As a child, Riki Mullu was told that denizens of neighboring villages believed she could cast wicked spells over them with just a blink of her eyes.
“They believe we can make them sick. They strongly believe this. It’s funny now that I am grown up and free. But when I was little I knew I should never tell anybody outside of my village that I am Jewish,” said Mullu, an Ethiopian Israeli who splits her time between Jerusalem and a Jewish enclave in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Mullu will be in Oakland on Monday, Jan. 30 at the behest of the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay, addressing women who have contributed at the “pomegranate” level — $1,800 or greater.
Her speech is tied into the federation’s Mitzvah Project, which aims to provide 20 at-risk Israeli young women in Kiryat Malachi with social workers.
Mullu avoided the fate of the women the Mitzvah Project aims to assist largely through her oversized personality. While many native Ethiopian women become quiet and passive from years of negative reinforcement, Mullu’s octogenarian mother is quick to note that her sixth child (of nine) always behaved like an assertive Israeli.
It was a stroke of luck that got Mullu out of Ethiopia. She was one of 150 Jews airlifted out of the country in 1977 in a little-known operation, which petered out before Prime Minister Menachem Begin could bring in any more Ethiopians.
At 12 years old, Mullu was told the rest of her family would be in Israel within a year. That estimate turned out to be nine years off.
“I did not see my parents again until I was nearly 22,” she says. “I left everything, everything, everything.”
Thousands of miles from home and separated from her large family, Mullu was sent to boarding school in Ranana. She was soon adopted by an Israeli family, and found herself sharing a home with three foster siblings.
Mullu — whose given name is Bizu but goes by Riki, short for Rivkah — worked as an art and Hebrew teacher and for Jewish agencies until a massive stroke of luck a decade ago. Of the nearly 7 million people who entered into the United States’ green card “lottery,” she was one of about 50 selected.
At around the same time, enough people began asking her where she got the exotic, Jewish-themed jewelry she made and often wore that she hatched a bright idea: Why not go into business making Judaica? Back in Ethiopia, her father was a metalworker who crafted farming implements and the occasional bit of jewelry for his family and friends. But she laughs when it is suggested that she followed in the “family business.”
As a frequent speaker at United Jewish Communities events, Mullu feels the American Jewish community has a lot to learn about Ethiopian Jews. For one, her ancestors have been Jewish for as long as any American Jew’s.
“I want people to accept me as a Jew like everyone else,” she said. “I don’t want to be an ‘Ethiopian Jew’ or a ‘black Jew.’ My parents worked hard to be Jewish, my grandparents worked hard.”
She also hopes to educate Americans on the plight of Israel’s Ethiopian community, which, coming with little education or wealth, is still the poorest and least educated in the Jewish state.
“A lot of people say, ‘The Ethiopians are in Israel. Our work is over.’ But actually, our job has just started,” she said.
Mullu’s own family, though, is enjoying a vacation from major problems. Her brothers and sisters came to Israel on various airlifts and she personally went back to Ethiopia in 1988 to rescue her elderly parents.
Shabbat at her parents’ apartment in Jerusalem is now a joyous event. Her eight siblings and their 45 children somehow manage to squeeze into the two-room flat.
“People sit in every room, everywhere, everywhere it’s people. We have a balcony and people are out there. My parents live on the first floor, so people spill out into the garden. There’s so much love, so much closeness.”
For more information about the Mizvah Project, call Patti Schneider at (510) 839-2900 ext. 203 or e-mail her at [email protected].