Like their predecessors, who arrived in 1985 in the equally secretive Operation Moses, the latest emigres from Ethiopia find Israel to be a land of ambiguous promise. They speak no Hebrew, have no marketable skills. They’re used to huts, not houses. They’re not accustomed to modern plumbing-or to bathing unclothed. But whatever their social handicaps, they insist on being accepted as full-fledged Jews.
There are now more than 26,000 Ethiopian Jews scattered across Israel, and to the Orthodox religious establishment their Judaism is far from kosher. Their deep faith is centered on the Torah alone. Isolated from mainstream Judaism, they had no access to the commentaries and customs developed by generations of Talmudic scholars. Ethiopians have no rabbis but, like the ancient Israelites, they look to turbaned priests (called kessim) to lead them in prayers, to marry them and, on Passover, to sacrifice lambs to God. They come from villages built near rivers so that the women can bathe ritually after menstruation in the muddy waters; therefore, they do not use mikvahs (ritual baths) for purification. But in many ways the Ethiopians are more observant than the Orthodox. On Yom Kippur, for example, they pray for 25 hours straight–a practice that disturbs the sleep of their new Israeli neighbors. And during the harried airlift from Ethiopia, some kessim considered staying behind rather than boarding an Israeli plane on Shabbat.
In Israel, the chief rabbi had insisted that Ethiopian males undergo a symbolic recircumcision. Today, both men and women must go through ritual immersion before marriage, which they consider an insult. Like all Israeli brides, Ethiopian women must comply, but they complain that the ritual cleansing resembles Christian baptism. As a compromise, the chief rabbi has designated a single rabbi, David Chelouche, to perform marriages for Ethiopians without requiring them to go through the hated ritual.
Inevitably, Ethiopian Jews will have to jettison many of their ancient traditions. There is no room in rabbinic Judaism for priests. Recognizing this, Yosef Adana, the son of the chief of the kessim, became the first Ethiopian rabbi. Another victim of the Ethiopians’ return is their prayer book, which is written in Geez, an ancient liturgical language which only the priests now understand. At Israel’s only Ethiopian synagogue, in Beersheba, newly arrived immigrants gather to be led in their venerable prayers because they do not yet know how to pray in Hebrew. “The Ethiopian prayer in Geez will be forgotten,” says Rabbi Adana. “It makes me very sad. Even if you don’t understand, you feel different.” That’s the price for coming home to Zion.
