An Ethiopian combat soldier. IDF Blog photo.
There are some 500 Ethiopian Israelis currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Israel’s Interior Minister Silvan Shalom declared Monday that he will work to immediately bring their families from Ethiopia to Israel. According to The Jerusalem Post, Shalom will also endeavor “to advance the immigration of the rest of the 7,000-member Jewish Ethiopian community.”
“I have a strong will to bring the rest of Ethiopian Jewry , and I hope that I will be able to do so in my role as interior minister,” Shalom told members of a meeting between the Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee and the Knesset’s Interior Committee (JP).
Shalom intends to review the complete lists of Ethiopian Jews waiting to make aliyah (immigrate) to Israel, including those who have been refused before. The plan is to bring the families of the 500 Ethiopian IDF soldiers first, and Shalom believes that this “foot in the door” will open the way for the remaining Ethiopian Jews.
“We’re talking about 6,000 to 7,000 people, that Israel should and must contain,” he said (JP), pointing out that if not for destructions throughout early Israel history recently commemorated the 9th of Av, about 300 million Jewish People would comprise Israel today.
In the years surrounding Israel’s dramatic airlifts of thousands of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s and also in 1991, thousands left home and family to gather in Gondar for flights to Israel. When the airlifts stopped, thousands were left in poverty in Gondar. With little or no means of returning to their homes, they clung to a burning hope that would one day the airlifts would resume. Various Israel-sponsored aliyah campaigns have occurred since then but on a much smaller scale.
In 2013, Israel called an official end to state-sponsored mass aliyah of Jews from Ethiopia, dashing the lingering hopes of thousands of Ethiopian Jews stranded in Gondar. With it came the closure of several humanitarian facilities serving the Jewish population there.
Knesset Member Avraham Naguise, who chairs the Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee, noted that “families have been separated, including children from their parents, and those who remain are left without assistance and without the involvement of humanitarian organizations that have worked there before” (JP).
Since 1999 Jewish Voice has taken free medical and dental care to the Jewish People in Gondar. We continue year after year to bring them care that they otherwise cannot afford, care that is often lifesaving. We are going to Gondar again this October and you can be a part of bringing the hope of Yeshua to the suffering, needy Jewish People of Gondar. There are so many ways you can help.
Come with us! Find out more about our Gondar outreach this October 9-19, 2015. Click here, email us at outreaches@jewishvoice.org, or call our Global Outreach department at 800-299-9374.
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Photo courtesy of the IDF Blog, IDFblog.com.
