A year and a half after Israel’s declaration of independence, Dr. Jacob
Weinstein, a Jewish Agency official and immigration expert, returned home to
Israel from a brief trip to Ethiopia. Previously he had been tasked with
negotiating the immigration of the Jews of Yemen. Ingratiating himself with the
country’s Muslim leaders and British colonial officials in Aden, he got the
leading imam to “allow” the Jews to leave. He wrote in his diary that “the Jews
had already been praying for 2,000 years to return to Zion.”
Ethiopia
posed a different challenge. There, Weinstein was confronted with an
ancient Christian kingdom led by an affable monarch. Ethiopia had abstained
during the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Now
Israel wanted to secure diplomatic relations with the African country, one of
the few independent states in the region that was not Arab and could be
well-disposed toward the isolated Jewish state.
Weinstein had no luck at
completing his task in Addis Ababa. Having met with the emperor’s privy council
he came away empty-handed; Ethiopia and Israel would not establish relations
until 1956. But when Weinstein returned to Israel he was interviewed by a
reporter from the Histadrut newspaper Davar.
Brushing aside his mission’s
failure he told the journalist that he had learned through sources in Ethiopia
that the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community had shown great interest in the
nascent State of Israel fasting for 48 hours when they heard that the country
was at war with its Arab neighbors. In addition 2,300 Jews had walked for 20
days from their villages to the capital seeking to get to Israel to aid the
country in its war. Speaking to a reporter from The Palestine Post, now The
Jerusalem Post, Weinstein said, “though this community [of Ethiopian Jews] had
been living in Abyssinia for 2,000 years they displayed a lively interest in
emigration to Israel. Estimates of the number of Falashas vary from
10,000 to 40,000.”
Weinstein’s revelation that there were Ethiopian Jews
eagerly awaiting their return to the promised land fell on deaf ears.
The
institutions of the young state, as well as its public, were aware of the Jews
in Ethiopia. Through an investigation of the archives of this newspaper several
interesting and little known episodes were brought to light.
The first
mention of Ethiopian Jews in the Post, almost always referred to as “Falashas,”
literally “squatters” in Amharic, or “black Jews,” appears in 1933, a year after
Gershon Agron founded the newspaper. In a report on a lecture by Dr. Redcliffe Salaman at the Hebrew University on “the origins of the Jewish race,”
Salaman – an expert on diseases, particularly viruses related to potatoes –
dabbled in a theory that the Jews were not truly pure Semites, but descendants
of the Hittites and Philistines. In his lecture he noted that the Jews of
Ethiopia and India (“Cochin Jews”) were descendants of “massive
intermixtures.”
This line of discussion, about the racial or ethnic
difference of Ethiopian Jews, was of interest to many who wrote about them. A
July 1959 Ma’ariv article noted that after the Law of Return was passed in 1950
there was discussion about bringing the Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The writer,
Yuval Elitzur, who had reported from Ethiopia, wondered whether even if the
Chief Rabbis accepted the Ethiopian Jews, how Israel would deal with the
“problem” of their color.
“It is an ostrich-like policy to ignore the
skin color,” he said, like sticking one’s head in the ground. “Even if we don’t
have to worry that the people of Israel will behave like the whites of South
Africa or the American South, we must consider that bringing all the ‘Falashas’
in a short period of time will create a racial problem in Israel… racism is not
based on common sense, but nevertheless we will have a hard time overcoming it.
Anyway, Ethiopia will not let them leave.”
The issue of Jews being
allowed to leave Ethiopia was one obstacle to their immigration.
Although
the Jewish Agency and Israel had successfully overcome this problem in Yemen,
little was done to persuade Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, to change
his attitude toward the Jews.
In November 1935, Tecle Hawariate,
Ethiopia’s representative to the League of Nations, gave an interview to several
Jewish newspapers. At the time he was pressing Ethiopia’s case before the League
because of the Italian invasion of his state. “We consider the ‘Falashas’ our
brethren and they are enjoying full equality in our country… they are now
proving their devotion by spontaneously volunteering for the defense of the
liberty of our country.” Hawariate claimed that there were 300,000 Jews then
living in Ethiopia, a number the newspapermen corrected to read
50,000.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia resulted in around 270,000 dead,
some of whom it is assumed were Jewish. As Italian general Emilio De Bono’s army
moved cautiously into Ethiopia from Eritrea in November 1935, the Jewish Agency
reported that it had received a request from Ethiopian Jewish leaders to
immigrate to Palestine. It is not clear what the Jewish Agency made of this
request, but it came too late, as Italy’s Fascist forces soon conquered the
country.
In an ironic twist, the emperor of Ethiopia came to Palestine
after fleeing his country into exile. He did not bring any Ethiopian Jews with
him. However, in an interview with in May 1936 he noted that
he was glad the Jewish community in Palestine was showing an interest in his
country’s plight. In June of the same year the Italian consul in Jerusalem said
his government was doing everything it could to “put the ‘Falashas’ on a proper
footing” by opening schools in their district. Some Jews were even brought to
Rome to study at university.
This was several years before Mussolini
signed the infamous “Pact of Steel” in which he allied Italy with the Nazi
regime. In 1939 Italy ordered the Jewish community’s “dissolution,” closing
schools and firing Jewish officials.
Despite the hardships endured by
Jews in Ethiopia, one of the more shocking events was still to come. In June
1937 Poland had recognized the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. For an unknown
reason it was reported that “some of its Jewish subjects have requested
permission to settle in the African state.” Why Polish Jews sought to flee
Poland for Ethiopia, a country where they would have had marginal prospects, was
unclear, but it seems that some of them did make their way to Addis Ababa, prior
to Hitler’s invasion.
In May 1941 British forces with their Ethiopian
allies drove the Italians out of Ethiopia. Several South African Jews had served
with the British forces and met Ethiopian Jews during the military
campaign.
When they arrived in Cairo in August they told reporters that
there had been “great rejoicing” among the Jews of Ethiopia who were “the first
Jewish community liberated from totalitarian persecution.”
In May 1942
the emperor appointed a Jewish representative to London, Abraham Abram.
Beginning in that year Abram held meetings with Harry Goodman, the British
secretary of Agudath Israel World Organization, a political arm of Orthodox
Jewry, and told him of an idea then circulating among Ethiopian Jews; that they
might aid their brothers in Europe by helping them immigrate to Ethiopia. In
August 1943 the Post reported that “a leading member of the ‘Falasha’ community
expressed to the emperor the desire to assist European Jewry and to welcome them
in ‘Falasha’ towns.” As we now know, it was already too late, as the decision to
destroy the Jews of Europe had been taken at Wannsee in 1942, and there was
little escape by 1943. But this remarkable revelation, that the Ethiopian Jews
reached out to help the Jews of Europe in their darkest hour, reverses the
general historical view that Ethiopian Jews always needed to be saved by
others.
In the end it should be recalled that it took the chief rabbis of
Israel until 1973 to rule that the Ethiopian Jews were Jewish and it took
another four years before the advent of a Likud government under Menachem Begin,
for the State of Israel to assist in their immigration. Yet, 30 years before,
when Ethiopian Jews had heard that a Jewish state had declared independence,
they had, as the Prophet Jeremiah commanded, stood up and girded themselves for
war, trusting in the proverb, “Your enemies will fight against you, but they
will not prevail” (Jeremiah 1:19).
The writer has an MA from the Hebrew
University and works for the government. She came to Israel with Operation Moses
in 1985. Translated by Seth J. Frantzman.
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