The Ethiopian aliyah is in many ways one of the most inspiring episodes in Israel’s modern history — and, in some ways, among the most frustrating. There’s a rich historical debate as to whether the Beta Israel descended from ancient Israelites or were a more recent breakaway sect of Ethiopian Christians who decided to return to the old-time religion. Whichever way, it’s an ancient community. There are reliable contemporaneous accounts of the Beta Israel from the 1480s, and the community began to suffer from state-sanctioned religious persecution from the 17th century onward, including a prohibition on owning land. This led Ethiopian Jews to take up occupations like blacksmithing and pottery — an association with fire that helped further stoke anti-Jewish bigotries about their connection to evil.
In 1973, Ovadia Yosef, who was then the chief Sephardic rabbi, ruled that the Beta Israel were Jews who should be brought to Israel. Seven years later, the Mossad (with crucial U.S. help, notably from George H.W. Bush) began bringing Ethiopian Jews to Sudan and then exfiltrating them to Israel in two large operations, Moses (1983-85) and Solomon (1991).
One of the heroes of both dramas is Micha Feldmann, 79, a gentle and charmingly self-deprecating Israeli whom I met in Addis and who was long the Jewish Agency’s point man for Ethiopian Jewry. He is affectionately known to them as “Abba Micha” — father Micha.
“I held the corpse of a girl 12 years old,” he recalls of the earliest rescue flights. “Because first we flew out the sick and the old, and then the young. You can imagine how I felt.” In 1990 he returned to Addis to lead the Jewish Agency Mission to Ethiopia, running a staff of 16 people as they dealt with an influx of thousands of Beta Israel streaming into the capital as it was under siege from rebel forces. “The rains began. The sewage came up. People started dying. We opened a school on the embassy campus for 4,000 children, not so much to teach them but to save them from the streets and give them an extra meal according to what the doctors suggested.”
In May 1991, American Jewish donors came up with what amounted to a $35 million bribe to the Mengistu regime to let the Jews go. The Israelis were given a single weekend to get it done. In the space of 36 hours, 14,325 Beta Israel were flown to Israel, including, in one case, 1,086 passengers on a Boeing 747, plus a baby born midair. It holds the record for the most people ever to fly aboard a single plane.
Even after 32 years, it’s hard to be unmoved by old footage of the operation — the best possible reminder that Israel, whatever else is said about or against it, has been a refuge for the vulnerable and a beacon for the oppressed. It was hard to be unmoved again as our flight touched the ground and the plane spontaneously broke into singing, “Am Yisrael Chai” — the Nation of Israel Lives.