Israel is terrible at apartheid. Israel is lousy at being a racist country. I can say these things unequivocally following a celebration yesterday of the Ethiopian Jewish holiday, Sigd, at the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC. Sigd, a holiday observed by tens of thousands of members of the Ethiopian Jewish community known as Beta Yisrael, commemorates a millenia-old tradition of longing for the return to Zion and Jerusalem from exile.
For me, the celebration of Sigd was personal.
I started my career in the State Department. Among my first duties was working to coordinate between the White House and Israel on the evacuation of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel as Ethiopia’s communist dictatorship was collapsing. In what became known as the heroic Operation Solomon, over the course of 36 hours, the Israeli Air Force airlifted Ethiopian Jews around the clock from Addis Ababa to Israel. I watched in wonder at the reports coming in.
A month later, I boarded a flight to my first overseas posting, a two-year assignment in Addis Ababa. It was there that I learned about Sigd and other Beta Yisrael traditions from the remaining Ethiopian Jewish community.
More than thirty years later, it is with incredible joy that I see how Israel has integrated Ethiopian Jews along with Jews from all over the world into the most demographically and racially mixed society imaginable. Sigd became an official Israeli religious holiday in 2008, fifteen years after Operation Solomon — record time when one considers how long Ethiopian Jews waited to return to Jerusalem. It is celebrated today with a pilgrimage-like ceremony of worshippers joining their kessim (spiritual leaders) in Jerusalem in prayers of thanksgiving and renewal.
This year marked the second year the Embassy of Israel celebrated Sigd, and the celebrations keep getting better. Guests were welcomed with an elaborate traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and the bipartisan group was then invited to learn about Sigd, to marvel at the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and to dance to the music and storytelling of Ethiopian-Israeli Gili Yalo. Yalo recounted his emigration from Ethiopia as a barefoot four-year-old boy, walking for weeks to a refugee camp in Sudan. After six months in the camp, Yano was airlifted to Israel as part of Operation Moses in 1984. His audience broke into laughter when he described the astonishment and fascination the Ethiopian migrants felt when they deplaned and saw a sea of white people waiting to greet them as fellow Jews. Until that moment, Ethiopian Jews believed all Jews looked like them, and that all Jews strove to reach Jerusalem.
Operation Moses preceded Operation Solomon by less than seven years. The colossal impact it had on Israeli society cannot be underestimated. Never before had most Israelis felt a connection to East African Jews, Jews who didn’t look like them and whose traditions were ancient, not modern. The absorption of Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society took time. Ethiopian Jews in 1984 did not know anything about modern Israel; they lived in a time and place in which biblical Israel was their frame of reference. The transformation of the Beta Yisrael (House of Israel) from Ethiopia into the Bnai Yisrael (the Children of Israel) in modern times is complete. It took a generation, sometimes two, for Ethiopian Jews to fully acclimate to Israel, but once they learned modern Hebrew and served in the Israeli Defense Forces, they were no longer ingathered exiles but Israelis.
With false claims of genocide and spurious accusations of blood libels against Jews and the State of Israel circulating everywhere, it is heartening to see and hear the true story of the kind of miracles that happen in Israel all the time. Ethiopian Jews in Israel are part of the wondrous mix of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrachi, Persian, Indian, East Asian, African, and Latin American Jews. The ingathering of exiles is a daily mission in Israel, and it is beautiful to behold. The Embassy’s ability to showcase this fact to broader audiences is crucial to the mission of dispelling the hateful rhetoric we hear every day.
