My daughter-in-law’s father, Avraham, is a deeply observant man, and as Zionist as anyone I have met in this country.
As a young man in the early 1980s, Avraham set out from Ethiopia for Sudan with his family. Men, women, and babies walked into the unknown, through desert, past bandits, hunger, and disease.
Guides they paid often robbed them and abandoned them in the desert with nothing. They kept walking. He lost his stepfather and two brothers on the way.
Then he waited three years in a Sudanese refugee camp, where he had to hide his Jewish identity, for the opportunity to realize his Zionist dream.
While he waited, the Mossad was running one of the strangest operations in its history. Through a front company, its agents leased an abandoned Sudanese diving resort called Arous and ran it as a real hotel, with paying tourists.
At night, staff slipped away to collect Beta Israel Jews and drive them to the beach, where Israeli naval commandos took them out to a waiting ship. It ran from 1981 to 1985 and depended on Beta Israel activists like Ferede Aklum, who coordinated escapes from the camps.
Avraham was one of the Jews those commandos carried to the ship.
His stepfather and brothers are among the roughly 4,000 Beta Israel who died on the road to Sudan or in its refugee camps. Only about 1,500 of them have been named.
On November 9, Avraham will do what he does every year: he and his family will ride with much of their community to Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv promenade, which looks out over the Temple Mount.
The Kessim, the community’s priests, will lead the prayers and read from the Orit, its scripture. When the fast ends, the dancing starts.
Sigd falls 50 days after Yom Kippur, on the 29th of Heshvan. Tradition ties it to the covenant renewed in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. In Ethiopia, the community climbed a mountain to fast, pray toward Jerusalem, and ask to be returned there.
In 2008, the Knesset made Sigd a state holiday in a law sponsored by Uri Ariel and backed by Shas and Meretz. If any date on the Jewish calendar has earned the title “most Zionist,” except for possibly Hanukkah, it is this one.
It is also a problem for anyone who calls Zionism a “European colonial project.”
In 1862, 34 years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, a Beta Israel named Abba Mahari set out for Jerusalem with thousands of followers. They believed the waters would part for them as they had for Moses.
At the Tekeze River, it did not. Many drowned or starved. The Beta Israel had no congress in Basel and no Balfour Declaration.
For centuries, they observed Shabbat and the purity laws in the villages of Gondar and Tigray, under heavy pressure to convert, and they kept trying to go home.
That their Jewishness ever needed a rabbinic ruling is a stain on our religious establishment. In 1973, Sephardi chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that they were Jews, descendants of the tribe of Dan.
Even so, the Chief Rabbinate demanded that new arrivals undergo symbolic conversion, including ritual immersion.
It took years of protest, including a month-long sit-in outside the Chief Rabbinate in 1985, to make the rabbis back down. Many of the protesters had just survived Sudan.
Israel’s own doing
Operation Moses flew about 8,000 out of Sudan between November 1984 and January 1985. Operation Solomon brought more than 14,000 from Addis Ababa in 36 hours in 1991.
The Beta Israel story is typical of how modern Israel was built: by Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Holocaust survivors with no homes to return to, and most of the roughly 850,000 Jews driven out of the Arab and Muslim world.
Operation Magic Carpet flew about 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949 and 1950. Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews in 1951 and 1952.
Colonialists have a mother country to return to. These Jews had none, and in the lands they fled, they had always been outsiders.
The “white settler” caricature only works if you erase Jewish history, not only in Kyiv and Warsaw, but in Sana’a, Baghdad, and Gondar. The Western campus activists chanting “decolonize” have no answer for my daughter-in-law’s father, so they ignore him or lie about him.
The unfinished part of this story is Israel’s own doing.
At a discussion in the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee on February 10, the figure cited was 19,000 people waiting to immigrate from Ethiopia. Many have waited about 20 years.
Many have parents, siblings, or children here who live as Jews in every sense of the word, and they still have not been reunited. Since their ancestors were forced or pressured into Christianity, they do not qualify under the Law of Return.
They come only when the cabinet approves a quota of a few hundred or a couple of thousand at a time.
In 2002, Rabbi Yosef ruled that these converts had acted out of fear and persecution and should be considered Jews. The waiting community studies Hebrew and holds what is billed as the world’s largest Seder in Gondar. Israel still requires them to undergo a full Orthodox conversion on arrival, and they do.
Ukraine shows what the state can do when it wants to. When Russia invaded in 2022, Israel rightly opened its doors. Of the roughly 14,000 people who immigrated from Ukraine the following year, about 8,500 were not Jewish under the Chief Rabbinate’s criteria.
They qualified automatically under the Law of Return’s grandchild clause, which requires one Jewish grandparent and no observance, no Hebrew, and no waiting list.
When fighting engulfed Gondar in 2023, Israel evacuated just over 200 people. The waiting lists stayed behind.
A grandchild in Kharkiv who may never have entered a synagogue gets a rescue flight.
A woman in Gondar who has fasted on Sigd every year of her life, whose children already live here as Jews, gets a number in a queue. No honest reading of Jewish law or Zionist history justifies that.
The 26th Knesset is sworn in on November 10, the day after Sigd.
Whoever forms the next government should write one commitment into its coalition guidelines: complete the aliyah of the remaining Jews in Ethiopia by a funded deadline, and reunite every family split between Gondar and Israel, with no more quotas doled out a few hundred at a time.
Israel was built by Jews who never stopped waiting for Jerusalem. On Sigd, thousands of them will stand on that ridge and look at it. The state should stop making their families wait.
The writer is a contributing opinion writer for The Jerusalem Post and other Jewish publications, as well as an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former New York Police Department officer.