MONTREAL — A commemoration of the life of Baruch Tegegne, a pioneering activist for Ethiopian Jewish aliyah, will be held at Congregation Beth-El Feb. 13 at 1 p.m.
Tegegne, who lived off and on in Montreal for about 25 years, died Dec. 27 in Israel at age 66 of of complications of hepatitis C.
Bruce Gottlieb, a founder of the Canadian Association for Ethiopian Jews, said Tegegne’s “perseverance and courage played such an important role in the rescue of Ethiopian Jews,” and his is “one of the most remarkable stories of Jewish redemption.”
Although he died in relative obscurity, Tegegne is credited with instigating the international movement that brought tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. He put himself at physical risk in his personal rescue efforts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, before the Israeli government began its airlifts in 1984.
Montrealer Phyllis Schwartzman Pinchuk co-authored Tegegne’s memoir, Baruch’s Odyssey: An Ethiopian Jew’s Struggle to Save his People, in 2009. It details Tegegne’s desperate and frustrating campaign to convince the Israeli government to recognize his people as Jews.
As Pinchuk writes, Tegegne would eventually be hailed as a hero, but at one time he was seen as a troublemaker by Israeli officials and the North American Jewish establishment.
Tegegne made an emotional plea at the 1979 North American Jewish federation’s General Assembly in Montreal to save his people dying in the refugee camps of Sudan while they waited for deliverance to Israel. That address was seen as pivotal in awakening Diaspora Jewry to the urgency of the situation.
Today, he’s seen as the one who sounded the alarm over the imperiled, but little known, Jewish community in Ethiopia, pleading with Israel to take action. The first airlifts of Ethiopian Jews by Israel began in 1984.
As he relates in the memoir, the campaign came at great cost to his livelihood and health, and, he believes, led to the end of his marriage.
Tegegne was born in the remote village of Wozaba in 1944. When he was 11, the Jewish Agency selected him, along with 14 other children, to go to Israel to study modern Judaism and Hebrew. He returned to Ethiopia five years later to work among his people and remained there until 1974.
That year, the new Marxist regime confiscated his family’s prosperous farmland. Tegegne’s activism among Jews also made him suspect.
Tegegne then embarked on a desperate journey to Israel. It took him two years and eight months of literally wandering around the world to get there. But the doors were still closed to the Ethiopians in the mid-1970s, despite the chaos in their country. Tegegne underwent conversion to be admitted. He believed Israel’s resistance to helping his people was due to racism.
In 1977, Tegegne organized the first large demonstration for Ethiopian aliyah outside Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s office.
But action was slow, and Tegegne embarked on his own rescue mission, with the help of the new American Association for Ethiopian Jews. Disguised as a Sudanese, Tegegne went back and forth between Ethiopia and the refugee camps taking Jews with him.
He moved to Montreal in 1979, and is believed to be the first Ethiopian Jew to settle in Canada. He married Montrealer Susan Migicovsky and is survived by a daughter Yaffa.
Tegegne’s story and the plight of Ethiopian Jewry came to wider attention in 1983 with Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici’s documentary Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews.
Tegegne, a diabetic, had suffered from kidney disease since at least 2002, and underwent a transplant in Montreal in 2005. Until his health began to fail, he had spent much of the previous 20 years working among the Ethiopian community in Africa and Israel.
Jacobovici called Tegegne “a hero who saved hundreds, if not thousands, from the refugee camps in war-torn Ethiopia.”