Israel Flying Jews Out of Ethiopia : Africa: Airlifts seek to take 14,000 to safety in 48 hours. Approval of the flights comes amid intense U.S. pressure. Meanwhile, rebels close in on capital.

With a rebel army pressing on this capital city from three fronts, Israeli authorities here began a massive airlift Friday designed to spirit more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to safety in Israel over a period of 48 hours.

Permission for the Jews to leave Ethiopia had been a topic of negotiation involving the Israeli, American and Ethiopian governments for more than a year, but Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam had never allowed more than 1,300--and generally about 500--to leave every month.

But with Mengistu having fled the country for exile Tuesday, and with intense pressure coming from American officials here, the country’s new acting president approved the wholesale exodus Thursday, his third day in office.

About 12 planes--including aircraft from Ethiopian Airlines, this country’s commercial carrier; El Al, the Israeli flagship airline, and the Israeli Charter Co.--began lifting off from Addis Ababa Airport about 1:30 p.m. Friday for the 3 1/2-hour flight to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport. The airlift’s organizers plan to continue the flights around the clock until the transfer is complete, possibly as early as this afternoon or tonight.

In Washington, Administration officials cited a blunt message from President Bush to Mengistu’s successors as an important factor in pushing the operation ahead. Bush, they said, told the Ethiopians that if they want American help in arranging a truce with the advancing rebels, they must allow all remaining Ethiopian Jews to leave immediately for Israel.

The airlift will largely complete the emigration of the community of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, begun with a secret American airlift but prematurely aborted, in 1985. An unknown number of Jews remain in rural areas of western Ethiopia that are currently behind rebel lines, but estimates of their number run to no more than a couple of thousand.

Around the hillside compound of the Israeli Embassy here Friday, thousands of immigrants, many of them owning only what they wore or could carry on their backs, jammed every inch of ground and pavement as far as the eye could see. A troop of Israeli security men tried to maneuver a dozen large buses into the compound to transport the passengers to Addis Ababa Airport. But the milling mob made the process difficult, as children and toddlers, straying into the road, constantly threatened to fall beneath the huge vehicles’ wheels.

Other onlookers, some possibly hoping to hitch an illicit ride on the exodus fleet, added to the confusion.

“These people will all leave tonight,” shouted one of the Israeli security men, “if we can only get rid of the other 40,000 Addis residents who are also here!”

The exodus of the Jews, descendants of a tribe so ancient that their current religious practices reflect pre-Talmudic beliefs, was tied up during Mengistu’s regime in layers of bureaucratic red tape. Ethiopian officials insisted that every emigrant’s family history be confirmed and reconciled with records in Israel, ostensibly to avert the emigration of non-Jews. There are some indications that Mengistu drew out the process in hopes of extracting military aid from the anxious Israelis--something the Israeli government insists he never received.

With Mengistu’s departure Tuesday to exile in the southern African nation of Zimbabwe, and with rebel troops closing in on Addis Ababa, the atmosphere of urgency for the exodus increased sharply.

Sources say that American diplomats made the fate of the Jews a top priority in their first meeting Wednesday with Ethiopia’s new acting president, Tesfaye Gebre-Kidan. American officials also notified their contacts among the two major Ethiopian rebel groups of their interest in speeding the emigration, and received assurances that the rebels would not interfere. This could be important, as troops of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, whose military successes forced Mengistu into exile, were reported late Friday to be no more than six miles from the Addis Ababa city line.

On Thursday the American Embassy here presented Tesfaye with Bush’s personal message. By that afternoon, Tesfaye had given his approval for the wholesale emigration that Mengistu had long withheld.

By late Thursday, a delegation of Israeli political officials and experts in logistics were on their way to Ethiopia to put the airlift into operation.

Israeli officials here maintained that Ethiopia’s current political and military crisis had little to do with the urgency of the operation. Instead, they argued that the conditions under which the Jews were living--encamped in tents or rented houses in the vicinity of the Israeli Embassy on the city’s north side--made it imperative to move them as quickly as possible.

“Every day is an unnecessarily agonizing experience,” said an Israeli official here.

But other knowledgeable sources said the prospect of an imminent breakdown in social order in the besieged city made it necessary to relocate the Jews, who are mostly peasant farmers and tradesmen who moved to Addis Ababa from Ethiopia’s remote Gondar province over the last 18 months in search of permission to leave the country.

“Obviously we wanted to get them out of harm’s way,” said a Western diplomat involved in the affair. “If there is a general breakdown in order, they could get caught up in it.”

Some officials also feared that a rebel advance could halt the emigration, or that the new Ethiopian government might cave in to pressure from other governments opposing the operation, including many Arab states still influential here.

The scene at the airport here Friday as the airlift commenced reflected that urgency. The aircraft, including one jumbo Boeing 747 with blue and white Israeli markings, arrived every few minutes to begin the transit. Small children, who make up perhaps 60% of the emigrants, were strapped sometimes three to a seat to hasten the outflow; any large items of luggage, something rare enough in the destitute community, were left at the Israeli Embassy compound for later shipment.

The passengers boarded the jets sometimes in bare feet, many never having ridden in any kind of motorized vehicle before. “Some of the children climbing on that 747 were pretty wide-eyed,” said one witness.

The first planeload touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv at 5 p.m., and throughout the evening floods of Ethiopians streamed cheering, trilling and waving out onto the Tarmac and on to an uncertain new life in a country already heavily burdened with new immigrants.

In what is believed to be the largest passenger flight in history, one El Al Boeing 747 cargo plane brought in 1,087 men, women and children at mid-evening. With children crammed onto parents’ laps and spilling out into the aisles, the passengers cheered wildly as the plane touched down.

Several elderly men and women swathed in robes knelt and kissed the pavement repeatedly before being gently lifted by family members and aid workers and whisked away into waiting buses. A young boy made his way down the steps with his arms raised above his head, and young mothers with babies strapped to their backs hooted joyously in what quickly became a madcap celebration outside the airport terminal.

The subjects of this exodus are the descendants of what was once among the most powerful communities of ancient Ethiopia. In the 10th Century a Jewish warrior queen, Yehudit, ruled a huge swath of the country. When her kingdom was smashed, her people went into a long decline, impoverished by prohibitions against their owning land. They were subjected to frequent mob violence and acquired the label “Falasha”--a term that means “outsider” and which they shun, preferring the name “Beta-Israel,” or House of Israel.

Physically, the Ethiopian Jews are indistinguishable from the rest of their compatriots. They are dark-skinned, with somewhat delicate features, and are taller than many other black Africans.

The U.S. government, at the urging of the American Jewish community, has sustained a long interest in the fate of the Ethiopian Jews, often exceeding the interest of the government of Israel, where their fate has sometimes been a political issue. In 1985 an American undertaking known as Operation Moses spirited an estimated 7,800 Ethiopian Jews to Israel from a secret air base in Sudan. The premature end of that operation left many Ethiopian Jewish families ruptured, leading to the long negotiations with Mengistu over completing the emigration.

BACKGROUND

The Ethiopian Jews claim to be descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel, and a 1975 ruling by Israel’s chief rabbis recognized them as descendants of the tribe of Dan. Calling themselves “Beta-Israel,” or House of Israel, they lived in isolation from mainstream Jewish life for more than 2,500 years. They were ignorant of the body of Talmudic law that has governed Jewish rites and social behavior since the 4th Century. They spoke no Hebrew, and their calendar featured holy days unknown to the rest of world Judaism. Still, they followed many biblically inspired practices recognizable to modern Jews, including the circumcision of male children and kosher dietary laws. There have been at least two airlifts of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel in the past decade. About 7,800 Ethiopian Jews were taken from Sudan to Israel from Nov. 21, 1984, to Jan. 6, 1985, in a secret airlift called Operation Moses by the Israelis. In March, 1985, the U.S. Air Force and the CIA also organized an airlift of about 900 Ethiopian Jews.