Israel Approves Immigration for 9,000 Falash Mura Ethiopians
Image by Getty Images
Israel on Sunday approved the entry of some 9,000 Ethiopians known as Falash Mura who claim Jewish lineage, ending decades of debate on whether to allow their immigration despite uncertainty over their right to settle in the Jewish state.
The cabinet unanimously voted in favor of allowing the last group of Falash Mura to immigrate over the next five years but their acceptance will be conditional on a successful Jewish conversion process, the Interior Ministry said.
They have been waiting at transit camps in Ethiopia for years waiting for Israel’s green light.
“Today we have taken an important decision, to bring to Israel within the next five years the last of the communities with links to Israel waiting in Addis Ababa and Gonder,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
Israel’s “law of return” allows Jews to claim citizenship and take residency. The first Ethiopian Jews were airlifted in the 1980s and 1990s following a rabbinical creed that ruled they were descendents of the biblical Dan tribe but not all the Falash Mura have so far been allowed to settle.
Some 135,000 Jews of Ethiopian descent live in Israel, whose population numbers over 8 million. They have long complained of discrimination, racism and poverty which led to violent protests on the streets of Tel Aviv earlier this year.
Ethiopian Jews have joined the ranks of legislators and the officer corps in the country’s military but official figures show they lag behind other Israelis.
Ethiopian households earn 35 percent less than the national average and only half of their youth receive high school diplomas, compared with 63 percent for the rest of the population.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
