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February 12, 1999/26 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 20
Rabbi pledges Christian funds to aid Ethiopian Jews
DEBRA N. COHEN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Up to $2 million donated by evangelical Christians will redeem the Jews of Kwara, Ethiopia, and bring them to Israel.
The sum has been promised by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. His offer has been accepted by the government of Israel, an official confirmed.
Eckstein's offer came with two conditions: that all the Kwara Jews -believed to number between 2,500 and 3,000 - be brought to Israel within six months; and that the source of the money be publicly acknowledged.
Between 1984 and today, an estimated 45,000 Ethiopians have arrived in Israel, including some 14,000 during Israel's dramatic Operation Solomon in 1991. But those from the remote northern region of Kwara were left off official Operation Solomon lists because of a long-standing feud among Ethiopian Jewish religious leaders.
The following year, some 3,500 Jews from Upper Kwara made their way to Israel. However, the 3,000 or so in neighboring Lower Kwara were essentially forgotten. After an article in The Jerusalem Report last summer brought their plight to public attention, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly pledged to bring them to Israel.
Unlike the estimated 15,000 Falash Mura, who also seek entry to Israel but whose Jewishness is in question, the Kwara Jews are recognized by the Israeli government as Jewish. But little has happened to bring them to Israel, say those involved with the issue.
Fewer than 200 have been given permission to go to Israel from Lower Kwara, and an estimated 1,000 Jews from that region are living in squalor just outside of the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar, say some who have visited the area in recent months. The rest remain in Lower Kwara, though more have begun to sell their farmland and huts to neighbors and stream toward Gondar, said Eckstein, a Chicago-based Orthodox rabbi whose longtime work in interfaith affairs led to his involvement with the evangelical community.
As the Kwara Jews wait in Ethiopia for permission to make aliyah, two Jewish humanitarian aid groups have been helping them and others with food and medicine. The North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, a grass-roots organization based in New York, has, since November, been supplying $5,000 a month worth of tef, a grain needed to make bread, to the Kwara Jews and Falash Mura living just outside Gondar.
For its part, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization that works all over the world and is based in New York, sent a native Ethiopian doctor to visit Lower Kwara in late November. While there he inoculated children under the age of 6 and women of childbearing age against diphtheria, measles and tuberculosis, said Will Recant, director of special projects for the JDC.
Israel has recognized the Jews from Kwara as fully Jewish. An estimated 15,000 Falash Mura consider themselves Jewish and also want to immigrate to Israel. But they have not been recognized as Jews by the Israeli government.
No one knows precisely how many remain in Lower Kwara, which is located on the Sudanese border, but estimates range from about 1,000 to 1,500. An estimated 750 to 1,000 have made their way to Gondar.
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