tel aviv | Shortly after midnight Tuesday a planeload of Falash Mura landed from Ethiopia, part of a steady trickle of immigration that has yet to turn into the wave of thousands promised by the government.
Opposition and criticism is mounting from within on the government’s decision to bring the Falash Mura community to Israel as key ministers ask how many immigrants will eventually be brought over and how the multi-million dollar project will be financed.
The upcoming hearing of a lawsuit against the government by a Falash Mura group in Israel and last week’s visit to Ethiopia by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom who reiterated the desire to bring the community here have also put the controversy back in the spotlight.
Some Ethiopian Israeli Jews are meanwhile voicing doubts about their would-be brethren. They say that many claiming to be Falash Mura are frauds, only claiming Jewish heritage as a way to escape Ethiopia’s crushing poverty.
“We are the Jews who observed our heritage for 2,000 years and now another group comes and says they are not Jews but want to become Jews,” said Dani Adeno, an Ethiopian Israeli journalist and filmmaker.
“They are trying to hitch a ride on our backs now that it is comfortable to say, ‘We are Jews’ … I believe that 70 percent, maybe more, have no connection to Judaism,” he said.
The Falash Mura are Ethiopians whose Jewish ancestors converted to Christianity, many of them under intense social pressure. Some 18,000 have left their rural homes and moved to transit compounds run by Jewish groups in Addis Ababa and Gondar in the hopes of immigrating to Israel.
Because they could not initially prove that they had Jewish origins, Israel did not allow them to immigrate in the mass airlifts of 1984 and 1991.
According to a census conducted by groups advocating their immigration to Israel, some 26,000 are able to prove maternal Jewish roots and therefore fit the current Israeli government criteria to move here. But critics say there is no guarantee that this would be the final number and fear many more may try to immigrate, especially if the government decides to broaden its definition of Jewish ancestry to facilitate the arrival of more Falash Mura.
Despite a Cabinet decision in February to bring all those eligible to Israel, the pace of some 300 Falash Mura arriving a month has yet to be increased. Those who have come were permitted entry under the so-called Law of Entry, which provides for immigration for humanitarian and family unification purposes.
In recent years some 11,000 Falash Mura have immigrated here and reunited with their families, according to Tsipi Livni of the Ministry of Absorption.
Livni has publicly said that more cannot be brought over on a grand scale without a proper plan for their absorption and an increased budget. Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, who has also been criticized for foot-dragging by advocates of a mass immigration, has voiced concerns that an unknown amount of Ethiopians with doubtful connections to Judaism might try to flood the country.
On Feb. 12, the High Court will hold hearings on a lawsuit filed by a group of Falash Mura in Israel against the Jewish state for what they say are unnecessary delays in the implementation of the decision to bring their community here from Ethiopia.
“Putting economic considerations before saving Jews is a crime against Zionism,” said Avraham Neguise, the executive director of South Wing to Zion, an advocacy group for Falash Mura in Israel. “We are demanding the government give answers.”
He said that 40 community members have died at the Addis Ababa transit camp and 64 in the Gondar compound — many from famine related illnesses — since the landmark Feb. 16 Cabinet decision to bring over the community. He was citing figures collected by Falash Mura community leaders at the camp, he said.
But Jewish Agency officials as well as the American Joint Distribution Committee, which runs a medical program at both transit camps, defended health standards for the waiting Falash Mura.
Meanwhile, Neguise also questioned why the government gave financial excuses as to why it cannot afford all of the Falash Mura community when it courts Jews elsewhere in the world to immigrate here.
“It is very, very difficult to imagine why, when they are begging other Jews to come from countries like Russia, America and Argentina, they are raising the question of money for the Ethiopian Jews. I have no doubt there is discrimination,” he said.
The finance ministry has estimated that the cost per Falash Mura immigrant is about $100,000, saying that more money must be invested in their absorption in Israel because of the deep cultural and economic gaps that must be bridged.
Last week Livni, the absorption minister, convened a meeting with Ethiopian Jewish spiritual leaders here and enlisted their help in trying to determine who should qualify.
Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and all three major religious streams in the United States have affirmed that the Falash Mura are Jews, but the Jewish identification of those who have come to the transit camps is verified on a family by family basis.