The first Ethiopian-Israeli beauty queen is on a quest to show the world how “unique and diverse” Israel is, The Algemeiner reported on Friday.
Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, who was born in the Ethiopian province of Gondar, is currently on a week-long college speaking tour in the United States. “There are Americans who I meet who are surprised that I’m Jewish and that I was an officer in the IDF and won Miss Israel,” she told The Algemeiner. “It’s weird for them. They don’t understand my story. Everything good that I represent, they don’t realize that these are things that can happen in Israel.”
Aynaw arrived in Israel from Ethiopia at the age of 12 with her brother after the death of their parents. The siblings lived with their grandparents in the northern coastal city of Netanya, where Aynaw later worked as a shoe store manager. She enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces after completing high school and served as an officer in the military police corps.
In February 2013, Aynaw made history when she became Israel’s first Ethiopian-born beauty queen. A month later, she attended a state dinner at the residence of the late Israeli President Shimon Peres in honor of U.S. President Barack Obama, who was on his first trip to Israel as president.
This is Aynaw’s fifth visit to the U.S., where she said she has encountered no hostility over her nationality. “Everyone has been nice to me,” she said. “I have come across people with staunch political views, but they listened to my story with interest and asked me pleasant questions.”
While she is currently enrolled in the international relations program at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, she intends to continue modeling in the near term, with an eye toward working in the U.S.
Aynaw said she aims to eventually get involved in politics in order to advance the interests of Israel’s Ethiopian community. Pointing to the recent appointment of the first two Ethiopian-Israeli judges, she observed, “Our integration into Israeli society is moving ahead, slowly but surely.”
Some 125,000 Israelis of Ethiopian descent live in the Jewish state today. In 1991, Israel airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews facing the threat of violence in just 36 hours during a covert operation aided by the American government. Those immigrants joined some 8,000 other Ethiopian Jews who made aliyah to Israel during Operation Moses in 1984.
The Jerusalem Post described Operation Moses in 2010 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.”
[Photo: Jewish Community Relations Council of New York ]