The Forgotten Heroes of Ethiopian Jewry

In his recent movie Heroes, the Israeli filmmaker Avishai Mekonen tells the story of the Ethiopian Jewish activists who campaigned for permission to leave for Israel, often risking the ire of their country’s brutal socialist regime, and worked to convince the Israeli government and American Jewry to help them emigrate. He discusses the film here. (Interview by Be’chol Lashon.)

[T]here is a whole part of the story [of Ethiopian Jewry] that is not well known, the story of the Ethiopian activists who held onto the dream of going to Jerusalem and made everything happen. . . . I want people to know the names of Yona Bogale, Gedalia Uria, Ester Hollander, and others. Some 440 Ethiopian activists and kessim [the local term for rabbis] were jailed in Ethiopia. So many risked their lives. For example, Ferede Aklum, . . . who endangered himself to find escape routes for the community from Ethiopia [to Israel] through Sudan, and worked with the Mossad.

These activists had no money, no guides, no equipment. They had a dream and they made it happen. Many of these people were put in jail for days or months because leaving Ethiopia was illegal. They were beaten and tortured. Some died in jail. Those who were released did not give up. These people were true heroes.

Yona Bogale was the first Ethiopian to reach out to the west and explain the danger the Beta Israel experienced. In the 1950s, he sent young Ethiopians to Israel to learn Hebrew, English, math, and science. Those students became leaders [of Ethiopian] Jewry who could communicate [with people in Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere].

Read more at My Jewish Learning

More about: Ethiopian Jews, Film, History & Ideas, Israeli history

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society