Israel’s Daring Efforts to Bring Ethiopian Jews to Their Homeland

After his election to the Israeli premiership in 1977, one of Menachem Begin’s first orders to the Mossad was “Bring me the Jews of Ethiopia.” This directive bore fruits, some seven years later, in the form of Operation Moses, a massive effort that clandestinely brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to the Jewish state. To pull it off, Israeli spies created a fake diving resort on the Sudanese coast as a cover for their activities. The story is the subject of a 2019 film, and also a book by Raffi Berg titled Red Sea Spies. Praising the book as both accurate and “vivid,” Stephen Daisley writes in his review:

By day, [the Mossad agents] ran their diving resort; by night, they snuck Jews out of the refugee camps in Sudan to which they had journeyed. Cut off from other Jews for millennia, the Beta Israel, [as Ethiopian Jews call themselves], believed themselves the last of the Israelites and were astonished to learn that Jews could be Europeans.

Initially, they were spirited through the desert to a coastal point near [the resort]. There, special forces lay waiting with dinghies to row them to a naval ship in the Red Sea, which in turn delivered them “home” to Israel. The risk of discovery and death hung over these danger-drenched night crawls; the dinghies had to be abandoned after Sudanese troops mistook them for smugglers one night and opened fire.

The Mossad switched to airlifts, flying out Beta Israel from a disused British airstrip, although this only drew more attention, and the operatives had a series of close calls. In the end, Jerusalem paid off Khartoum and was allowed to transfer a further 6,000 Jews to Israel, provided they did so in secrecy, for the Sudanese president Jaafar Nimeiri feared a backlash from Arab allies.

The scope of the operation was as breathtaking as it was daring. “What the Mossad’s mission amounted to,” Berg writes, “was having to engineer a mass exodus of an unknown number of nationals of a foreign, hostile state, people who spoke no Hebrew, were antiquated in their ways, barely traveled, and distrusted strangers.”

Read more at Spectator

More about: Ethiopian Jews, Menachem Begin, Mossad, Sudan

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