Falashas on hunger strike

2005-09-20 20:36

Addis Ababa - Some 350 members of Ethiopia's Bete Israel community went on hunger strike in Addis Ababa on Tuesday in protest over what they described as Israel's "unfulfilled promise" to take them to the Holy Land.

The three-day hunger strike was intended to publicise Israel's failure to keep the "promise" which the community says it made eight years ago, and which concerns some 20 000 Ethiopian Jews, also known as Falashas.

"We have been kept in hope for all these years with a promise to be moved soon to the Holy Land," said Getnet Mengesha, spokesperson of the Bete Israel community, as the Falashas prefer to be called.

"We have been on hunger strike since we assembled here for morning prayers," Mengesha said at a makeshift synagogue where some 200 men, 100 women and about 50 minors of both sexes were seated in silence on long benches.

Around 20 000 Falashas remain in Ethiopia, about 3 000 of them in Addis Ababa, awaiting to be flown to Israel any day, he said.

'Hope keeps us going'

Their hopes were based on the experience of some 70 000 fellow Falashas who were taken to Israel in the past twenty years. Large numbers were airlifted out of Ethiopia in Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991, and in smaller groups since.

"It is hope that keeps us going, despite the problems we have encountered in Gondar and Addis Ababa under severe living conditions," said Maledu Tilahun, 26, who came to Addis Ababa eight years ago from her hometown of Chilga in North Gonder Province.

Tilahun completed high school in Chilga and was hoping to enter college in Haifa, Israel, where several of her relatives were taken at the height of the devastating famine in Ethiopia in 1984 which claimed over a million lives.

Her uncle, Abraham Sheferaw, followed the family four years ago and now lives with them in Haifa.

"Its been a long wait for many of us," said Tilahun Abebe, 32, who came from Atghie-Ruphael, near Gonder city, six years ago, selling everything he and his family owned on the belief he would be flown to Israel within a week.

"This hunger strike is to attract the attention of those in a position to help," Abebe said.

The Bete Israel Community in Addis Ababa was also in dire need of food and clothing, he said.

"The aid the New York-based North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry used to provide to the community has stopped for a year now," he added.

- SAPA