TEL AVIV The Israeli government has approved entry of the last group of Ethiopian Jews awaiting immigration to Israel.
The move comes two years after the arrival of 450 Ethiopian Jews then deemed to be the last such group. Indeed, there have been several groups said to be the last since Ethiopian immigration began in the 1970s.
The initial wave was supposed to have ended with a giant military-style operation in 1991. Then Ethiopian aliyah ended again, in 1998. Then again in 2008. And again in 2010.
Each time, advocates of continuing Ethiopian immigration prevailed upon the government to let in not just more Jews, but other groups with Jewish ancestry.
Experts and Ethiopian community members say this group may actually be the one capping three decades of Ethiopian immigration. But when the new arrivals hit Israel, theyll encounter a whole new set of challenges. Ethiopian-Israelis lag in employment, wages and education, and have protested what they call institutional discrimination.
The need is not to just bring olim to the land, but to invest in their integration, said Roni Akale, director-general of the Ethiopian National Project. If they dont invest, there will be damage.
Heres who Israels 135,000 Ethiopian Jews are, why their aliyah has taken more than 30 years and how the immigrants have fared.
JEWS HAVE lived in Ethiopia for 3,000 years.
Many believe they first arrived there three millennia ago after splitting off from King Solomons ancient Jewish kingdom. Since then, Ethiopian Judaism developed mostly in isolation from the rest of world Jewry. Ethiopian Jews do not celebrate post-biblical holidays like Chanukah and Purim, and they maintain their own unique celebrations, like the fall festival of Sigd.
Successive Ethiopian governments persecuted the Jews, leaving them impoverished and relatively isolated in agrarian communities amid the countrys northern mountains. Contacts with outside Jewry increased in the 20th century.
In 1973, Ovadia Yosef, then Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, ruled that the Ethiopian community was Jewish, paving the way for their immigration.
Thousands came to Israel via military operations.
Ethiopian aliyah began with a trickle in 1977. Between 1984 and 1985, thousands of Ethiopian Jews fleeing famine crossed into Sudan, some of them traveling for up to a month on foot. From there, in a mission called Operation Moses, Israeli Defense Forces planes airlifted about 8,000 to Israel.
In 1991, with Ethiopias government on the cusp of being overthrown by rebel groups, mass aliyah resumed with the clandestine Operation Solomon, which brought 14,500 people to Israel on 40 flights in just 36 hours. Some of the flights held double their normal capacity to save time.
Debates over who is an Ethiopian Jew have drawn out the aliyah process.
After Operation Solomon, advocates for the community urged the government to let another group of Ethiopians move to Israel. The group, whose members are known as Falash Mura, has Jewish ancestry but is descended from Ethiopians who converted to Christianity about a century ago.
Some Israeli officials opposed the aliyah of the Christian Falash Mura. But in the 1990s and 2000s, successive governments brought waves of Falash Mura to Israel, who underwent conversion to Judaism after their arrival.
Experts say this wave may really be the end of Ethiopian aliyah because it includes every Falash Mura known to Israel. Its primary purpose, according to the government, is to reunite families split by earlier immigrations.
To qualify for this round, candidates need to have family in Israel and arrived in pre-aliyah compounds in Ethiopia run by the Jewish Agency by the start of 2010.
ETHIOPIAN-ISRAELIS lag in education and employment. Often from poor and uneducated, they have struggled to integrate.
According to data compiled by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, a government-sponsored think tank, as of 2013 only 27% of Ethiopian-Israeli students qualified for university, as opposed to 51% of all Israelis. Average wages for Ethiopian-Israelis were more than a third lower than the Israeli average.
Ethiopian Israelis claim that state institutions discriminate against them. Commented Myers-JDC-Brookdale director Jack Habib:
How much of that is perception and how much of that is reality we dont know. But there are these strong feelings of discrimination. Its not an issue we can ignore.
