The Ethiopian Airlift-Radically Redefining Jewish Identity
ODENHEIMER, MICHA
The Ethiopian Airlift— Radically Redefining Jewish Identity MICHA ODENHEIMER Several days after the mass air lift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, a young journalist from the Independent in London...
...Another legend, this one famous, makes them into descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba: no wonder they remember Solomon's Temple on Mount Zion...
...Beyond and behind both there is a retrieval of the message of Mount Zion's prophets, for whom one God has created all humanity...
...The Talmud comments: Why did God create only one human pair...
...As my thoughts returned to his original remark—how he perceived the "Falasha" as far more Ethiopian than Jewish—I remembered what I had said to a group of Ethiopian jews about a month before, as an introduction to a short lesson in Jewish history...
...With Operation Moses and Operation Solomon it was fulfilled...
...Beyond and behind Mount Zion, there is Moses' Sinai...
...For jusi as the Beta Ytsrael might look, talk and dress like their Ethiopian Christian is the history of a fidelity, yet even in it nothing quite compares to the fidelity of the Ethiopians...
...The Addis Ababa airport was closed the day after...
...The true wonder of these memories and traditions is not they themselves but the fidelity produced by them, one which, lasting for more than two millennia, was prepared to endure mockery, humiliation, persecution, if only the longing would one day be fulfilled...
...One legend has them led to Ethiopia by Moses, and a moving story about Moses' death is recited at their funerals to this day: No wonder they remember Mount Sinai...
...Jewish tradition stresses that there are no miracles without human action...
...male and female created He them (Genesis 1:27...
...I tried to point out to him the crucial importance for all people of the right to free immigration, the fierce desire of the Ethiopian Jews themselves to immigrate to Israel and the fact that the Beta Yisrael (House of Israel, as the Ethiopian Jews call themselves) had been slowly dwindling in number for many years and would probably not have lasted as a separate culture into the next century in Ethiopia...
...But perhaps it was because they wished to exterminate the message of Zion and Sinai...
...A hair-raising cliffhanger," I said to my Christian dialogue-partner, Professor Paul van Buren...
...There is the trust by these brothers and sisters in white Israel, now white no more...
...Thus I stressed Israel's courage and resourcefulness, an accomplishment by humans...
...We've been separated for a long time," I said, "and we have to hear each other's stories, because my children are going to marry your children...
...In order that no one could say, my ancestor is superior to theirs...
...It was a less interesting story because he saw the airlift more in terms of the continuing tragedy of Ethiopia than as a triumph for Israel...
...May this be done by Zionists the world over with a fidelity matching the Ethiopian: And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him...
...That, I realized, was the crux of the matter for me...
...Van Buren smiled, "Perhaps it was kept open one day longer...
...Van Buren hinted that perhaps, sometimes, brave human actions are supported by divine miracles...
...What is the lasting significance of these two operations for Israel, for Judaism, for the whole world...
...The retrieval of the two mountains is on behalf of Judaism but also of all humanity...
...The Ethiopian Airlift— Radically Redefining Jewish Identity MICHA ODENHEIMER Several days after the mass air lift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, a young journalist from the Independent in London confessed to me over a beer at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa that he had not wanted to cover the story...
...Yet with the aliyah of the Ethiopians the message of Zion and Sinai is being retrieved, and regardless of the world's slanders will continue to be retrieved...
...I haven't spoken to many of them," he said, "but my impression is that they are much more Ethiopian than they are Jewish...
...There is the rescue by "white" Israel of its blaek brothers and sisters...
...To this day we do not know for sure...
...Why did the German National Socialists wish to make the world judenrein (free of Jews...
...It is a measure of the world's persisting hatreds and idolatries that its representative organization, the United Nations General Assembly, has seen fit to attach the label of racism, of all movements, to Zionism...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
