Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Decades in Transition: A Lens on Ethiopian-Israelis

Irene Fertik is an American photojournalist who has been documenting the Ethiopian-Israeli community for the past 20 years. She’s captured the community’s highs and lows as they transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Despite the immense challenges facing Ethiopian-Israelis, Fertik says the community is incredibly resilient, proud of their history and optimistic about the future. Her work will be on view at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. throughout the month of September. She’s also compiling her photographs into a book that she plans to call “Tesfa to Tikva: From Hope to Hope.”

Her photographs are featured in the audio slideshow below:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.