Prophecy Fulfilled : A New Life in Israel for Ethiopians

For as long as anyone could remember, the teachers and elders had been reciting the prophecy: One day, the black Jews of Ethiopia would be led back to Jerusalem, the city where Judaism had been taught to their ancestors, the descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

In early 1984, almost two-thirds of the Jews remaining in Ethiopia were told that the time of the prophecy was at hand, and 12,000 of them marched out of their homelands.

They were drawn not only by faith. A score of secret schemes over the previous six years had spirited 5,000 of their people to Israel. But now they found themselves trapped in refugee camps in Sudan, their presumed rescuers caught by surprise and seemingly paralyzed, and they had begun to die at alarming rates.

The rescue effort was at a standstill. Officially, the Islamic government of Sudan was an enemy of Israel. The surreptitious methods previously employed to smuggle Ethiopian Jews to Israel were incapable of moving numbers so large. The governments of the United States and Israel, where concern was mounting, were stymied.

Then in September, 1984, an officer of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, came up with a plan to extract the Jews from Sudan. The man who devised it was a 46-year-old former college professor named Jerry Weaver, the embassy’s refugee affairs coordinator. The plan came to be known as “Operation Moses.”

Key Man Picked

In late November, it was ready to go. The Israelis set the time for the first flight--Nov. 20, at roughly 1 a.m. Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had located a young Ethiopian Jew to whom they would entrust the key task of ensuring that those who came on the flights were indeed Jews. James, the man they chose, who cannot be identified further, arrived in Khartoum on Nov. 18.

James was slight, soft-spoken almost to the point of timidity, the son of an old Ethiopian Jewish family, whose name had been prominent among the community’s leadership for generations. Now about 35, he had left Ethiopia years earlier, spent time in Djibouti and attended a university in France before going to work in a Swiss bank. James had never been in Sudan. To Weaver, he looked fragile.

Weaver and Christopher, his Sudanese aide, took him to the eastern Sudanese town of Gedaref, and on the morning of Nov. 19, James first entered the nearby camp at Tawawa where the Jews were staying. Weaver was nervous. The beginning of the airlift was just hours away. It seemed to him that for an operation of this importance, the key man should have been on the scene much earlier.

“He had never been there, no one knew him,” Weaver said of James. “So he had to go in and introduce himself--’I am the son of . . . and I am here to take you out.’ About 2 o’clock, he comes out and he says, ‘I think I’ve made contact, and I think we’ll have the people tonight.’ ”

Word Passed to Sudanese

Weaver passed the word to the Sudanese. The four buses rented to move the Jews from their camp to the Khartoum airport left a grimy, brick-walled warehouse where they had been hidden and were driven across an open field to the straw-roofed tukels (huts) at the southwest corner of Tawawa. It was 5 p.m. A cordon of security officers fanned out behind the buses.

James disappeared into the camp. Weaver climbed down off the bus and waited. Minutes passed and nothing happened--5:15 p.m., 5:20. Weaver grimly noted that the place they had chosen to wait was, in fact, a vast, open toilet. In the distance, Ethiopian refugees, squatting in the fields, stared in wonder.

“About 5:30,” Weaver recalled, “I see a man, a woman and three little children come walking out, looking around, very cautious. I motioned for them to squat down, and they immediately squatted down and didn’t move. Five minutes pass, 10 minutes pass. It’s now 5:40. The sun’s going down. Then I see, coming out from the huts--3, 4, 6, 10, 20, 30--I see a rivulet of people starting to come down.

“As they approach, I again motion for them to sit down. I’m not sure who these people are. I haven’t seen James since he went into the camp, but people are really coming out now, in a steady stream.”

Weaver stood by the closed doors of the first bus, not knowing what to do. He didn’t know whether the people who had appeared out of the camp were Ethiopian Jews or not, or if they were, which ones were supposed to be going. The plan had been to take out the vulnerable first--the sick, the old, the orphans. But at this stage, it looked impossible to sort out. Around him in the rapidly closing darkness were women with children, old men, hundreds of others, and they had begun to push forward, shoving and shouting.

James reappeared and pushed his way to the bus. Weaver was grateful to see him and watched as James tried to question the first five or six people to get on the bus.

But then a wail erupted from the waiting people as the first passengers climbed the steps, and the crowd pushed forward again. James was tossed aside--”like a stick,” Weaver said. The Ethiopians tore at each other’s clothes, tried to get through the iron bars on the windows, climbed on top of the bus. Weaver tore a stick away from an old man and began cracking people over the shoulders, pushing them back.

Convoy on Wrong Road

“By now it is 6 o’clock and dark,” Weaver recalled. “The Sudanese are nervous, I’m nervous, and obviously, the people getting on the buses are very nervous. By about 6:30, we have packed no-one-knows how many people aboard the buses, and we try to leave. People are running after us, total pandemonium. In the confusion, we take the wrong road. We are driving on a dirt track parallel to the Gedaref-Khartoum highway, but we can’t seem to get to it. So we stop the caravan, turn the whole damn thing around and go back toward the camp and get on the highway.

“Now this is our maiden voyage. We’ve got a five-hour drive ahead of us. We had driven about 15 or 20 minutes, and we come up to two traffic policemen. They flash their light, and the convoy commander stops. The two cops come up and start asking who are you and what’re these buses and who’re these people, and one bus has a light out and it can’t go--it has to stay here until it fixes its light. Well, ID cards are produced, much talk follows and we proceed.

“The bus drivers are nervous, and they start picking up speed, 80 kilometers an hour (50 m.p.h.), 100 kilometers an hour (62 m.p.h.)--the buses are out of sight in front of us. We’re driving 120 kilometers an hour (75 m.p.h.), and we can’t catch the buses. I am riding in a car in back with the Sudanese officers, in case there is a breakdown or some problem. We don’t catch up with them until the first checkpoint, where they’re all waiting, and we tell them to cool it, hold it down to 70 the rest of the way.

Plane Is Late

“We make it to the next checkpoint. No problem. We pass it. We’re now halfway. I had timed the arrival to coincide with the planned takeoff time of about 1 a.m. We get to the checkpoint at Soba, which is about 14 clicks (kilometers) from the airport at Khartoum. We’re almost home. We meet a car with some security officers, and they inform us that the plane is late. It hasn’t come yet. It’s about 12 o’clock. We go on past the checkpoint and then pull off the road a couple of hundred yards, and just sit.

“It’s the black of night, and utter silence. We had what turned out to be more than 250 people, in four buses, and we literally didn’t hear a sound. You might hear a baby whimper once or twice, then it would stop. You might hear the retching of some poor devil who was losing whatever he had to eat, but then nothing. Not a sound.

“About 1:20, we can see our plane coming in to land. It should have come in around 11 p.m., but there had been some miscalculation. The plan for the airport is to move as quickly as possible. We came in through a back gate. The plane was to be waiting on the night parking apron, away from the passenger terminal. It would be refueled, serviced, made ready to go, and then the buses would proceed right to the foot of the airplane steps, the people would load up and off it would go. No hanging around, no wasted motion.

“We did all that, got the people on board, but then we had a problem. The pilot said, we can’t go. ‘You’ve got 250 or more people on the plane, (and) we’ve got only enough oxygen masks for 220. It’s against the law. Sorry, we can’t do it.’ ”

Tempers were at a high edge. The pilot and the rest of the crew seemed to have had no idea what to expect and stared open-mouthed at their wretched-looking passengers. People were piled two and three to a seat, children stacked on top of one another. Their clothes were filthy. Some seemed sick. Some were terrified.

The Israelis had sent to Khartoum a Frenchman named Rene whose job was to look after the plane, chartered from Trans European Airlines, and its servicing on the ground. Rene approached the pilot and in loud, firm French told him that if he didn’t want to fly the plane, he would find someone who would. But he would waste no more time talking about it.

The pilot stared back at him, then returned to the cockpit to ready the plane for takeoff. It cleared the runway at 2:40 a.m. Operation Moses was off to a chaotic start.

Weaver drove home at 3:30 a.m. through Khartoum’s empty streets and lay awake the rest of the night, staring at his television set and going over all the things that had gone wrong.

The second flight, two days later, was handled by Christopher, the Sudanese aide. He had stayed in Gedaref with James, who had gone back to Tawawa the next day to try to smooth out the selection process. The Sudanese were alarmed at the mob scene around the buses on the first day. In Khartoum, Weaver talked an officer he identified only as Col. X, a Sudanese who had blessed the project, out of canceling the whole operation. He pleaded for one more try, explaining that there were bound to be hitches on the first effort. The colonel agreed.

When the buses made their second appearance at Tawawa, the crowds gathered around them. At one point, Christopher yanked a bundle from the hands of a woman--the passengers had been told to bring only the clothes on their backs--and when the woman hung onto the bundle, Christopher had it unwrapped and found that it contained a newborn baby.

Christopher, 30, courtly in manner, was blessed with a temperament as gentle as dawn. For a moment, he seemed stunned at his own brutality, at the brutality of the situation in general. He let James and the others handle the count, and he went to his car and sat there until it was finished, thinking that he was not cut out for this kind of work.

The loading was more controlled the second time, and the buses took off with about 230 passengers, 10 more than they should have had, but still closer to the mark. This time, also, the buses stopped twice en route for a rest call. The planners had learned, surveying the buses after the first trip, that they could not keep more than 200 people penned up without relief for five hours. At the airport this time, there were no problems. Flight No. 2 was on its way.

‘Travel Agent’ Problem

Weaver went back to Gedaref with Christopher, on the day after Thanksgiving, and took the third load to Khartoum. Christopher took the fourth and, again, they returned to Gedaref for the fifth load. Another problem had come up.

At this point, no one actually knew how many Jews remained in Tawawa. Some, it was known, had been in the vicinity for months, some for years. A small number had worked with various rescue operations for a long time, probably paid with Israeli money, although that was not certain. They had been asked to work with James.

Weaver and Christopher had begun to refer to them as “the travel agents.” There were four or five of them, with one who seemed to be in command, and they were not happy with James’ appearance on the scene. After a few days, the reason for their displeasure became apparent. They were taking bribes from the Ethiopian Jews to be chosen for the first flights.

When James reluctantly began to talk about it, Christopher recalled that, indeed, it seemed to have been the healthiest, most prosperous-looking people who were chosen for the early trips, particularly for the third and fourth flights, when things had settled down somewhat.

If He Moves, ‘Shoot Him’

It was simple, James explained. The “travel agents” had been doing this work for months, maybe years, and had become brokers, middlemen. The Europeans and others who had used them before had assumed they were simply altruistic Ethiopian Jews who were doing their best to help their own people and to ensure a smooth-running underground railroad. It was even true, to a point, but the situation had changed now, and the “travel agents” were still cashing in. James confided that he felt caught; he didn’t know what to do about it.

Weaver did. When the buses were loaded for the fifth trip, he made sure that the head “travel agent” was standing with him at the first bus. As it filled, he told the travel agent to get on board and count the passengers. Then, he slammed the door. Inside the bus, the man began to shout. Weaver shouted his own orders to the Sudanese security officer inside.

“Tell him to sit down,” Weaver said, “and if the son of a bitch moves, shoot him.” The travel agent was flown to Israel that night.

At that point, new “travel agents” were chosen to assist James. They would select people for four flights, and on the fourth, they themselves would leave and a new group would take over. The arrangement ended the corruption.

Within a few days, another problem that Weaver and Christopher had worried about began to resolve itself in an unexpected way. Although no hard count of the Ethiopian Jews was ever taken in Tawawa, it became apparent that the population of the camp had not been reduced, even though they knew that at least 1,500 people had been sent to Israel.

Investigating, they discovered that the Jews were making it from Um Rakuba, a refugee camp in eastern Sudan where many found refuge after their long trek from Ethiopia, to Tawawa on their own. They were hiring trucks and, for a fee of about $3 per passenger, the truck drivers would rendezvous with the people a mile or two outside Um Rakuba, usually after midnight. The trucks would follow remote tracks to Gedaref and unload their passengers in Tawawa sometime before dawn.

For some months, this movement was a mystery in Um Rakuba. Nurses would visit a family in a hut one day, come back early the next morning, and find that people had disappeared without a trace. Their neighbors would never indicate where they had gone.

Ethiopians interviewed in Israel later explained it. Some of them got jobs weeding the fields around Um Rakuba. A group of 30 or 40 would pool their earnings to hire a truck for Tawawa. The Jews in Um Rakuba had learned almost immediately that people were beginning to leave from Tawawa, that the real movement to Jerusalem was under way. They would not be left behind.

More Flights Added

After a little more than two weeks, the operation had smoothed to the point that it was decided to start running the flights on a 24-hour basis, using two crews, one of them overnighting in Khartoum. By now, the Sudanese were directing the operation virtually alone. Now and then, Weaver or Christopher would make the trip from Gedaref to Khartoum, but it had become almost routine. Weaver remained in the capital, and Christopher became his on-the-scene operative.

The plan they started with held firm, but moved faster. Weaver used two sets of drivers; the unloaded buses would go to the safehouse in Khartoum, and the next morning, rested drivers would return the buses to Gedaref.

The plane, meanwhile, would fly to a European airport-- usually Rome, Athens or Basel, Switzerland--before going on to Israel, where it landed at a military airport.

In Israel, among those who knew of the movement, permission to go see the Ethiopians arrive “got to be the hottest ticket in the country,” as a senior Israeli official observed. A few were granted the privilege, among them important American contributors to the United Jewish Appeal and other organizations.

Jewish enthusiasm over the operation brought about one breach of security that could have halted the airlift in its early stages: A Jewish publication carried an account of a fund-raising meeting at which an official spoke of an airlift of the Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In time, the Washington Post and the New York Times followed up the story. American and Israeli officials held their breaths, but the Arab world seemed not to notice. Operation Moses went on without interruption.

In Sudan, the secret continued to hold. It was not clear how widely knowledge of the operation had spread within the Sudanese government, but at least some military officials knew what state security was doing. Among the foreigners working in Sudan’s relief programs, awareness of the operation was rumored and sketchy. Relief workers in Tawawa, for example, stayed well away from where the Jews were loaded up every night.

Weaver had arranged to buy six huts at a corner of the camp and used them as a staging area for each day’s flight. The area was unofficially off-limits, according to the relief workers there.

But on Dec. 10, four men were arrested near the site where the buses were loading. The four, an Ethiopian-born U.S. resident, an American, a Canadian and a Briton, were held for a time and then asked to leave the country.

Inquisitive Bulgarian

A few days later, an employee of Balkan Airlines--possibly a Bulgarian government agent--stumbled over the operation at Khartoum airport and was hustled out of the country on grounds that he had hidden four bottles of contraband liquor in his car. The Sudanese quietly removed film from the camera he carried, and no stir was created over the activities that had obviously aroused the Bulgarian’s interest.

The rest of December passed without incident. At least two babies were born en route, one beside the highway between Gedaref and Khartoum. One young boy was left behind, found sleeping under blankets piled in the rear of a bus when the drivers were cleaning up one morning. His mother had protested as she boarded the plane that her child was lost, but no one could find him. He went out on the next night’s flight.

In late December, Weaver went to Europe for the New Year’s holiday. He was in a small Austrian skiing village Jan. 4 when he heard on the radio that the Israelis had announced that a “secret airlift” had been carrying Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel. He could scarcely believe his ears; of all the possible sources for a breach in security, Israel seemed the least likely.

Austria was locked in a ferocious snowstorm, and it took Weaver nearly two days to reach Vienna and to make contact with Israeli intelligence. His contact suggested meeting in Athens.

By the time Weaver reached Athens, the Sudanese had canceled Operation Moses, although two additional flights had actually come and gone after the Israeli announcement.

This time, Arab governments were in an uproar. Protests came from the Jordanians, Egyptians, Kuwaitis and Moroccans. The Ethiopians, in a fury, demanded that “our people” be returned at once, implying that they had been kidnaped.

The Israelis never fully explained their announcement. Some officials said the revelation was triggered by an “off-the-record” comment made by an Israeli immigration official, Yehuda Dominitz, to a small West Bank publication, which then published the remarks.

Other Israeli editors, aware of the airlift and under agreement with the government to maintain the secrecy, then pressed the government to lift its embargo. Some well-placed Israelis, however, say that Prime Minister Shimon Peres was trying to limit the damage to the government of a banking scandal that was then dominating the nation’s news media, and he realized that the story of the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews would wipe the banking scandal off the front pages. And, in fact, it did.

Spokesmen for the prime minister recently declined to answer any questions regarding the Ethiopian Jews.

In Athens, Weaver’s Israeli contact, a senior agent of Mossad, was apologetic. “It was our fault,” he told Weaver. “On your end, it was flawless.”

Weaver returned to Khartoum, wondering what sort of reception he would get from the Sudanese. As he stood waiting for his baggage to come off the flight, a hand clapped down on his shoulder. He turned to find Col. X. The colonel embraced Weaver in the sort of bear hug that Sudanese reserve for those they consider as close as family.

“It’s all right,” the colonel said. “Welcome back.”

And there it stood. Operation Moses had moved 7,800 Ethiopian Jews. Weaver assumed when the operation was halted, about 1,200 were left in Sudan. Later, the estimate was revised downward to 900. No hope existed of renewing the Operation Moses method of getting them out.

In an interview with the New York Times, Sudanese President Jafaar Numeiri said he had no objection to the Ethiopian Jews, or any other refugee group, leaving Sudan, but that he could not allow the Jews to go to Israel because, he said, “Israel knows that I am its enemy.”

Vice President George Bush was preparing for a trip to Africa, with his first stop in Khartoum. In a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, Bush said that among the issues he planned to take up with Numeiri was the departure of the Ethiopian Jews remaining in his country.

Bush arrived in Khartoum on March 4 and met with Numeiri twice. It was at the second meeting, over tea in Numeiri’s office, that Bush persuaded Numeiri to allow the rest of the Jews to be taken out of Sudan.

What Numeiri asked in return is not known, other than the continued good will of the United States. Numeiri sorely needed that good will. Sudan’s economy was a wreck; the State Department had withheld disbursement of nearly $200 million in aid in an effort to coax the Sudanese into putting their economic house in order.

It is possible that Numeiri, always known as a shrewd bargainer, did not ask for a specific return of his favor but assumed that he could call in his chips at a later date. Numeiri had scheduled a trip to Washington the following month.

Bush left Khartoum on the afternoon of March 8, and that evening a “wheels-up” party was held at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Hume Horan in Khartoum, where the embassy staff and a planeload of leftover Secret Service agents celebrated a VIP visit concluded without major mishap.

Quick Operation Ordered

While guests circulated around the bar and buffet, the ambassador, the CIA station chief, a member of his staff and Weaver were in deep conversation in the ambassador’s living room. Only they knew of Bush’s discussions on the Ethiopians.

The ambassador had just received word from the White House of a presidential order to lay plans for an operation to remove the last of the Ethiopian Jews from Sudan. President Reagan had said he wanted the operation carried out, if possible, within 72 to 96 hours.

The next day, Weaver flew on an embassy plane with two U.S. Air Force pilots to check out the runway of a remote airstrip outside Gedaref. The pilots paced it off. It was 900 meters long, surfaced in rough, red, laterite gravel--running at a slight uphill grade, west to east.

“Yeah,” one of the pilots said, “it’s do-able.”

From that point, it was a CIA operation, and Weaver stayed out of it. In this case, the decision to involve the CIA came directly from the White House, although the timetable suggested by the President could not be kept.

Over the next 12 days, the plans were formulated and refined. The Jews would be moved out of Tawawa, about two miles from the north edge of Gedaref, on a back road that joined with the road running to the airstrip. The airstrip itself was about eight miles from Gedaref, far enough away that the operation would be difficult to spot from town. The Jews would be moved in the early evening and would spend the night by the runway.

Air Force Planes Used

The planes were to be Air Force C-130 transports, probably flown from West Germany, and would probably refuel in Kenya before arriving in Sudan. They would land shortly after dawn, one at a time, load their passengers and fly directly to Israel.

Once again, James had to be summoned from Switzerland to conduct the final screening. At this point, the planners took their first hard count of the Jews; they came up with a little more than 500, although they had expected at least 900. For a day or two, they considered delaying the operation a week, fearing that they might discover another group later and be faced with the problem all over again.

Christopher was dispatched to check out the refugee camps where the Ethiopian Jews might normally be expected to arrive. He found five people at Um Rakuba, and quickly got them to Tawawa. Finally, when the Ethiopians could not guarantee that any more Jews could be located in Sudan, the planners decided to go ahead. As nearly as they could tell, they had them all. The airlift was set for dawn on March 22.

A harsh harmattan wind blew up on the night of March 21. The agents in charge of the operation had erected radio antennas on a rise of land overlooking the runway. The Ethiopians, separated into six groups, sat among the shrubs and thorn trees at the edge of the runway, huddled together in the blowing dust.

A pair of American pilots, standing by the radio gear, worried over the gusting crosswinds, which if they continued, might scrub the mission: A crashed C-130 on an operation like this would be an unthinkable disaster. With the aircraft already on the way, the wind continued unabated. Finally, as dawn began to lighten the sky, it stopped blowing.

The first plane landed a few minutes before 6 a.m. It taxied to the midpoint of the runway, and the first group of Ethiopians was loaded aboard the plane, its engines still running and blowing thick red dust down the runway behind it. It was on the ground 20 minutes.

Five other planes followed the pattern set by the first. By 9 a.m., the last plane was loaded and airborne. The operation had gone off without a hitch. The CIA agents returned to their house in Gedaref and drank champagne to celebrate their success.

In the town of Netanya on the Israeli seaside, an old lady named Lemlem, 63, lay on a bare mattress in a sixth-floor hotel room, her head covered in a piece of dirty, homespun cotton cloth. Her daughter’s small children played on the floor around her. Laundry dangled damply from the bathroom fixtures. Outside, children ran down the hallway’s tattered carpet and crowded the stairways. Lemlem roused herself slowly when her son, Daniel Suyin, came to visit.

Lemlem arrived in Israel on Dec. 22, on an Operation Moses flight. She had left her village in Gondar in April, walking to Sudan with her daughter and son-in-law and their three children. Her son had left almost two years earlier, smuggled through Sudan and Kenya. Now the rest of the family had followed. Suyin kissed his mother.

“I am sick,” she said, touching her head and stomach, indicating where the sickness was. But in fact, as the visit went on, it seemed that Lemlem was less sick than simply depressed. As she talked with her son, her spirit livened.

She had complaints. She said she never left her room. Her grandchildren carried food to her from the cafeteria downstairs. Her life was limited to resting and watching the children. She never went outdoors. Lemlem had more company than she knew what to do with--for she was old, and the old were almost lost now.

Once, back in Gondar, the elders were the voice of authority in the community. In Israel, however, different rules applied.

Authority now seemed to belong to the youths, who were excited about their new lives--who were adventurous, eager and leaped ahead of their parents; worked hard at learning Hebrew and English; read magazines; discovered new rights and privileges, went out to explore the streets and to shop for radios and Rolling Stones T-shirts.

Some of them had learned political protest, had picketed the offices of the rabbinate and the Knesset to protest what they called the patronizing attitude of the Jewish Agency, the semiofficial organization responsible for their resettlement, and had formed an association to look after the rights of the Ethiopian Jews in Israel.

Somehow, in all of this, the older ones got left behind, unconsulted and forgotten, as a new generation took over and plunged brashly into the future.

For two months, Lemlem had been living in a hotel (the whole building was rented by the Jewish Agency when it ran out of more suitable quarters) less than 100 yards from the shore of the Mediterranean Sea--and yet she had never walked on its beach, never tasted salt water, had no idea that it might be different from any other water. She had lived her life in sunlight, in the open, with the smell of woodsmoke in her clothes, but neither her son nor her daughter thought to take her outside here in Israel, and to sit with her on a park bench so that she could feel the sun shine on her head.

For some reason, as Daniel Suyin morosely admitted later, they had just never thought of it, never realized that the old woman--and all the old ones--needed such attention.

“You must realize this is all new,” he said. “We are learning.”

Mulu Abebe, a black Jew who started his trek toward Israel in March, 1984, lives now with his entire family in the absorption center in Mevasarret Zion, a suburban development just outside Jerusalem. His young daughter survived the sickness she suffered at Um Rakuba. Like other Ethiopians, he complains about the lack of spice in the food, but it is a minor point, and he laughs when he mentions it. The weather is also too cold, but that comment, too, causes him to laugh.

He lives in a house with solid walls, much better than the house made of tin and eucalyptus wood in Ethiopia. His children are going to school. He and his wife are both trying to learn Hebrew. It is very hard, but it is not unpleasant. Everyone in the family, he notes, has a wristwatch.

“Our fathers told us,” he said, “that in Jerusalem, there is milk and honey and plenty. We believe this, and we are happy.”

It was nearing sunset on Friday evening, and as Abebe spoke, his wife was setting out Sabbath candles on a covered table, smiling as she worked.

Ayaraw Engeda, another Jew from Ethiopia, also lives in a suburban section of Jerusalem, in a large, modernistic complex of modest working-class apartments. About 100 other Ethiopian families live around him, as well as hundreds of other immigrants, old and new.

Except for the surrounding rocky hills, the setting has a distinctly urban, concrete feel, far removed from the village that Engeda and his family left behind. With all the others his family faces the multiple wonders of running water, toilets, gas stoves, refrigerators.

Engeda rarely smiles and his face is set in an expression of worry. When Daniel Suyin, who acts as a translator, is asked why this is so, Suyin replies quickly without finding it necessary to ask Engeda.

“Because he sees that life is difficult and very sad,” Suyin says.

Engeda cannot forget his daughter, dying beside him on the cot in the clinic at Um Rakuba. Yes, his children go to school now, and that is good. And yes, he believes that he will find work here someday, and perhaps his family will prosper. But still, he does not smile and does not forget.

Rabbi Nahum Cohen directs a school run by Youth Aliyah, the children’s unit of the Jewish Agency on the seacoast at Hofim, where 400 Ethiopian children seem to be breaking scholastic records for Jewish immigrant youth.

‘There Is Sadness, Too’

“Many of our kids have left people behind in Ethiopia,” Cohen said. “They have done very well here. They are committed, dedicated, highly intelligent kids. But there is sadness, too, because so many of them are here by themselves. They left parents and families behind. When the news came here that Operation Moses was cut off, it affected everyone. The kids just stopped eating for two days. It was a sort of mourning.”

Cohen summoned a girl named Esther, 15, who only two days before had gotten a letter from her family, still in Ethiopia. In the letter, painstakingly translated, her father said, “We do not know if we should try to come, and we must ask what you advise us.”

“What should she say?” Cohen asked. “This is a 15-year-old girl, and she is being asked to decide the fate of her family.”

Between 6,000 and 9,000 Jews are believed to remain in Ethiopia, and much of the melancholy a visitor may sense among the refugees now in Israel has to do with the concern for people left behind, people for whom there seems to be no immediate means of escape. It is a familiar story for many Israelis.

Chaim Aharon, head of the Jewish Agency and the man in charge of programs to absorb the Ethiopians into Israeli society, believes that they “have had to run a distance of 2,000 years. The cultural shock is very, very strong. Almost everything is new for them, but we have found that most have overcome the cultural shock and integrated with the society very well.”

Israeli society also has received the Ethiopians well, Aharon said. “There has been a lot of volunteerism. People have been eager to help, to contribute clothing, their time, or whatever is needed.”

Ethiopians who have been in the country longest, traveling and interacting with the society, say they do not see racism as a problem. They are more upset over the argument put forward by some Jews in Israel that the Ethiopians are not truly Jews, and they have protested against suggestions that they undergo ritual conversion ceremonies--baths or circumcisions--to confirm their faith. In fact, as Aharon noted, most Ethiopians “find it difficult to understand that all other Israelis are not religious.”

Religious Decline Predicted

And yet virtually all experts on the subject (Israel has many) predict that, in general, the Ethiopians will fall away from their religion now that they are in Israel, for that is a common pattern.

Among the youths who have been there longest, it is already happening. It seems ironic, then, that the quality that led most of the Jews of the outside world to rally to the cause of the Ethiopians--their steadfast adherence to their religion in the face of 2,000 years of hostility--is the very quality most threatened by their rescue.

But the old ones, as long as they last, will hold on to their faith firmly.

Tshumah Negah, 66, lives in Mevasarret Zion with his daughter and her children. His wife died in Um Rakuba. He arrived in Israel on Dec. 24.

“Our teachers told us the word of God,” he said. “As God told to Moses to take his people from Egypt, God told us, ‘One day I will gather you and carry you to Jerusalem. Do not stray, do not change your religion, even if death comes before you.’ ”

The coup that toppled Sudan’s President Numeiri came on April 6, as Numeiri hurried home from his visit to Washington. He was informed when his plane landed in Cairo, where he remains, living in seclusion.

The new government of Sudan, led by a supreme military council, has promised investigations into the removal of the Ethiopian Jews from Sudan. Their exodus had nothing to do with the coup itself (which occurred later and which was largely brought about by continued economic and political decline). But it has provided one rallying point. Former Vice President Omar Tayeb is in custody, and the generals say that he will be tried for his role in the affair. The manner and date for his trial have not been announced.

As far as anyone knows, there are no Ethiopian Jews in Sudan, and none are arriving.

Jerry Weaver left Khartoum hurriedly on March 25, three days after the news of the last airlift became known. The U.S. Embassy had received what it considered to be a serious threat to his life, reportedly by Arab extremists. He returned to Washington to await reassignment, probably to Central America.