Until the late 1970s few members of the Jewish community in Ethiopia (Beta Yisrael, then still called the Falashas) were able to immigrate to Israel. The lecture will present a new project at the Israel State Archives on the government’s attitude to the community. We ask whether the restrictions reflected religious or racial prejudice, or geopolitical considerations based on Israel’s relations with the Ethiopian government. Even after Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s recognition of Beta Yisrael as Jews in 1973, there was little change.
1978/79 marked a turning point, and newly declassified documents show the background to the government decision to act to speed up immigration. They reveal diplomatic contacts with Ethiopia and Sudan and secret operations involving the Mossad and activists from Beta Yisrael. The government faced a dilemma: the need to restrict secret information made it difficult to mobilize aid from world Jewry and to counter accusations of indifference to the fate of African Jews threatened by a new holocaust. Our findings show that it was mainly external factors which hampered the operation.
Documents from government ministries, including Mossad reports, cast light on the attitudes of Israeli and US leaders as well as the rulers of Sudan and Ethiopia. An unusual combination of circumstances allowed the airlift in 1984/85 known as “Operation Moses”: the famine in Africa, Sudanese inability to cope with masses of refugees; US involvement there and the Administration’s response to appeals from the Jewish lobby. We also explain the background to the leak which ended the airlift.