Ethiopian Jews Always Dreamed of Jerusalem

In an excerpt from his recently translated memoir, the Israeli journalist Danny Adeno Abebe describes his childhood in the Ethiopian village of Til­a­ma­do, the entire population of which set off on foot for Israel in 1983:

[U]ntil we made the journey to Israel, I had never left the confines of my village and its grazing lands. My friends and I knew nothing but life in the village. Our impression was that the world outside simply did not exist. Our village was the whole wide world, but its inhabitants had a single dream somewhere over the horizon—Yerusalem: Jerusalem.

We always knew that the moment the opportunity arose, we would drop everything to realize our dream to move to Jerusalem. But this was a wish we were forbidden from expressing out loud. We spoke about it in whispers, mainly on Shabbat and during the Jewish holidays.

The villagers never mentioned Israel. Everyone, including the children, spoke of Jerusalem. Of a faraway kingdom, a land of God and ancient stones, whose righteous people spoke the holy tongue. Every festival was dedicated to Jerusalem. Every prayer was directed toward Jerusalem. Every event recalled Jerusalem. On holidays and at family events, we used to sing a song called Ende Yerusalem, “Nothing Like Jerusalem.” In later years, even the Christians embraced this song, and they still sing it at weddings.

The Jews of the village were commonly labeled falashas: “foreigners.” The Ethiopian establishment, from top to bottom and throughout history, treated the Jews as aliens disloyal to the state and its government. Consequently, we were not entitled to land or the basic rights afforded to our Christian neighbors. There was an unfunny joke in Ethiopia: “Why don’t Jews get rich? So they won’t have to leave property behind when they run away.” For the same reason, nobody was prepared to lend money to Jews: they feared that they would run away without repaying their debts.

Read more at Tel Aviv Review of Books

More about: Anti-Semitism, Ethiopian Jews, Israeli history, Jerusalem, Judaism

 

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