Regional Outlook: Africa : Ethiopian Jews Waiting for a Way to the Promised Land : An emigration logjam is keeping 12,500 refugees in Addis Ababa. The movement of these people to Israel has become a touchy issue for both countries.

The villagers where Abebe Yalu lived had long since forced him into a life of sharecropping by burning his farm.

The atmosphere of hostility in town had never abated. So when word began to circulate that those who could make their way to Addis Ababa might be able to emigrate to Israel, he packed up his family, spent $75 on bus passage to the capital, 400 miles south, and departed to the taunts of the local people who coveted his meager possessions and who celebrated the family’s departure with gunshots.

That was three months ago, and today Yalu and his family (his name is a pseudonym) are among 12,500 Ethiopian Jews living in limbo in the capital, waiting for a logjam of emigration to break. The delivery of these people to Israel has become one of the most explosive issues in both countries since Israel and Ethiopia reestablished diplomatic relations in November.

The affair has embroiled the United States too, in part because of the immense interest among influential American Jews.

At a meeting last month in New York, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III reaffirmed to Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tesfaye Dinka “our strong support for free emigration and family reunification”--diplomatic code phrases for Jewish emigration from Ethiopia--and said the United States hoped that the rate of emigration to Israel, which has recently slowed to a trickle, would increase.

American interests are also involved because stories have been circulating in this rumor-prone capital for months that the Israelis have promised Ethiopia arms in return for the guarantees of continued emigration so far extracted from the Ethiopian government. U.S. officials have continually warned the Israelis that to pass on any materiel of U.S. origin to the Marxist government would violate American laws.

So far, according to diplomatic and other sources here, there is no hard evidence that Israel has provided even token military assistance to the tottering government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. But stories persist that Israel has provided arms ranging from bolt-action rifles and Uzi submachine guns to cluster bombs. There may also be 30 and 100 Israeli military advisers in the country, said one Western diplomat.

In any event, it is clear that Mengistu’s most pressing need is for military aid to replace what is being withdrawn by the Soviet Union, Ethiopia’s main supplier for about 15 years.

Israel denies that it has given any military aid to Ethiopia or that there is anything like an arms-for-Jews deal.

“I’ve heard this, that we’re going to replace the Russians (as suppliers),” said Haim Divon, charge d’affaires at the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa. “But even if we wanted to, we don’t have the capacity to do so. The immigration of the Falashas is not linked to anything else.”

To most Ethiopians and much of the world, the black Jews are known as Falashas. But they reject that name, since the word is usually translated as “stranger” or “outsider,” a label that reflects their low station in Ethiopia. Most prefer to call themselves “Beta-Israel,” or “House of Israel.”

The atmosphere around a secluded compound at the center of the informal Ethiopian Jewish settlement in Addis Ababa leaves no doubt that the emigration operation is one of the most sensitive programs in Ethiopia today.

A high wall hides what is the unofficial emigration headquarters from view, and its solid metal gate is heavily guarded. Cars from the Israeli Embassy silently pull up throughout the day to discharge official passengers.

Outside the wall, hundreds of people dressed in the same flowing shawls in which they made their way from remote villages stand silently. Within the compound two wide green tents shelter Jews undergoing processing. An air of open suspicion and hostility greets any outsider who manages to get inside.

Over the summer, even as Ethiopian leaders were giving the State Department assurances of continued cooperation, officials here stepped up their harassment of people involved in the emigration project.

At least two Americans working with the Israeli Embassy to facilitate the emigration, including Susan Pollack, an activist on behalf of Ethiopian Jews who has been in and out of this country for six years, were questioned about their activities by security officers.

The officers ordered the Americans to move out of their rented private quarters and back into hotels. The rationale was that as holders of tourist visas, they are not permitted to lodge in private homes, but it is clear that the government intended to better monitor their activities.

People working with the Ethiopian Jews are also concerned that some earlier emigrants who returned to Addis Ababa over the past few weeks to help those left behind will lose their tourist visas, forcing them to return to Israel.

During the summer, the emigration was sharply curtailed by Ethiopian authorities. The peak flow of 500 Jews a month out of Ethiopia between March and June all but ceased in July, and there has been little increase since then.

Diplomatic sources and others agree that one reason for the slowdown was the opening in July of the annual Organization of African Unity summit meeting here, when the Ethiopians feared that incoming Arab delegates would see Ethiopian Jews lined up to depart for Israel from Addis Ababa airport.

Sources here who ask to remain unidentified say the flow remains restricted not by any overt rejection of candidates by the Ethiopian authorities, but by myriad bureaucratic obstacles. To the extent that the bureaucratic delay is indistinguishable from the general pace of government action in Ethiopia, this makes it hard to confirm that a deliberate slowdown is in progress.

For their part, Israeli officials in Addis Ababa firmly deny that any major problems exist, beyond processing thousands of people and confirming their identities.

“The story of a gap in emigration was designed to complete the story of ‘weapons for Falashas,’ ” says Divon. The slowdown in departures is “just a question of paperwork. No one takes into consideration that last year there were 2,000 Jews in Addis, and now there are 13,000.” (Another 500 to 1,000 Jews are thought to still be in the countryside of Gondar province.)

Still, there are signs of a deep division over the Jewish issue within the Ethiopian government. Foreign Minister Dinka is considered a soft-liner in favor of letting the Jews leave. But his position is thought to be opposed by Kassa Kabede, President Mengistu’s influential brother. As factions shift, the current willingness of authorities to allow the emigration could change abruptly, they fear.

“It’s a question of who has the president’s ear,” says one person working on the issue. “I don’t think this government has a unitary position, so the winds could always change.”

One element is the government’s sensitivity about giving a despised minority a right that millions of Ethiopians may crave: the chance to escape a land where the most evenly distributed thing is penury. Under Mengistu, Ethiopia has become the world’s poorest country; the Jews here are among the very few Ethiopians with a place to escape to.

That issue has already been dramatized by the arrival in the captial of thousands of people from a region known as the Foggera, where decades ago many Jews converted to Christianity to escape persecution. Unlike the Marranos of Spain, who converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition but continued to practice Judaism in secret, the Foggerese abandoned Jewish observance.

Now their claim to the right of Israeli citizenship under the so-called Law of Return, which welcomes Jewish immigrants to Israel, presents a dilemma for both sides.

“From the Ethiopian standpoint, people are only allowed to leave once they’ve demonstrated they have relatives in Israel,” says William Recant, director of the Washington-based American Assn. for Ethiopian Jews. “Under that system, the Foggerese are not able to leave.”

But the Law of Return grants citizenship to those whose parents or grandparents were Jews, and who have not themselves converted to another religion. So from the Israeli standpoint, many Foggerese may be entitled to the right.

“It’s a delicate issue because we don’t want Ethiopians who don’t have any contact whatsoever with Judaism to use this as a mechanism to leave the country,” says Divon, the Israeli charge d’affaires.

The people at the center of this great emigration saga were once among the powerful communities of ancient Ethiopia.

In the 10th Century a Jewish warrior queen, Yehudit, laid waste to the ancient Ethiopian capital of Axum. Even today Ethiopian schoolchildren are taught to abominate her name, and they sometimes taunt Jewish children with cries of “Yehudit Budit!” or “Yehudit the Terrible.”

When her kingdom was smashed, the Jews of Ethiopia went into a long decline, impoverished by a prohibition against their owning land and subjected to periodic violence. Their numbers dwindled to a little over 25,000.

Over the years a few Jews made their way to Israel for schooling. The international Jewish relief organization ORT set up a school in Gondar province, where they lived, and conducted a census of 15,000 Jewish families that is today used to help verify the identities of the people camping on the hillside here in the capital. In 1985 about 12,000 were quietly spirited to Israel from refugee camps in Sudan during the project called Operation Moses.

Despite its current profession of determination on the issue, the Israeli government’s interest in the Ethiopian Jews has waxed and waned over the years. In the period of closest Israel-Ethiopian ties, when the Labor government of Golda Meir was in power in Jerusalem and Emperor Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia, Meir never questioned Selassie’s resolve to convert his country’s Jews to Christianity or his adamant refusal to let them leave. Even to raise the issue with the emperor risked a diplomatic rupture.

There was even a debate within Israel as to whether the Ethiopians in question were Jewish.

Some have charged that racism was responsible for the Jewish state’s skeptical reception of the Ethiopians’ Jewishness. Similarly isolated communities of Yemenite and Indian Jews were accepted as immigrants much more happily than were the Ethiopians. They were compared unfavorably in public with other immigrants. If the concentration-camp survivors among the first Israelis were highly educated and worldly, the Ethiopians were illiterate and naive--not likely to adjust well to life in a modern state, it was said.

Some in Israel counter that there were legitimate doubts about the Ethiopian Jews on two points: whether they were genuine descendants of the “House of Israel,” and whether their beliefs actually qualified them as Jews.

The first point was legally resolved in 1975 when the government accepted a rabbinical judgment that the Beta-Israel were descended from the Tribe of Dan--one of the Ten Tribes of Israel enslaved by Abysinnia in the year 722 BC and extinguished from history. To this day, that judgment is heatedly disputed among Judaic scholars, some of whom believe that the Jews of Ethiopia were originally ancient converts or are descendants of small migrant communities of Jews. But it did serve to get the Ethiopians recognized under the Law of Return.

The second point is a philosophical and historical one.

The first adventurers who came upon the Beta-Israel in the 19th Century found religious and cultural characteristics that seemed to have been preserved almost unchanged from antiquity.

The Beta-Israel were ignorant of the vast body of Talmudic law that has governed Jewish rites and social behavior since the 4th Century. This suggested that their separation predated that period. Instead of rabbis, the Talmudic-era class of leaders, they follow priests, as did the earliest Jews. For a time they also adopted a monastic tradition foreign to the rest of Judaism. (This has only recently been abandoned.)

They spoke no Hebrew, conducting their rituals in the ancient Ethiopian dialect of Ge’ez. While for most Jews the year revolves around the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Beta-Israel revere above all others an unusual November holiday called Seged, when they fast to mark the Jews’ release from bondage in Babylon. They also find special meaning in Passover, the celebration of the deliverance from Egypt, with its alluring promise of an eventual return to Jerusalem.

On the other hand, they do follow many biblically inspired practices recognizable to modern Jewry, not least of which are the circumcision of males and kosher dietary rules.

Today, despite official Israeli protestations that rescuing the Jews of Ethiopia is the principal issue in its relations with Addis Ababa, it is clear that much more is at stake in the revived Israeli presence in this country.

Israeli diplomats here flatly deny that their government has any agenda in Ethiopia other than a willingness to help the country with development aid.

But Ethiopia commands a large reach of the Red Sea shoreline; that swath is entirely at risk in the rebellion waged in the north by the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front. If the Arab-backed Eritrean rebels were to succeed in splitting their province off from Ethiopia, the country would lose all of its shoreline and the Red Sea coast would be almost entirely in Arab or Arab-backed hands.

An Eritrea hostile to Israel would be in a position to block overflight routes for El Al, the Israeli airline, to its only two African destinations, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

The reopening of diplomatic relations with Ethiopia has also been a linchpin in Israel’s effort to reopen embassies in the rest of black Africa, most of whose countries severed relations at the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

For all these reasons Israel may be treading carefully in its discussions with the Mengistu regime over stepping up emigration. Divon of the Israeli Embassy says he expects all the Jews to be out of Ethiopia in another year, suggesting he expects the rate to rise to about 1,000 a month.

Meanwhile, the would-be emigrants are wending their way through a maze of bureaucratic rules. The procedure requires Ethiopian Jews living in Israel to send formal requests, in legal boilerplate, that Ethiopia allow their relatives to emigrate with their families. To establish family connections, the requests are checked against the old census conducted by the ORT relief organization. At the same time, the government insists that the requests make a perfect match with the personal histories, or meshenyas, carried around by the Ethiopian families on worn sheets of lined paper.

Because the Israeli and Ethiopian branches of some families have been separated for years, names and ages may be mismatched, children left out, meshenyas lost or forgotten. The discrepancies have to be formally corrected and certified by the Israeli consul in Addis Ababa and all the documents resubmitted to the government by the aspiring emigrants. The whole procedure can take months while the families inhabit hired homes and backyard tents in the capital, collecting at the Israeli Embassy to receive blankets, provisions and stipends.

The stupefying procedure gives people like Abebe Yalu, the sharecropper, some time to reflect on what he knows of his community’s history.

“From my parents, and the old men, I learned that we had come from Jerusalem,” he said, “and that maybe someday we would go back.”