Airlifted Ethiopian Jews Ask Israel to Bring Out the Rest
Ethiopian Jews secretly airlifted to Israel in 1984 Sunday asked Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to help bring thousands of stranded relatives to the Jewish state.
Leaders of the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel say 15,000 black Jews remain behind. Israeli immigration officials put the number at 10,000.
Ethiopian immigrants protested outside the prime minister’s office and gave a letter to a Shamir aide calling for immediate efforts to reunite divided families and free 37 Jews they said are imprisoned in Ethiopia.
Immigration officials told a reporter that they are aware of the situation of Ethiopian Jews and are doing everything possible to help them.
“It may not sound like a satisfactory answer, but there is simply no more we can do than what we are doing at the moment,” an Immigration Ministry spokesman said.
About 8,000 of the 15,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel arrived in the 1984 airlift known as Operation Moses.
The immigrants said many of their relatives were stranded and returned to Ethiopia after the airlift from neighbouring Sudan was halted by publicity.
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