The week of Parshat Ki Tavo, our synagogue hosted two of the most incredible young people I have ever met. As the parshah is concerned with the Israelites’ entrance into the land, it was fitting that our speakers were two young Ethiopian Jews from Israel, here on a month-long internship with local law firms.
Erez Naga, 30, arrived in Israel in 1984 at the age of four. Jerus Truneh, a bit younger at 26, came when she was 10. Erez left his village with hundreds of other Jews hoping that they would be able to realize their dream of Jerusalem. They walked for months across the Sudanese desert, and about one-quarter of their comrades died before reaching a refugee camp.
They knew nothing of what had happened in the world over the past 2,500 years to the Jews elsewhere. They trace their lineage back to exiles from the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. They believed that they were the last Jews on Earth, until an Israeli shaliach came to their village to tell them about the Jewish state.
“When we arrived in Israel, we were shocked to see so many sick people,” he said. “All the Jews were so – white!” (Much laughter from the congregation.)
“I was lucky. Almost all of my family made it – my little brother died in the desert, but my family of 400 [gasps from the congregation] was lucky that most of us reached Israel.”
He spent four years in the Israeli army.
What was that experience like?
“In the army, there was not discrimination. We watched each others’ backs. Our lives depended on each other. But when we left the army, we all went back to our own ghettos.”
Jerus came later. Her parents, too, were focused on education for their children, which enabled her to reach law school. Currently, she volunteers with other Ethiopian youth, mentoring them, tutoring them where necessary, and above all inspiring them to be anything they want to be.
“So many do not think they can achieve. When I asked one student what she wanted to be, said she wanted to be a cleaner like her older brother. I asked why, when she had so many other choices. She said because he had a good job – which indeed he does, at a major hotel. But I wanted her to be so much more.”
“There are only four Ethiopian Jewish lawyers in Israel today,” she said with some distress.
When Ethiopian Jews thought of return to their homeland, they thought of Jerusalem and the biblical-era land of Israel. They had no idea that, 2500 years after their ancestors were exiled from the land, a new state of Israel had been in existence for 60 years.
In Ki Tavo we are told that once the Israelites entered the land, they are to recite the blessings and the curses, to bring a tithe of their first produce to the Temple, and to carefully observe all the commandments given to them by Moshe in the desert.
They had certain responsibilities to remember their past wanderings by reciting, when bringing the first fruits, “A wandering Aramean was my father.”
Imagine the wanderings of the Ethiopian Jews. Imagine their joy, and their consternation, when they reached the real Jerusalem, with its cacophony of voices and demands.
I asked the young woman about the holiday of Sigd. “It is the holiday where the priests would go up to a mountain, imagining they are standing once again at Sinai, and praying for return to Jerusalem,” she told me. “Even after we came to Israel, they go every year up to a mountain and pray.”
Is their community still deeply religious? Apparently while the elders retain their deep commitment, many of the second generation no longer practise their traditional faith, identifying more with secular sabras.
Like so many other immigrant groups in Israel, they found that Israeli society and the dream of biblical Israel present totally different realities. We can hope that Ethiopian Jews will retain the strengths of their community, while enriching Israel, and indeed the whole Jewish world.
