book from Ethiopia in a daring operation. This book of Psalms, which was written in Ge’ez, a Semitic language used by Jewish clergy in Ethiopia, was left behind by a family that immigrated to Israel in 1991.
Ayanawo Ferada Senebato keeps the 400-year-old book wrapped in an Israeli flag in his living room. It is handwritten and contains multiple annotations added by kesim, the Amharic-language word for rabbis. It also contains passages added to it by Christians who had held the book for the family that left, Ayanawo Ferada Senebato said. The book, which is falling apart, needs restoration and decryption, and Ayanawo Ferada Senebato is raising funds for this.
“When we amass enough of our cultural wealth and share it with our youth, we’ll meet the mission of perpetuating the unique Ethiopian Judaism, but also keep them centered on their own identities, which is crucial for them as individuals and for us as a society,” he said.
Others nurture Ethiopian Jewish traditions through other media. The city of Ashkelon in January saw the opening of the first state-sponsored Ethiopian-Israeli theater, Tizita, whose name means “nostalgia” in Amharic. Communal groups got the state to add Sigd, the main Ethiopian-Jewish holiday, which is celebrated in winter, to the official state calendar in 2008. Thousands of community members celebrate Sigd in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, with the number growing each year.
But Ayanawo Ferada Senebato is also observing trends that he finds disquieting.
“During the Black Lives Matter riots in America, some young Ethiopian Jews here identified with that. I see them wearing Africa pendants and Africa T-shirts all of a sudden. I want to tell them: ‘You’re not about Africa, you’re about here, this place. This religion. This People. Wake up’!” he said.
Part of the reason for the duality in the community is its internal split.
The Ethiopians who came in the 1990s belonged to Beta Israel, a group that has remained Jewish for centuries. Their admission to Israel as citizens under the Law of Return left behind another group, the Falash Mura: descendants of Jews who allegedly had been forcefully converted to Christianity, and who had many family ties with Beta Israel Jews.
Following years of campaigning and lobbying, including by American Jewry, Falash Mura Ethiopians also got permission to immigrate to Israel, but not under Israel’s Law of Return for Jews and their descendants. Falash Mura immigrate by government decree, pending their conversion to Judaism and only if they declare themselves to be unmarried and childless.
In war-ravaged Ethiopia, where the monthly median wage is about $50, permission to immigrate to Israel is in high demand. People who self-identify as Falash Mura have been waiting for many years to get on one of the flights that Israel organizes periodically.
In Gondar, those in waiting have a synagogue, operating from under a tin shed, where they greet visitors from Israel and the United States with Torah readings. The Jewish Agency for Israel and a group called the Struggle to Save Ethiopian Jewry, which receives its funding from U.S. Jewish Federations, run cultural programs for these prospective immigrants, including ones that teach them Hebrew and Jewish traditions.
A sacred duty, or a scam?
So far, at least 28,000 Falash Mura have immigrated to Israel out of 98,000 who have immigrated from Ethiopia in total. The number of Falash Mura who meet the government’s requirements is estimated at 10,000, but the figure tends to grow as their relatives in Israel lobby for the ones left behind to be let in.
In 2007, Israel brought in about 7,000 Falash Mura, saying they were the last. But 13 years later, another 3,000 were brought in. To some Israelis of Ethiopian descent, bringing in those who identify as Falash Mura is “a commitment to our brethren,” as community activist Pnina Tamano-Shata said in 2022, when she was the cabinet minister in charge of immigrant absorption.
“I have made it my mission to make sure none are left behind,” she said during a trip that year to Ethiopia to oversee a Falash Mura flight. Some of the women aboard were wearing handmade festive dresses decorated with the Star of David and other Jewish motifs.
Activists working toward bringing in more Falash Mura, including prominent Likud member Avraham Negosa, have publicly accused the Israeli government of “racism” for delaying the flights of people he said were essentially Jewish.
Avraham Yerdai, a former vice chair of the Union of Ethiopian Jews, rejects these claims. Most Falash Mura who immigrate to Israel “are just Christians. They are changing the character of our community, and are here just to get out of Africa,” he told JNS.
Official data from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority revealed that out of more than 5,000 immigrants from Ethiopia who arrived in Israel as part of Operation Tzur Israel in the year 2020-2022, 3,301 identified as Christians.
Ayanawo Ferada Senebato, a journalist and writer, called the Falash Mura flights “a scam.” Some Falash Mura who came to Israel had a real connection to Judaism, he said. Some who didn’t, developed it after coming, he added. “But mostly, these are non-Jews. Many of them practicing Christians.”
Ayanawo Ferada Senebato describes Israel’s immigration policy from Ethiopia as “absurd.” As Israel encourages the departure of self-identified asylum seekers from Eritrea who got in illegally, “it imports other African non-Jews by the thousands. It’s insane,” he said. “The government does this not to be called racist. But the only reason Falash Mura today are being let in is because they’re black. That’s the real racism.”
He credits American Jewry with successfully lobbying Israel in the 1980s to let in Beta Israel Jews and recognize their Jewishness. But now, “American Jews and the Federations are destroying with their own hands the heroic history they made in the aliyah of the Beta Israel community, by bringing in missionaries from Ethiopia, thereby jeopardizing the existence of the Beta Israel community as a Jewish community in the Land of Israel,” Ayanawo Ferada Senebato told JNS.
The Jewish Federations of North America did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
A question of race?
In Israel, many Ethiopians have complained of racism. Ethiopians have been excluded at state-funded haredi and other schools. Citing HIV concerns, medical authorities had refused to use blood donations from Ethiopians until this practice was banned in 2017, following several street protests.
In 2019, 18-year-old Salomon Teka was killed by a police officer, triggering a violent wave of protests. The officer was cleared earlier this year of any wrongdoing by a judge who found the officer had been in mortal danger from a group of men to which Teka belonged, who threw stones at the officer. To many, Teka’s death symbolizes over-policing in neighborhoods with many immigrants from Ethiopia.
In her modest apartment in Kiryat Yam, Manalush Sanbto paints a nuanced picture of that relationship.
“There’s racism, a little, but not violent and not so much to your face. They just won’t hire you for a job, for example,” said Sanbto, who works in rehabilitative care for senior citizens. Her daughter had tried to find a job for five months before landing one at a call center, she said.
Ethiopian Jews have made great strides in Israel considering “that we came from mud huts 40 years ago,” she said. In 2018, the first Ethiopian man graduated from the Israel Air Force flight school, one of the world’s most rigorous programs of its kind. He isn’t Israel’s first Ethiopian pilot: That distinction belongs to Meital Mengistu, who graduated from a civilian flight school in 2014 when she was only 19.
Pnina Tamano-Shata’s appointment to cabinet minister in 2020 was another communal milestone. Several Ethiopians have become medical doctors, one of them heading the Assuta Hospital in Beersheva. Still, Ethiopians tend to be poorer than other groups, including other immigrants, and overrepresented in prisons.
“Part of it is because of our culture,” said Sanbto. “Our generation was meek and timid. We didn’t insist, we didn’t demand like the other Israelis.” This resulted in the sidelining of many Ethiopian Jews—and to resentment.
“But our young, they’re not like that,” Sanbto added. “They’re Israeli. They’ll make it here. Everything will be alright.”