Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Ethiopian Jew Killed in Riots While Waiting To Leave for Israel

— The Jewish community of Gondar in Ethiopia said it lost one of its members in riots that have claimed dozens of lives in recent weeks.

The Jew killed in Gondar was identified as Weta Chekla, the Israel-based news site Little Ethiopia reported Thursday. The report said he was waiting to immigrate to Israel amid delays in the implementation of a government decision to bring 9,000 members of his community to the Jewish State.

Demonstrations on Thursday and similar protests in recent days in the city of Gondar occurred amid inter-ethnic tensions involving the Welkait community.

Gondar has approximately 6,000 people from the Falash Mura community of Ethiopians who claim links to descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity generations ago but now seek to return to Judaism and immigrate to Israel.

In April, an Israeli government signed off on an agreement guaranteeing the immigration of 9,000 Falash Mura by 2020, partly with funding from the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. The agreement called for the absorption of 1,300 Falash Mura by June but, following delays, the first group of Ethiopian immigrants to move to Israel in the past three years is scheduled to arrive at Ben-Gurion airport on Sunday. Only 78 of them are to land in Israel on the evening of Oct. 9.

The article about Chekla’s death on Little Ethiopia, which is a semi-official website of lobby groups representing the interests of Ethiopian Israelis, accused the Israeli government of dragging its feet because of racism on the immigration of the Falash Mura.

“The Government of the State of Israel continues to classify Jews according to color and race and completely ignores the community in Ethiopia,” the unsigned article read. “Wherever White Jews are to be found, the government shows its attentiveness in every possible way, from sending delegates to calling for immediate aliyah,” the authors continued, using the Hebrew word for immigration to Israel under its Law of Return for people of Jewish descent and their relatives. “But it’s a different story in the case of the Beita Israel,” read the text, using the Amharic-language designation of the Falash Mura, which means “the House of Israel.”

But, pointing to the community’s achievement in Israel, Israeli officials and advocates of the policies applied to absorb approximately 120,000 Ethiopians into Israeli society since the 1980s have consistently rejected allegations of racism toward African Jews.

Last week, two Israeli-Ethiopian female lawyers, Lawyers Esther Tapeta Gradi and Adenko Sabhat Haimovich, were appointed as judges by the Israeli Judicial Committee.

“Undeniably, mistakes were made in the absorption of aliyah from Ethiopia,” wrote Uri Heitner, a senior researcher at the Shamir Institute for Research – a state-funded research and development center and think tank located in the Golan Heights – wrote last week in an op-ed about Ethiopian Jews in Israel. “There are still difficulties demanding resolution. But overall, the Ethiopian Aliyah is an impressive Zionist success story.”

 

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.