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by Emmanuel Goujon
15 June, 2007
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - Thousands of Ethiopian Jews who left their native villages to relocate to Israel have been camping for months or even years in the capital, waiting in vain to get to the Promised land.
Some live, often destitute, on little hillocks around the Israeli embassy complex in Addis Ababa's undulating cityscape and most despair whether they will ever get an opportunity to go to Israel.
"My children have left (for Israel) and for the past seven years, we have been filling out forms at the Israeli embassy and with non-governmental organisations to leave," said Huregu Mekonnen.
"I quit my village and left everything behind me and I am very angry to still be in Addis Ababa where life is very difficult," said Mekonnen, who is wizened beyond her 43 years.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Israel organised two mass operations that brought 35,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Today their number has reached around 100,000.
In 2005, Israel promised that a final group -- the Falashmura or Ethiopians who say their families were forced to convert to Christianity in the 19th century but today reclaim their Jewishness -- would be relocated before the end of 2007.
That announcement raised hope despite any verbal or written guarantee, and many gave up everything to huddle in Addis Ababa until they got their papers for Israel.
The trigger for the exodus was the 1974 coup that toppled Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and brought in Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. The latter's Marxist-Leninist dictatorship fanned anti-Semitism in a country with a proud Christian Orthodox tradition and where Jews had long been a target of missionaries.
According to reports from the time, an estimated 2,500 Jews were killed and some 7,000 made homeless in the first weeks of coup, the start of a bloody reign in which tens of thousands of Ethiopians who were killed or disappeared.
After taking office in 1977, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin asked Mengistu to allow 200 Ethiopian Jews to leave for Israel aboard an Israeli military jet that had emptied its military cargo in Addis Ababa.
Mengistu agreed and that may have been the precursor to the mass exodus.
Getnet Mengesha, vice-president of the Beta Israel association which groups Ethiopian Jews, said 2,500 of the country's estimated 12,000 remaining Jews were now living on the edges in the capital.
"The majority of us had a good life in the countryside," he said, but gave up everything to fulfill a dream "and Israel is refusing us in."
"We feel rejected by both sides," said the architect, bitterly. "Now we are displaced people in our own land."
Sixty-seven year-old Mesgan Berehle said "I have nothing. I came here 10 years ago with my eight children and I left behind my farm."
While waiting in Addis Ababa, he and his wife had another child who was born handicapped.
"It's a living nightmare," he said. "If I had been in Israel I could have perhaps cured my son. I cannot go to Israel, I cannot return to my village: I am like a sunken boat."
The family, meanwhile, has been split apart with several members, including a son and a daughter, having managed to emigrate to Israel.
"They call me often and ask me to come," he said. "But I am stuck here. While I know Israel is not paradise .... I have to go there because I am Jewish."
The extent of the Falashmura's Jewishness has triggered fierce debate among political and religious leaders in Israel, where many Ethiopians complain of discrimination.
Under Israel's "law of return," anyone who is Jewish or has a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse, or is the spouse of someone with such a Jewish relative provided he did not voluntarily convert from Judaism, can settle in Israel.
But unlike most Jews in the diaspora who are granted Israeli citizenship automatically upon arrival, Ethiopia's Jews needed the Jewish state's rabbinate to recognise them as Jews in 1975 before being allowed to enter the country.
The Israel embassy said an average 200 Ethiopian Jews have been leaving for Israel every month, until Februrary when the Israel interior minister tightened emigration rules making departures more difficult.
The Falashmura in Israel say that their relatives' immigration is being blocked by the government, which says it wants guarantees that no more candidates will seek to immigrate by citing family ties.
"For a long time, our grandparents had been telling us that our land was Jerusalem, that we are Jewish and we must go to the Promised Land," said Mulu Kelkay, 38, a former soldier.
"From Russia, they even take dogs, but us, they leave us out. It's true we are blacks but we are Jewish."