Operation Moses: the Aliyah of Ethiopian Jewry

The Jews of Ethiopia, Beta Israel, lived for centuries in the highlands of Gondar and Tigray, keeping the Torah, Shabbat, the purity laws and the festivals, but knowing neither the Talmud nor Hanukkah nor Purim: they had separated from the rest of the people before those things reached them. Every year they said at their festival, 'Next year in Jerusalem,' and they did not mean it as a metaphor.

In 5733 Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that they are Jews, descendants of the tribe of Dan, and fall under the Law of Return; the state recognised this in 5735. When famine and civil war struck Ethiopia, tens of thousands walked to Sudan, hundreds of kilometres across desert. An estimated four thousand died on the way or in the camps.

Operation Moses ran in secret from 21 November 5745 to 5 January: roughly 8,000 people were flown out on some thirty flights through third countries. When newspapers reported it, Sudan halted the operation and hundreds of families were left divided for years. In 5751, in the 36 hours of Operation Solomon, another 14,325 people were brought in—one Boeing 747 carried 1,122 passengers, and babies were born in the air.

Today about 170,000 Israelis are of Ethiopian origin.