As a teenager in the late 1970s, Danny Adama negotiated with truck drivers to transport bags of sesame seeds from just over the Sudanese border to his home in Ethiopia’s Gondar province.
Adama would take the 700-km, three-day route as often as he could in order to exploit the 300 percent markup he enjoyed on his cargo in then-Marxist Ethiopia. An aspiring Jewish entrepreneur, Adama escaped the Soviet satellite system by relocating to the Sudan, ostensibly in order to open a restaurant.
In reality, he was on his way to Israel, where today Adama has a mortgage on a flat and runs one of four Ethiopian eateries in Tel Aviv’s old central bus station. The restaurant is cash-starved and needs repairs and he is trying to get a loan.
Is he, like many Ethiopians, a mere pushcart on a superhighway, irreversibly disadvantaged and misplaced?
“This is the desert generation,” says Nitza Ben-Zvi, the Labor and Welfare Ministry’s point-person for Ethiopian-immigrant job-training programs. Other ministry officials agree with Ben-Zvi’s somewhat defeatist attitude, citing Ethiopians’ difficulties in grasping Hebrew, their five-year transition from absorption centers to permanent housing, and a host of cultural biases that hinder their progress.
Ethiopian-born Labor Knesset member Addisu Messela modestly admits he is hardly the political Moses the community needs. His focus during his first term, he says, will be to tackle problems associated with absorption — chiefly housing.
Demonstrating political maturity, Messela says there is no quick fix for the difficult economic conditions the Ethiopian community faces. The Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews estimates that nearly 60,000 Ethiopians are among the 700,000 Israelis living below the poverty line, far outweighing their share in the overall population.
Calling for affirmative action, Messela cites the relative success of Ethiopian students in Israeli universities.
Statistically, the Ethiopian community appears to have attained levels of employment similar to that of the veteran population. But underemployment is rampant and large sectors of the population — notably women — have yet to join the work force.
Mica Odenheimer, the American-born president of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews, sees a bleak future for the children of subsistence farmers. Odenheimer’s organization runs a Tel Aviv drop-in center for Ethiopians under 18 who have dropped out of school.
In stark contrast to the black-Jewish “economic slavery” argument vaunted by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Odenheimer’s outlook for Israel’s Ethiopians is based on the direction the country’s social policy will ultimately take.
Since Operation Solomon, the policy has been to first seek jobs for Ethiopians living in temporary housing and later train them during their transition to permanent housing.
Odenheimer feels the major barrier to the economic advancement of even the most successful Ethiopian entrepreneurs is that the products and services they tend to supply cater mainly to their own community, which has little if any disposable income.
Gadi Germi, who runs the Ethiopian desk at the Netanya Business Development Center, says categorically all the businesses he has seen are based on the community’s own demands.
Attempts at running mass-appeal restaurants, which have generated successful business for nearly every other immigrant group in Israel, have all failed.
Zvika Rubinstein, who heads the Netanya Center, says the obstacle is the absence of significant startup capital and management skills: in other words, everything.
Rubinstein recalls helping two Ethiopian partners seeking to import tef — a staple starch in Ethiopian Jews’ diet. They imported several containers of whole grain, ground it in a Netanya mill and managed to sell it for a good price. However, Rubinstein recalls, the two were unsuccessful in obtaining a six-figure bank loan to finance the venture until he intervened, suggesting to the bankers that their role was partially charitable.
He sees commercial potential in an Ethiopian history and culture center featuring a museum, eatery, crafts area and retail stores, which would be patronized by both tourists and Israelis. A concern supporting the idea is currently trying to finance a feasibility study.
Avraham Neguise, the first Ethiopian social worker to graduate from Hebrew University, believes the future of the Ethiopian-Israeli community depends on the proper education of youth.
“We don’t know how to demand. We are very passive,” Neguise has told the Jewish Bulletin. “We are not blaming anyone. We are just trying to help ourselves.”
Ayelew Berhanu is the editor of an Amharic-language periodical intended to encourage Ethiopian entrepreneurship in Israel. His magazine, originally conceived and published by the Institute for International Business and Innovation, provides a forum for Ethiopians to read about business issues in Israel.
“Work is life,” Berhanu writes in an article on Ethiopian acculturation into the Israeli workforce, elucidating social problems — including suicide — that stem from occupational estrangement.
Most Ethiopian Jews were originally subsistence farmers — an occupation they have not pursued in Israel because it is usually associated with secular kibbutzim or capital-intensive moshavim. In addition, in an industrialized society their handicraft skills are generally not needed.
Considering that the United States receives only 1,500 black African refugees per year while more than 15,000 Ethiopians arrived in Israel in a single day during Operation Solomon, obstacles to the Ethiopians’ economic absorption were and are formidable
Though he is a rabbi, Odenheimer leaves hope out of the equation as he assesses the social future of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Indeed, as responsibility for handling the immigrants haphazardly shifts from Ministry of Absorption bureaucrats to social workers, the Ethiopians’ economic fate will become increasingly linked to that of Israel’s underprivileged.