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Friday December 21, 2007

Ethiopian aliyah coming to a close

by uriel heilman
jta

With Israel’s Interior Ministry on the verge of ending Ethiopian aliyah, a coalition of Ethiopian advocacy groups is pressing the government to consider another 8,500 would-be immigrants.

For now it seems nothing short of a court order will force the Interior Ministry to screen the additional Ethiopians for aliyah eligibility under the special terms granted to the Falash Mura, Ethiopians who claim links to Jewish progenitors.

The advocacy groups say Israel is shirking its obligations under a February 2003 government decision to bring up to 26,000 Falash Mura to Israel, and they have petitioned the Supreme Court to take action.

The Interior Ministry says it has fulfilled its obligations, and that the 8,500 Ethiopians represent a new group beyond the 26,000 specified in 2003.

Avraham Neguise, the director of South Wing to Zion and a leader of the advocacy coalition, said Israel is drawing an arbitrary line that is dividing families.

“By deciding to draw the line between parents who have already come and brothers and sisters, they are cutting the live flesh of the community,” Neguise said. “The government is lying and cheating the Israeli people and the Jewish people.”

The Supreme Court has given no indication on when, or whether, it will hear the petition, which has been pending for several years.

The dispute over the 8,500 Ethiopians cuts to the heart of the controversy over Falash Mura immigration to Israel.

Many observers — including Israeli and Ethiopian government officials and some Jewish aid groups — long have warned that Israel’s efforts to end the mass immigration of Ethiopians would be stymied by advocates seeking to bring additional Ethiopians to Israel.

Those fears were realized once before, in 1998, when Israeli officials welcomed what they thought was the last planeload of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, only to find another 8,000 Ethiopian petitioners knocking on their doors several days later.

The 2003 government decision and subsequent decisions by the Israeli Cabinet were aimed at bringing those new petitioners, who soon swelled to some 26,000, while putting a cap on the olim. The cap was based on a 1999 census conducted in Ethiopia by a former Israeli official, David Efrati.

Israeli officials’ insistence on a cap underscored fears that Ethiopians with dubious claims to Jewish ancestry would exploit the system to escape Africa’s desperate poverty for a better life in Israel.

Unlike the Ethiopian immigrants who came to Israel in Operations Moses and Solomon in 1984 and 1991, respectively, the Falash Mura were not practicing Jews until very recently. That has made it difficult to ascertain their claims of links — either by heritage or marriage — to Ethiopians of Jewish ancestry whose progenitors converted to Christianity more than a century ago to escape economic and social discrimination.

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