| I recently went to hear a presentation by an USA-born woman who is the wife of
a Falasha. She says more Falashas remain in Ethiopia than were rescued by
project Moses. Since only the strongest individuals managed to make it out
so far, the ones that remained were the very old or the very young ... not
a good situation. And it will be harder than ever to get any more out.
The Falashas speak a Semitic language. Their version of the Bible is written
in yet another Semitic language, neither the same as Hebrew. They don't have
Purim or Hannukah. However, they strictly observe the rules of Kashrut,
Shabbos, the festivals, and ritual personsal purity as written in the Torah
(during her period, a Falasha woman lives in a separate tent). They are hated
by their non-Jewish neighbors. I find this last fact to be a strong endorsement
that these people are truly Jewish.
The Falasha observance includes a strong yearning to return to Jerusalem.
The persons who function like rabbis for the Falashas undergo a training period
that takes 10 years that includes long periods of solitary study. Of course,
they are not allowed to function as rabbis in Israel.
Dave
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| The Boston Herald, Thurs., May 30, 1991
Out of Africa, in Dignity and Freedom
By Jeff Jacoby
If you had been looking at those people, crammed for months in
the slums of Addis Ababa, what would you have seen?
Pathetic Ethiopians, who fled war in the country only to find
misery in the city? Primitive illiterates, locked in 13th
century ignorance? Third World paupers owning little more than
the rags on their backs? Disease-ridden peasants, sick with
malaria, eye disease, tuberculosis?
Would you have seen just another mass of Africans, black people
from a far-away continent, with their strange looks and strange
language and nothing in common with - us?
Israel saw brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters in
trouble, to be precise. And so, with no fanfare, no debate, no
need to be prodded into action, the Israelis unrolled "Operation
Solomon." They reached into the middle of a civil war 1,500
miles away and in less than 36 hours, airlifted more than 14,000
Ethiopian Jews to safety.
Is there any other country that routinely goes to such lengths to
live up to the injunction, "Love thy brother as thyself"?
Earlier this year, when the Kurdish uprising ended in massacres
and refugee floods, the United States, paralyzed with indecision,
stumbled for weeks before finally sending emergency supplies and
building refugee camps. (No one dared suggest that America might
offer itself as a safe haven for Kurdish refugees.)
When Albanians craving freedom surged through the first cracks in
their country's Stalinist isolation, all they got from
neighboring Greece and Italy was sullen faces and a cold
reception. Vietnam's boat people "still" risk death at sea to
escape life under the Communists; the lucky among them end up on
Hong Kong, imprisoned behind British barbed-wire.
Not so Ethiopia's long-oppressed Jews, whose African roots trace
back 25 centuries - to the marriage, according to legend, of
King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Between "Operation Moses" (a
1985 rescue mission that airlifted more than 10,000 but was
halted by media leaks) and "Operation Solomon," virtually all of
them are now safe, in a homeland where they are wanted.
In a world that customarily has to be badgered and guilt-tripped
into noticing refugees, Israel's rescue of the Ethiopians is
dazzlingly unique. Christians are under attack in Egypt and the
Sudan; the world's powerful Christian nations haven't come to
their defense. Palestinian Arab refugees have rotted in
demoralizing wretchedness all around the Middle East since long
before the West Bank and Gaza Strip were "Israeli-occupied;"
their Arab brethren, blessed with vast lands and petro-riches, let
them rot.
But when Jews are in danger in Ethiopia (or in the Soviet Union,
or in Romania or Iraq or Argentina), Israel not only throws its
gates open in welcome, but works every channel - overt and
covert, diplomatic and monetary - to save them.
There are times, heaven knows, when the Israelis' stiff-necked
insistence on doing things their way exasperates their friends
and lands them in the diplomatic doghouse. But sometimes - the
rescue at Entebbe comes to mind, and the destruction of that
Iraqi nuclear reactor, and the capture of Adolf Eichmann - that
go-it-alone brashness combines courage and ethics in a way that
shouldn't be extraordinary, but is.
In 1975, the United Nations voted to label Zionism - the national
liberation movement of the Jewish people - a "form of racism and
racial discrimination." Which of the 72 nations that joined in
that condemnation has ever shut its airport to commercial traffic
in order to rescue planeload after planeload of diseased and
backward blacks from squalid African camps and slums? In that
act of conscience and responsibility, Israel stands alone.
Racist? Israel is the only country in history to admit tens of
thousands of black Africans not in chains, as slaves, but in
freedom and dignity, as citizens.
In the United States, which boasts of being a "nation of
immigrants," a powerful lobby fights to keep foreigners out -
especially foreigners with dark skins who don't speak our
language. In Texas, natives pull their cars up to the Rio Grande
late at night, shining their headlights to help border guards
catch Mexicans trying to cross into America.
If they tuned into CNN last weekend, those Texans would have seen
crowds of white Israelis lining the streets, cheering as shuttle
buses drove to shelters the ragged black foreigners who had just
become Israel's newest citizens. If a purer instance of racial
harmony ever occurred, it has yet to be recorded.
Jeff Jacoby is the Herald's chief editorial writer
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