They came such a short distance -- except that in the 1980s many did it on foot and 4,000 died en route. They trace their Jewishness to the Biblical era, but only the Prophet Elijah knows for sure. They also invoke the Sartre formula, claiming Jewishness by virtue of having been abused in Exile. Now they challenge Israelis to honor the absorption ethos.

Ethiopian Immigrants

The euphoria of the great 1991 airlift has given way to a modified 1950s malaise. Are the "Ethiopians" getting by? Mostly, yes. Has it been easy? Mostly, no. No policymaker of consequence has said, "they're not Jews," or "of course they're Jews," in a manner that would stick for good. Lacking an appropriate hyphenated or hyphen-free tag for them, society has placed itself on linguistic autopilot, leaving them as "Ethiopian immigrants" -- all 50,000 of them, including their Israel-born children.

Deemed too culturally distant for "Russian"-style direct absorption, they were initially dispatched to mobile home encampments and then, with subsidies verging on 100%, to housing in selected towns. This gave rise to concentrations in several outlying localities, some of them disadvantaged.

An Education Ministry survey of 1992 high school graduates, most of whom reached Israel in Operation Moses (mid-1980s), revealed that 84% completed 12th-grade requirements, as against 72% of the population at large; in other words, "Ethiopians" are less inclined to drop out than Israelis at large. However, only 15% of these graduates earned matriculation certificates, as against 30% countrywide that year. Some 52% were satisfied with their education; 27% were dissatisfied. Some 56% had served in the army. Nearly all who had married had done so within their community, but half had no principled objections to "marrying out" and 90% would accept their children's doing so. One-third were unemployed. More than half were unskilled or skilled industrial workers. 18.5% owned their own housing (population at large: about 75%); 41%, including some married couples, lived with their parents. Some 19.5% had experienced incidents of discrimination, but 81% did not believe their neighbors disliked them because of skin color. The respondents exhibited some movement toward secularization, coupled with scattered continued observance of Ethiopian-Jewish religious customs. A weekly program in Amharic on Voice of Israel radio commanded a 90% listenership rate among those polled.

Whatever the level of outright racism, sensitivity to it is rising. On April 24, the decision to award an Israel Prize for Journalism to veteran Shmuel Schnitzer of Ma'ariv was rescinded because of an August 1994 article in which he had referred to Falas Mura as "infested with disease," foremost HIV. An originally acceptable Hebrew term for members of the community, kushim ("Cushites") -- from a Biblical name for Ethiopia -- is today treated as a slur. Russian born Major Michael Valitsky spent much of the year contesting the army's decision to discharge him for addressing co-serviceman Avi Asmara as a kushi (in jest, he said). The term used by Schnitzer, shehorim ("blacks"), has descended to the same pejorative status.

The community has several abiding grievances:
   (1) There is a perceived national disinterest in the preservation of Ethiopian-Jewish culture and of making Israelis at large acquainted with it;
   (2) There is bitter resentment of the collective aspersions cast on Ethiopian immigrants because of the high incidence of HIV infection among them relative to the population at large;
   (3) The community is impatient with the prolonged bureaucratic stalling over bringing the rest of their brethren to Israel;