Israel’s ‘Strangers’ : Falashas ---- the Troubled Migration

When he arrived in Israel 20 years ago, Isaac Elias recalls, people looked at his black face and were sure that he didn’t belong. At one point, he was given 24 hours to leave the country.

“I came to Israel, I said ‘I’m an Ethiopian Jew,’ ” and they said, ‘We don’t believe you; there is no such thing,’ ” Elias recalled in an interview at the Shimshon immigrant-absorption center here.

It took a while, but Elias ignored the pressure and eventually decided that he would remain in Israel. He decided to become an Israeli citizen, and now he works here as a counselor and translator--helping smooth the way for the thousands of Ethiopian Jews, or Falashas, who have arrived in Israel in the last few weeks. They came here in a once-secret airlift called “Operation Moses” that rescued them from drought and famine in Ethiopia.

Better for Newer Arrivals “There wasn’t a reception process like there is today,” Elias said. It will be better for the newcomers, he added, but not altogether trouble-free, despite what has become probably the most highly developed system anywhere of absorbing immigrants.

“There are always problems,” Elias said. “There were problems then; now there are different problems.”

About 7,500 of the Ethiopians have been airlifted to Israel between early November and early January--when, according to diplomats, premature publicity embarrassed the previously cooperative Sudanese government and halted the Israeli-sponsored operation before the last of the Ethiopian Jews could be brought out of refugee camps in Sudan.

Comparatively Small Influx The newcomers joined an equal number already here, most of whom had arrived since 1980 by means still shrouded in official secrecy. The numbers are small compared to past immigrations. About 750,000 Jews flooded into Israel in the four years after independence in 1948, more than doubling the young nation’s population.

Nevertheless, in some ways, the arrival of the Ethiopians is regarded as Israel’s biggest immigration challenge to date.

The vast majority of the new black immigrants are emerging from backward agrarian lives into a modern society. Some Israelis still do not fully accept them as Jews. And their arrival has, for the first time, focused national attention on the color issue.

“It is incumbent on us all to meet this thrilling challenge of befriending, of absorbing, the brothers and sisters who have come from afar,” Prime Minister Shimon Peres said last week in a report to the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, on the Ethiopian immigration.

“We must do this with full respect for their customs and way of life, for the uniqueness of their heritage and the depth of their feelings. We are one people. There are no black Jews and white Jews. There are Jews. History and faith bind us together forever.”

Behind the prime minister’s remarks was the painful memory of past mistakes, when high-handed treatment by the Ashkenazim, the European Jews, of immigrating Sephardic Jews from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa left social and political scars that are still visible. Peres and other Israeli leaders say they are determined that those mistakes not be repeated with the Ethiopians.

‘This whole kind of Tarzan syndrome, as if they’re coming from darkest Africa, simply is not true’ (The Ethiopian Jews regard the term Falashas, by which they are often called, as pejorative. It means “strangers” in their native Amharic language, and, in their view, it emphasizes their second-class status in Ethiopia.)

The Israeli government and the Jewish Agency, which shares the task of caring for new immigrants, are expected to spend at least $300 million over the next two years in integrating the Ethiopian Jews into Israeli life.

Nearly 1,000 employees of the Jewish Agency are working with the newcomers. A voluntary Public Council for Ethiopian Jews has mobilized hundreds of others, who are doing everything from helping the new arrivals open bank accounts to advising them on printing a newspaper in Amharic.

Learning on Both Sides But beyond helping the Ethiopians prepare for Israel, the Israelis must be prepared for the Ethiopians. Steven Kaplan, a Hebrew University African specialist who has been asked to consult on the project, said that to this end the Ministry of Education is assembling a traveling exhibit that will offer junior high and high school students a look at Ethiopian Jewish culture.

Many of the Ethiopians have been disoriented by the move and about 300 of them have suffered such extreme culture and psychological shock that they required hospital care. Chaim Hershko, director of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital, said they showed symptoms similar to those of Jews rescued from Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II.

“They suffered from shock and refused to be separated from their relatives,” he said. “They had no faith in the medical teams treating them, were frightened by physicians’ white uniforms, and hid food under their mattresses and beds.”

Yael Rom, co-chairman of the voluntary Public Council, said the first thing that some of the Ethiopians wanted was plants for their rooms “because they hadn’t seen green plants for so long” in their drought-ravaged homeland.

Hotels, army facilities and rest homes have been mobilized to help handle the influx of Ethiopians. Here in Ashkelon, the permanent home of about 100 Ethiopian Jewish families who arrived earlier, the Jewish Agency rented the Kings Club hotel on the fashionable north side of town for a year.

Search by Computer The hotel served as a reception center for first-stage processing, including a computerized search for any relatives already in Israel. And soon it will become an “absorption center,” where newcomers will spend a year learning Hebrew and getting accustomed to life in Israel.

In Ashkelon’s beach area the other day, a dozen smiling Ethiopian youngsters greeted visitors from behind the fence of the Kupat Holim rest home, which has been taken over as an absorption center. They all wanted to shake hands and practice their first words of Hebrew-- shalom , the traditional word of greeting or farewell, which means “peace,” and boker tov , “good morning.”

Most of the immigrants were wearing Western-style clothes but a few had on native dress. A mother and her toddler held fresh tangerines.

About half of the 228 residents at a trailer park on the south side of town were newly arrived from Ethiopia; the other half were elderly Romanians and Russians. Photographs of blacks, freshly clipped from African magazines, adorned the bulletin boards of language training classrooms, and there were hand-lettered tags in Hebrew identifying the people in the photos as “student,” “man” and “woman.”

One of the sparsely furnished trailers was occupied by an Ethiopian man and his five children. The man’s wife was one of perhaps 2,000 people who died in the course of the arduous journey, often on foot, from the parched Ethiopian highlands to collection points in Sudan.

Of the 7,000 Ethiopian Jews who were in Israel before Operation Moses began, about 2,000 have moved out of the absorption centers into the broad Israeli community, according to a spokesman for the Absorption Ministry.

Ethiopians are scattered throughout Israel--from Eilat, on the Red Sea in the south, to Kiryat Shemona, on the Lebanese border in the north. The ministry’s policy is that there should be no black ghettos in Israel, the spokesman said, adding, “We don’t want to isolate them.”

The government announced Thursday that the Housing Ministry has been allocated $25 million to buy 600 apartments for the newcomers around major metropolitan areas like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Fourteen Ethiopian families have already settled in Kiryat Arba, a large Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the number is expected to increase to 98.

When news of the airlift first broke here, mayors of several Israeli cities suffering from high unemployment and other social problems said that they did not want Ethiopians moving to their towns.

The reaction among the newcomers was “very bad,” according to Rahamim Elazar, an Ethiopian Jew who immigrated in 1973 and is active in the Public Council for Ethiopian Jewry.

“In Ethiopia, we are told that we don’t belong and have no right to cultivate the land,” he said. “I never thought that anyone in Israel could tell a Jew, ‘You have no right to live here.’ ”

Another sensitive issue is a symbolic “renewal” ceremony that Israel’s Orthodox rabbinical establishment insists on to certify the Ethiopians’ status as Jews. Elazar said this requirement is humiliating for a people who kept their faith for more than 2,000 years while they were separated from the Jewish mainstream.

In fact, one group of new immigrants has threatened mass suicide if the requirement is not dropped.

It was not until 1972 that the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel decreed that the Ethiopian Jews were descendants of the lost tribe of Dan and thus truly Jews. Three years after that, a special government decision confirmed that they were automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.

The 16-year-old daughter of an early immigrant is the only black in herr school. Color isn’t an issue. Still, some Orthodox Jews contend that there may have been intermarriage during the long separation of the Ethiopian Jews and that a symbolic conversion is necessary “to be on the safe side.”

Since there is no civil marriage and divorce here--such matters are under the jurisdiction of the religious authorities--the rabbinate’s position is important. One Ethiopian Jewish couple in Safed have been refused permission to marry by the local rabbi. They were married in a traditional Ethiopian ceremony, but it is not certain if any children they have will be recognized under Jewish religious law.

Much Israeli press coverage of the new Ethiopian immigrants has focused on their alleged backwardness, which both the Ethiopians and those Israelis who know them best say presents an image that is wrong and insulting.

“It’s enough to start a trend to label them, to stigmatize them,” said Tamar Eshel, a former member of Parliament and co-chairman of the Public Council for Ethiopian Jews.

Hardly Jewish Tarzans “This whole kind of Tarzan syndrome--as if they’re coming from darkest Africa--simply isn’t true,” said anthropologist Jeffrey Harper, who has visited the Ethiopian Jews in their native land. “They’ve been in touch with Israelis and with Jews from the outside for the last 60 years.”

Ora Danyo, head of social welfare for the Jewish Agency’s immigration department, complained about a film of the newcomers that has been shown on television.

“They were shown having trouble with toothbrushes,” he said, “but their dental hygiene in Ethiopia was excellent. They used a kind of toothpick taken from a palm tree and rinsed their mouths with water after every meal. I wish the average Israeli schoolchild had teeth like the elderly Ethiopians.’ ”

Hebrew University’s Kaplan said the Israeli image of Africa “is still very much tribal gyrations and such.”

“I was asked what sort of contribution I thought these people could make toward Israeli athletics,” he said. “Some of these people are literate in three languages.”

Elazar said, “It’s absolutely not true--we are not primitives. We just haven’t had the chance to study, to learn.”

According to the Absorption Ministry, only about 1,800 of the Ethiopian Jews in Israel are of working age, and about 1,000 of these are still studying Hebrew. Most of the rest are blue-collar workers.

Many work at Israel Aircraft Industries, the country’s biggest defense plant. Three work at Miromit Ashkelon Metal Products Ltd., a subsidiary of American Heliothermal Corp. in Denver. The firm makes solar collection and storage systems, hot beverage dispensers and other products. Plant manager Yona Silber said, “We’d like to have more” Ethiopian workers.

Simcha Zimba, 46, has worked at Miromit for about two years. The father of four school-age children, he cleared 150,000 shekels (about $230 at the current exchange rate) last month, about 60% of the average Israeli wage. His wife also works--in a meat-processing plant. Asked how they get along financially, Zimba shrugged and said they have enough.

Elazar, who speaks Amharic, Hebrew and English, has two children and is studying journalism at a university. He said his countrymen “fit into factories because in Ethiopia they worked with their hands as blacksmiths, carpenters, builders.”

The spokeswoman for the Absorption Ministry said 66 Ethiopian Jews are studying in Israeli universities, including one as a doctoral candidate. Kaplan, at Hebrew University, said there are 60 Ethiopians there in a pre-university course preparing for full-time study.

Most people here say that the stereotyping of Ethiopian immigrants as primitives is based more on ignorance than blind racism, although many are concerned about the potential for trouble as thousands more black Jews emerge into the Israeli mainstream.

Both Elazar and Elias, who were among the Ethiopian pioneers in Israel, say they have not experienced any discrimination or any other form of racism.

Elias, the Jewish Agency counselor, recalled that when his oldest daughter was 5 or 6, she asked him, “Papa, why do they call me black?” He said he explained to her that her forebears had come from Africa, where everyone is black.

Rina Elias is 16 now and the only black in a school of 800 students. She leads an active social life, she said, and her color is not an issue.

There is bound to be some tension, an agency official involved with the Ethiopians said. He cited a case in which a Russian Jew broke up a romance between his niece and an Ethiopian because of the young man’s color.

“What will I do if my daughter comes home with a black boyfriend?” the American-born official said. “What would I do in the States? The only thing I can say to you is at least he’ll be Jewish.”