Asmara — Germany and Kenyan journalists who arrived here to participate in the 20th anniversary of Independence Day expressed deep impression with the colorful celebrations and the peaceful co-existence of the Eritrean people.
The German journalist, Dr. Werner Zeppenfeld, stated that the fact that a number of Eritrean citizens residing abroad arrived in the Homeland to participate in the Independence Day celebrations attests to the existing strong bond between the people and the leadership, in addition to the strong attachment to the nation.
He further explained that he has visited over 30 countries in Africa, but nowhere matches to the prevailing peace and security in Eritrea. Dr. Werner expressed desire to visit other parts of the country and that he would produce a program on the German media focusing on Eritrea's 20-year journey of independence, as well as the peace and security he experienced.
Likewise, Kenyan journalist, Mr. Jeff Koinange, who works at K-24 TV Station, stated that his visit to Eritrea is for the first time, and that he found out Eritrea to be quite unique compared to 46 other African countries that he has visited. He further noted that the development accomplishments the nation registered in a short period, coupled with the prevailing peace and stability could be cited as an example.
Moreover, Mr. Jeff Koinange stated that he is highly impressed with the colorful Independence Day celebrations, and that he came to understand that Eritreans have a strong sense of nationalism, besides being hospitable. The Kenyan journalist went on to say that he would broadcast his observations about Eritrea in the K-24 TV Station.
The head of a custody court at the Givon prison has demanded that an asylum seeker from Eritrea validates his birth certificate at the Eritrean embassy, despite the risk this would pose to him and his family, Haaretz has learned.
The asylum seeker, who can only be identified as Ibrahim, came to Israel from Eritrea in November 2009. He was arrested a month later and held at the Givon prison in Ramle for a year and a half. The prolonged detention resulted from the Population and Immigration Authority insisting that he came, in fact, from Ethiopia.
After Ibrahim finally obtained his Eritrean birth certificate, Mani Pshitizky, a judge in the custody court, decided to have the authenticity of the birth certificate verified by sending it to the Eritrean embassy.
This requirement contradicts the safety guidelines of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR ).
"UNHCR strongly recommends that the identities of asylum seekers should remain confidential. This particularly applies to sharing identities with officials of the government from where the asylum seeker originates," an opinion submitted by the UNHCR to the Interior Ministry read. "The concern is that often people seeking asylum are considered as acting against their own state by seeking asylum and could thereafter be subjected to fines and punishment, further exacerbating their asylum claim."
Four days later, the Population and Immigration Authority told the court it was impossible to fulfill its request, as "approaching the consulate is tantamount to turning him in."
Undeterred, Pshitizky reiterated his request, which was yet again refused. He then ordered Ibrahim released, under the condition he himself approaches the Eritrean embassy to confirm his citizenship there, or leave Israel by May.
Despite this request, the court did not return the birth certificate to Ibrahim, prompting the We Are Refugees non-profit organization to approach the court and ask it to extended his conditional release. In response, Pshitizky ruled Ibrahim should arrive for an interview at the Interior Ministry's infiltrators unit, which will take his case from there. At the interview, Ibrahim was arrested. The authority claims he admitted that the birth certificate was forged.
Migrants from Eritrea rest in a building, used to house people waiting to be smuggled into Israel, near the Egyptian-Israeli border in Sinai, December 25, 2010.
Photo by: Reuters
"Ibrahim's citizenship was questioned, with the Interior Ministry consistently claiming he was Ethiopian. He was released by the court, which offered him an opportunity to prove his citizenship," the Justice Ministry said in response.
The Population and Immigration Authority said that Ibrahim attempted to escape during the interview, and eventually admitted he was Ethiopian, rather than Eritrean, and was therefore immediately returned to custody.
Twenty years after Operation Solomon – Israel's dramatic airlift of Jews out of Ethiopia – normalization has almost set in between the two countries. Not only are Ethiopian Jews now being permitted to immigrate to Israel, but those who fled are also returning to Ethiopia as Israelis.
By Shalva Weil for ISN Insights
At the end of May 1991, plane after plane brought 14,310 Ethiopian Jews to Israel within a day and a half in an amazing airlift, as the future of Jews in Ethiopia and the future of the Ethiopian government known as the Derg, hung in the balance. The pictures that appeared over and over again on the world's television screens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, dressed in white traditional costume with exquisite hand-woven embroidery, silently filing into the airplanes in order to fulfill the dream of their forefathers of immigrating to Zion, remains imprinted in collective memory. The Jews of Ethiopia had prayed for hundreds of years to return to the land of their fathers.
In 1984-5, some of the Ethiopian Jews - then known by the stigmatic name "Falashas" meaning "strangers" or "outsiders" - had been flown to Israel from the refugee camps of the Sudan in Operation Moses. The head of the military junta, Mengistu Haile Mariam, refused to let the "Falasha" leave Ethiopia. So during the night, Ethiopian Jews stole into the Sudan and from there were airlifted out to Israel by the Mossad. But the airlift was stopped in the middle, after it became known that the Sudanese government, supposedly an enemy of Israel, was implicated. Four-thousand Ethiopian Jews had perished on the journey from Ethiopia to the Sudan, or in the refugee camps. After Operation Moses was terminated, the remaining Jews returned to their villages in Ethiopia and waited. From 1985-1991, a few thousand Ethiopian Jews tried reaching the "Promised Land" by other illegal routes. They wished to be reunited with their families in Jerusalem.
Then an obscure American woman by the name of Susan Pollack, the resident director of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) in the capital city of Addis Abeba, an advocacy organization whose raison d'etre was "rescue", intervened. She went from village to village, primarily in the Gondar area of Ethiopia, gathering u p Ethiopian Jews and encouraging them to travel to the capital city of Addis Abeba with a view to emigrating to Israel. As the Jews streamed to the capital from 1990-1991, rebel Ethiopian forces headed by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Meles, Chairman of the Tigrai Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which opposed the military junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam, were knocking at the gates waiting to take over the government. Negotiations at the governmental level involving the United States, Israel, Ethiopia and possibly other countries were held to release the Jews and airlift them to Israel.
Unsolved mysteries
Still fascinating today, 20 years after what became known as Operation Solomon, is the mystery regarding $35 million that was transferred from Israel to Ethiopia in exchange for the release of Ethiopian Jewry, in the race against time before the Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam collapsed. At first, the representative of the Ethiopian government, Kassa Kebede, who today lives in Washington, provided the Israelis with an erroneous bank account number in New York; it was a bonds rather than cash account. More troublesome was the fact that the number was that of a private account and not an official Ethiopian government account.
According to Professor Stephen Spector, who wrote a book about Operation Solomon based on 200 oral history interviews conducted with experts on Ethiopian Jewry, Ethiopian Jewish activists, Israelis involved in the rescue and US Representatives of Congress, the correct bank account number may finally have been provided by Bob Houdek, Chief of Mission in the American Embassy in Ethiopia from 1988 to 1991, who then transferred the information to Israeli Ambassador Asher Naim, who later wrote: "It took Kasa more than two hours to finally come up with the correct number. We took maximum precautions to ensure that no one, but no one, except 'the legal government of Ethiopia' could touch the money. It was in an account that could only be released by the State Department's confirmation of a legal and recognized [Ethiopian] government after the London peace conference. We could only hope that the money would be spent for the benefit of the Ethiopia's [sic] poor".
In hindsight, one cannot help raising an eyebrow at the naivety of the Israeli establishment; on the other hand, without the transfer of huge sums of money to whatever source, the Ethiopian Jews would not have been transferred to Israel today. According to an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, the money was inherited by the new Ethiopian government, and not taken by an individual.
The impact
As the last Jews flew out of Ethiopia, the Derg collapsed and Zenawi took over. In 1995, he was elected Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and re-elected for a second term in 2000. The results of the last legislativeelections in 2005, were disputed by contesting parties and led to the death of 193 Ethiopians, but as opposed to some other African leaders, Zenawi managed to squash all protest. Violations of human rights are regularly reported by opposition parties, but the western world appears disinterested. The latest incident occurred on 20 April when Zenawi's representative in the Tigray region, Abay Woldu, with the aid of Federal Police, suppressed a protest with tear gas against the demolition of houses in the city of Mekele in Tigray province, which left thousands homeless. Nevertheless, against all odds, Zenawi has stayed in power for a full 20 years, and, despite the fierce war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in which thousands have purportedly been killed, Ethiopia has remained the most stable country in the Horn of Africa.
Whereas once King Solomon was visited by the Queen of Sheba, who probably originated in Ethiopia, today visits between Ethiopia and Israel are increasingly frequent. Whereas before Operation Solomon, there were no direct flights to Ethiopia from Israel, today Ethiopian Airlines has a monopoly on several direct flights per week between the two countries. Some of these flights are full of new immigrants, the so-called "Felesmura" , 8,700 of whom now have permission to migrate to the Jewish state. In the opposite direction, veteran immigrants, who may have arrived in Israel during Operation Solomon, are often flying to Ethiopia on "roots" trips, or for commercial ventures. The Jerusalem market, Mahanei Yehuda, is full of Ethiopian products from teff, the special nutritious grain grown in Ethiopia, to Ethiopian jewellery and clothes. Several Israeli Ethiopian Jews have import-export businesses, while others are embarking upon agricultural projects in Ethiopia.
Until 1991, Ethiopian Jews were not allowed by Emperor Haile Selassie, or his successor Mengistu Haile Mariam, to leave Ethiopia on the pretext that the "Falashas" were Ethiopian citizens. Today, 20 years after Operation Solomon, normalization has almost set in, and, in addition to the "Felesmura" who are now being permitted to immigrate to Israel, Ethiopians are now returning from the Ethiopian "diaspora" in Israel to Ethiopia as Israelis.
Dr Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and President of the Society for the Study of Ethiopian Jews (SOSTEJE).
The ark of covenant and other unexplained mysteries.
The ark of covenant, not Noah’s ark, is an important religious object. People have various theories of the where about of the ark of covenant. It is unusually for such an important symbol to miss without a trace. The ark is so important to the people of Israel because God commanded Moses to build it.
“And they shall make an ark of shittim wood: …And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: …And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat…” exodus 25: 10-22.
It is clear from the above statement that the ark is not just an ordinary object although it was made by men. This is because God said to Moses “And I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat.” It means that the ark served as a point of communication between God and the Israelites yet it was an object made by man.
The mysteries and powers of the ark were mentioned in the Old Testament. The ark was so powerful that it takes special process to touch it or approach it. Even it killed the man that tried to stop it from falling down. The man only tried to hold the ark so that it will not fall yet he was killed. Some people in recent time claim that the ark was so powerful that it radiates light and because of that special clothing was used to approach it.
“And the philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer untoAshdod. When the philistines took the ark of God they brought it into the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon. And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him. Therefore neither the priest of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon’s house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day. But the hand of the lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with hemorrhoid, even Ashdod and the coast thereof”’ 1 Samuel 5: 1-6.
Dagon fell before the ark which shows that the ark is more powerful than Dagon. Dagon was humbled and destroyed by the ark. There are some mysteries which maybe difficult to explain. It is not an easy task to explain how the ark could be that powerful when it was made by man. Some people may claim that it is because it was commanded by God or it belongs to the Israelites. However, we know that some pagan objects are powerful and can do some unexplainable mysterious things. Those in the mysteries know that there are mysteries which are not open for all because it could not be understood or it is dangerous.
There is a small kingdom called Abiriba in Abia state Nigeria. They have a God which their fathers solely worshipped before the advent of Christianity. The name of the God is “Kalu” and because the place it is located within the community is called “Ndi Ebe” therefore the God is called ‘Kalu Ndi Ebe.” The God is said to be known by other names by other people. For instance, it is said that the Igbo call it “Amadi oha” while the Yoruba’s have their own name for it. Generally, people call it the “God of thunder” or “the God of Justice.”
During theNigeriacivil war, the Nigerian army was said to set Ndi Ebe on fire which is where the “Kalu” was situated. Every house burnt even a fresh tree close to the alter of ‘Kalu” burnt but the alter, itself, did not burn. The Nigerian army took the main object, just like the ark, which is used by the priest and which people usually see as the Kalu. The object is just irons in a type of bag so, they said. They tried to burn the bag and its content but it radiated the light and used thunder to kill the men. They abandoned it and even some of them came back after the war to admire the God.
Unfortunately the military men did not know that because the God works with light so even the owners of the God do not come close it with light. If by mistake anyone goes close to it with any form of light it will alert the people by radiating the light into their houses and the people will shout, as in unison, “who is it that goes with a light.” There are many mysteries that the God posses which has made it wise that a book be dedicate to it in due time. For instance the God, it is said, could cut down a long tree very close to it and bring it down in a way that it will not touch or spoil his alter. It can reject some eggs given to it as gift if the giver does not meet a certain demand. Normally, the through the eggs above somewhere and if it is the one he wants then he will break it will it was still on the air. But if it is an egg he wants to reject then the eggs will not break, no matter that it hits on a hard surface, rather it will bounce like a football.
People usually go to the God for justice which it does not fail to kill anyone found guilty of a crime especially if the offender fails to confess the crime. There are many such gods and mysteries in Africa and other parts of the world. It is because of the fast and immediate justice that the old African gods can grant that crime was less. That is why some African scholars are of the opinion that the advent of Christianity caused more harm than good because of increase crime rate and disrespect by the youth. This is because of the doctrine of judgment in heaven, forgiveness, and mercy which modern religion showcased. However, the writer thinks that it is not Christianity or any other religion that is the problem but the failure of the people to live in the true spirit of modern religion and what it teaches. Consequently, people commit crime while they are members of various religions because God is now slow to anger.
‘Kalu Ndi Ebe” is still in its rightful position and location even till the present day although the people of the community rarely go to it because of the modern religion. This is because it is now seen as an idol so only those few that are not ashamed of being called pagans still go to it openly while others, even members of modern religion, go to it secretly when they need justice.
The ark of covenant is a mysterious object and as such it is unusual that people do not know its way about. Maybe it is protected somewhere or it is actually lost but even if it is lost, the world should know where and when it was lost because it is one of the most powerful and mysterious religious object that is widely known .
There are many unexplained mysteries and powers like the mystery and power of the ark of covenant. Is the power actually possessed by the objects or the gods used the objects to show their powers? Let us not forget that some people have a human bullet proof by which their body can ward off bullets.That is mysteries the world ( science) has failed to explain and it explantion can only be found by going beyond science
An odd sculpture recently appeared on the Tel Aviv University campus, following a complex, transcontinental, logistical operation. It was designed in London, assembled in Italy and shipped by sea to Israel. The artwork consists of metal pipes emerging upward from the ground, splitting, and winding around two palm trees. "This expresses continuity and departure," said the sculpture's designer, Israeli-born architect Ron Arad, in a phone call from London.
The sculpture is a memorial to Ethiopian Jews who left their homes between 1977 and 1985 for the exhausting, traumatic journey to Israel. The trek took them from Ethiopia to Sudan, and across mountains, deserts, rivers and forests; they faced hunger, thirst, illness, harassment and arrest before winding up in refugee camps
Jacques Faitlovitch in Ethiopia.
Photo by: Reproduction photo by Moti Milrod
About a fifth of the people - about 4,000 - died on the way. The others were flown or taken by sea to Israel in several stages that climaxed with the Operation Moses airlift. Six years later, in Operation Solomon, an additional 14,500 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel. This month is the 20th anniversary of that operation.
The statue was commissioned and financed by Michael Benabou, a French-Jewish businessman and a member of the French Friends of Tel Aviv University, which provides scholarships to Ethiopian-Israeli students. Two years ago he decided it was time to dedicate a memorial to these students' community. "It is a tribute to the operation that brought them to Israel, commemorates their suffering, and expresses hope for their future," he said by phone from Paris.
Another artwork commemorating the Ethiopians who died on their way to Israel stands at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. A ceremony is held there every year on Jerusalem Day, the official memorial day for the Ethiopian Jews who perished on the way here. The Jerusalem sculpture was initiated by Uri Rada, chairman of a volunteer association commemorating the Ethiopian Jews; his mother was one of those who died on the way over in the early 1980s. Now he is waging a campaign to collect the names of those 4,000 people and inscribe them on a memorial stone.
Lost brethren
The relationship between the Jews of France and Ethiopia began a century ago, with one man who devoted his life to the latter community. The new sculpture stands opposite Tel Aviv University's central library, where a small, crowded room on the second floor stores the archives of that man, researcher Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch, who died in 1955.
Only a few people outside the Ethiopian Jewish community know who he was. His Tel Aviv house has been abandoned for years. However, thanks to Faitlovitch's research, visits and diplomacy, Ethiopia's Jews underwent a revolution of consciousness that eventually led them to Israel.
"At first it is hard to believe that a white man, Polish no less, was the one who went to Africa to tell the Ethiopian-Jewish community that they were his lost brethren," said Wasihun Achenefe, a 26-year-old Tel Aviv University law student who works with the Faitlovitch archives.
Faitlovitch was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1881, and visited Ethiopia for the first time in 1904. He received a grant from Baron Edmond de Rothschild to "look for black Jews," newspapers reported at that time. The European scholar, who had studied at the school for oriental languages at the Sorbonne in Paris, astounded the Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, with his fluent command of the country's languages, and told him that the Ethiopian Jewish tribes were connected to white Jews elsewhere in the world.
Several years later, an interview with him was published in Warsaw's Hebrew newspaper Hatzfira. "The first time I came, in 1904, they did not want to believe that I, too, am a Jew, and only after a while did I manage to prove to them that there are many more Jews in the world. Since then they have wanted to be closer to these Jews," the article quotes him. When asked about that mission's chances of success, he said: "I am sure of it. So sure that I have decided to devote my life to this cause."
There are various theories about the community's origins. Some people consider them descendants of the 10 Lost Tribes. Others believe they are descendants of Ethiopian Christians and idolators who accepted Judaism.
Faitlovitch was not the first Westerner to visit the remote Jewish community known by two names: Beta Israel, the term the community uses for itself, and Falasha, a derogatory term meaning exiles, that is commonly used in Ethiopia.
In 1769 a Scottish explorer, James Bruce, set out on an expedition around Ethiopia that included a visit to the Jewish community. Prof. Joseph Halevy, who eventually became Faitlovitch's teacher, was the first Jew to visit the community 100 years later. But he failed to "draw" the community closer to world Jewry, and passed the baton to his pupil.
Faitlovitch tried to tell the Jews and the rest of the world about the community, launching diplomatic efforts in their name. He also tried to convince the community to change its religious practices to conform with rabbinic Judaism. Therefore he opened two Hebrew schools, one of them in Addis Ababa, to teach Judaism and the history of the Jewish people and also to preserve the community's own religious traditions. And before World War I, he sent some of the community's youth to study in Europe and Palestine so they could share their knowledge back in Ethiopia.
"Education was supposed to crack the community's isolation and link it to world Judaism, in order to reconnect this branch that has been forgotten for so long, preserve it, revive it and arouse it out of its apathy," he said.
On his second visit to Ethiopia, in 1909, he met 15 Jewish families in the village of Adi Shohu in the northern district of Tigre. He related his experiences in his book "Masa el Hafalashim" (Journey to the Falasha ; published by Dvir in 1959 ): "When we arrived, the Falasha greeted us enthusiastically. Despite the pouring rain they came out in festive clothes to greet us. They invited us to huts they had built for us and hurried to finish preparing the Sabbath meal ... After the work was done, all the Falasha gathered in the synagogue for Friday night services. The prayer lasted all night long with occasional breaks to eat ... the Falashas occasionally sang in religious exhilaration ... I told them the Jewish people wished to convey friendship and told them my trip's goal."
Faitlovitch fought Christian missionaries, who sought to make the Jewish community adopt the "real" religion. He would give the boys Hebrew names and organize bar mitzvahs for them, causing the Protestant missionaries to complain about "the French missionary."
In a Gonder suburb, he met converts from Judaism. "They said they were happy to see me in their country again and said they wanted to return to their forefathers' faith. They told me: 'Your presence encourages us and we all want to return to being Falasha - do not forget us, we are Falashas too.'"
In his book, Faitlovitch says they were forced to abandon Jewish practices. "The Falasha artisans were compelled to undertake all sorts of forced labor for senior officials ... so they could not avoid working on the Sabbath and eating forbidden foods. Resistance was punished severely. One man who refused to desecrate the Sabbath was chained and detained until he agreed to work on the Sabbath."
Years on the road
Faitlovitch became a legend in Ethiopia and many people respected him. Pictures in his archives show him in white clothes and a black hat in order to impress his audience during addresses in Ethiopia. "He told us stories about Jerusalem and the Jewish people. No one wanted to listen to the priests' stories, only to Faitlovitch's," recalled one of his students, Yona Boagle. But others say he treated some of his pupils resolutely and patronizingly.
Faitlovitch spent years traveling, and had no permanent residence until his final years. Between his visits to Ethiopia, which he traversed on a mule, he traveled the world to raise money for the Falasha Jews, helped by his contacts with diplomats and important Jewish institutions.
Faitlovitch continued with his strenuous work even in the face of tough diplomatic circumstances. For example, he returned to Ethiopia in 1942, shortly after the Italian occupation of Ethiopia ended and amid reports of the destruction of European Jewry. He said at a farewell party in Jerusalem, "According to reports that have reached me from Abyssinia (Ethiopia ) ... life is returning to normal ... The government is willing to oblige the Jewish exiles, expelled from their European states by the Nazis ... and allow entry to any Jewish group willing to settle in Abyssinia."
His good contacts with senior Ethiopian officials gained him two government jobs. In 1942 he was appointed inspector general of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and two years later he became an adviser at the Ethiopian Embassy in Cairo, a job he held for two years. It was an odd position for a Jew: representing a Christian African power in a Muslim capital, Haaretz wrote after his death.
In 1947 Faitlovitch started to actively promote Ethiopian immigration to the Land of Israel. In a letter to the Joint, he said the destruction of European Jewry made it the Jewish people's duty to help the Falashas move to Palestine. "With the millions of Jews who were just now exterminated, we cannot afford to ignore the potential source for Jewish manpower," he argued.
Faitlovitch was the first person who brought an organized group of young Ethiopian Jews to Israel, 30 years before Israel waged a big operation to bring them over. In 1955, 12 Ethiopian Jews came to the Kfar Batya youth village, near Ra'anana, to study Hebrew and Judaism. As part of the agreement with the Ethiopian authorities, and despite the youths' desires, they had to return to Ethiopia to serve as teachers there.
Faitlovitch spent his final years in a home on Tel Aviv's Vitkin Street, where he kept his collection of books and rare manuscripts, including hundreds of books about Ethiopia, dozens of manuscripts in Ethiopian languages and a historical archive of Ethiopian Jewry. After he died in 1955, his widow gave the house to Tel Aviv's municipality, and it served as a public library. "I want to hope that the Faitlovitch House, which I gave Tel Aviv's municipality ... will be a source of information for all the people who go to Abyssinia and for its Jews," his widow, Miriam, wrote in Haaretz in 1959.
Twenty years later, the municipality moved the library to Tel Aviv University. About a decade ago a doctoral candidate, Haim Admor, started restoring its contents. "It is the community's sole historical archive and is a rarity in the world," he said. Hopefully, Tel Aviv's municipality will pick up the gauntlet and restore the Faitlovitch House. As a first step, it could put up a sign commemorating him.
“Like being president of a country,” Rabbi Gershom Sizomu says of his work on behalf of his African Jewish community(James D. Davis, Sun Sentinel staff / May 16, 2011)
By James D. Davis, Sun Sentinel
11:42 a.m. EDT, May 16, 2011
Rabbi Gershom Sizomu knew he wanted to be a Jewish scholar. He also understood his position as a leader in the small Jewish community of Uganda.
But he didn't quite grasp that he would one day deal with jobs, clinics, mosquito nets and other mundane matters.
"It's like being president of a country," the quiet but outgoing African rabbi says, just after addressing high school students this past week at the Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton.
But he says it's all part of spirituality. "Religion is not just about keeping Shabbat and kashrut alive. Good relationships include God and man. You must fulfill your obligations among people."
Sizomu, 42, may not be a president, but he does lead the 1,500-member Abayudaya community in Uganda. This past week he introduced the community around South Florida, not only speaking but playing guitar and singing in his tenor voice. In fact, he did take part in a recording that earned a Grammy nomination in 2004.
His main message: The Abayudaya, whose name means "People of Judah," are part of the worldwide Jewish community, and much of their story has reprised Jewish themes of liberation and community building.
"Judaism is not homogenous; it has different languages and cultures," Sizomu says. "The Abayudaya journey is the Jewish journey. We celebrate that."
The message meshes with that of Be'chol Lashon, an organization that emphasizes Jewish diversity, for which he is the senior rabbinic associate. His current 25-day tour began in San Francisco, where Be'chol Lashon has its headquarters, then went to Maryland, New York and Boston. From South Florida, Sizomu goes to New Mexico before returning to California.
In contrast to the Beta Israel of Ethiopia and the Lemba of southern Africa, the Abayudaya accepted Judaism less than a century ago. A great warrior named Semei Kakungulu gave Christian missionaries a hearing, but preferred Judaism.
"He found the Old Testament structure, of a relationship of obligation between God and man, resonated," Sizomu says. "If man does something for God, God does something for man."
The Abayudaya began practicing Judaism in 1919, but some gragually drifted away. Then Idi Amin, the nation's brutal dictator from 1971 to 1979, began to ban any expression of Judaism, including kippot or Sabbath services, on pain of death.
"We went underground, so when we emerged, we were stronger," he says.
He said Amin was overthrown on the eve of Passover. "We compared that to the Israelites who left Egypt."
To connected with world Jewry, more than 350 Abayudaya underwent a mass mikvah baptism in 2002. The following year, Sizomu entered the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He was ordained in 2008, then returned to Uganda and opened a yeshiva, or rabbinic school.
Other big concerns are health and jobs for the Abayudaya.
With help from Be'chol Lashon, the Ugandan government and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Abayudaya have designed a five-year health and development plan. It includes things as simple as mosquito nets and as complicated as a medical clinic.
The clinic is up, but it hasn't been equipped yet. Sizomu is trying to find donors for X-ray, ultrasound and other equipment. That, plus personnel, will cost $300,000, he says.
Once up and running, the clinic could supply jobs for secretaries, security, teachers and maintenance workers, Sizomu says. Other enterprises include a guesthouse, an Internet café, bracelets and crocheted kippot.
So many mundane matters to handle. How does Sizomu keep from feeling overwhelmed?
His ebullience brings a quick answer.
"I just have no boundaries," he says, spreading his hands. "I just think and think. No end."
