On Wednesday Ethiopian Jews commemorated the estimated 4,000 of their number who died on their way to Israel. The commemoration took place on Mt. Herzl.
The annual ceremony, the “Memorial Day for Ethiopian Jews who perished on their way to Israel,” is observed annually to commemorate the estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died on their perilous journey to Israel from Ethiopia through Sudan in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres attended the ceremony held near the memorial for fallen Ethiopian Jews, resembling an abandoned Ethiopian village, with the names of some 1,500 perished, etched in stone.
In his address, Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged some of the difficulties facing Ethiopians but promised to work towards easing their absorption into Israeli society:
“I also know that the hardships did not disappear even upon your arrival in the land. Some of you are still dealing with absorption pains in the country and, at the same time, are paving a way for the young people who were born here, Ethiopian sabras. I have no doubt that time will work its own. As the years pass, the difficulties will fade and the intolerable and reprehensible displays of racism and discrimination will also disappear. We will fight them together and we will defeat them until nothing remains. It is important to me that you know that we are attentive to your feelings, your pain and your aspirations. We are enacting many initiatives to advance Ethiopian Jews, by as much as much as possible, in all aspects of life: Social welfare, housing, education, equal opportunities, concern for your religious leaders, integrating your children in the school system; everybody must learn together, all Israeli children must be together. There is no position in the state that you cannot fill and you are already doing so with great success — in the IDF, the universities, the Knesset, the public sector, the foreign service, everywhere.”
An estimated 35,000 Ethiopian Jews made aliyah during Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991.
A 2010 article in the Jerusalem Post provided details of Operation Moses, describing it as an “unprecedented undertaking” that “was a three-way collaboration between the Mossad, the CIA and Sudanese State Security (SSS) to smuggle nearly 8,000 Falash Mura out of refugee camps in Sudan in a massive airlift to Israel.”
In 1981, significant numbers of Falash Mura, whose Jewish heritage goes back 3,000 years, began an onerous and often deadly trek, joining several hundred thousand of their countrymen who had already fled to Sudan to escape the virulent famine that was plaguing Ethiopia. However, most of those who would eventually be smuggled out of Sudan in Operation Moses did not make the journey until 1983-84. Conditions on the way to Sudan were particularly brutal and an estimated 4,000 of those hoping to make it to Israel died of malnutrition and disease, never finishing the journey they risked everything to embark on.
When reports began arriving in late 1984 that large numbers of Falash Mura were dying from malnutrition in Sudanese refugee camps, the decision to begin Operation Moses was made. The Mossad and the CIA, which already had a presence in Khartoum, began making arrangements with the semi-autonomous SSS agency for a massive airlift operation. In preparation, the Falash Mura were moved to rented houses in the Sudanese town of Gedaref. From there, they were slowly brought to the Khartoum airport where nearly 8,000 were eventually flown to Israel on charter flights on a Belgian airline. On November 21, 1984, the first flight took off from Khartoum – where the SSS had set aside a special runway for the operation – and landed in Israel. Operation Moses had begun.
[Source: ד”ר אבישי טייכר / WikiCommons ]