Book provides insider’s view of rescue of Ethiopian Jews

On Wings of Eagles: The Secret Operation of the Ethiopian Exodus by Micha Feldmann, Gefen Publishing House, ISB N 978-965-229-569-9, 303 pages, price not listed.

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – Author Micah Feldmann as the representative of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) helped many thousands of Jews migrate from Ethiopia to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, his humanitarian task maddeningly complicated by international politics and bureaucracy.

Luckily for history, Feldmann kept a diary as well as summaries of interviews with refugees and thereby was able to paint a picture of their great suffering both in Ethiopia and in makeshift refugee camps in the Sudan, as well as of their joy when they were finally brought by aircraft to Israel.

Starvation, theft, kidnapping, rape and disease stalked the Beta Israel as they were smuggled from their villages in Gondar province in Ethiopia across rugged terrain to camps in the Sudan, where they subsisted on help from  such American agencies as the Joint Distribution Committee and the American Association for Ethiopian Jewry while JAFI negotiated secretly for permission for an ever increasing number of refugees to be taken from the Sudan and flown to Israel.

The negotiations had to be conducted secretly because Sudan was an Arab state that unlike its northern neighbor Egypt refused to recognize Israel.  Openly helping to provide more Jews to Israel would seem to Sudan’s allies in the Arab world an act of treason, yet Israel and the American organizations were willing to bargain for these captives –and Sudan was cash poor.

So, little by little, Ethiopian Jews would be ransomed from the camps, put on trucks and driven at night to airfields from which they could be flown to Israel.  Others were allowed to proceed to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city, and fly commercially from there to European destinations which were transfer points to Israel.  Everyone knew the Ethiopian Jews would continue on to Israel, but this arrangement gave Sudan deniability.

When persecution of Jews by Ethiopia’s communist regime under Meginstu Haile Mariam abated sufficiently to permit the reestablishment of direct diplomatic relations with Israel, Feldmann became a consular official in Addis Ababa, while still maintaining his JAFI portfolio.

But emigration of Jews from Ethiopia proved as problematic as their departures from the Sudan.  Meginstu’s government also wanted a ransom to let Jews go –  not just money, but also sophisticated armaments that the United States did not want Israel to provide for fear of further destabilizing Africa.

So Israel sent non-lethal military supplies, like night-vision goggles, in an effort to keep the flow of immigration moving, even  if only a trickle.

Meanwhile, Jews who collected in Addis Ababa fell victim to disease and to death, particularly the children.  Feldmann made the controversial decision to build huts for schools on the Israel embassy’s grounds, less for the Hebrew education the children would receive than for the nutrition that could thus be distributed to them.   Why was this controversial?  Some critics believed that this was an indication that Israel really didn’t want to take in the refugees, but was trying to reestablish them in Ethiopia.

Every move Feldmann made to try to protect the Ethiopian Jews and to get them to Israel was subject to some sort of second guessing. Feldmann therefore had harsh critics and fierce devotees among the Beta Israel community.  Given the small number of Jews to whom Ethiopia was willing to issue exit permits, there was often fierce controversy over who should be given priority.

Should those who had been waiting longest in Addis Ababa be given priority?  What about those who previously had been in camps in the Sudan and now were in Addis Ababa?  Maybe the sick and the elderly deserved priority consideration, since otherwise they might die in Ethiopia without ever reaching Israel?  Perhaps families who have lost children during the immigration process should be moved to the top of the list?  And what about the Kessoch, the religious leaders of the Beta Israel, weren’t they due some deference.? Among such competing demands, Feldmann worked out a formula.

Meanwhile, he had to fight with the Ethiopian bureaucracy, who delayed even the few travel permits authorized for issuance with demands for exactly worded answers on paperwork that kept changing.   And, he had to deal with the problem of the Felesmura, Ethiopians whose Jewish ancestors had converted to Christianity.  A “Jews first” decision was made, relegating Felesmura to the back of the line.  As many of them had relatives who remained Jewish, this decision too was controversial.

Feldmann traveled back and forth between Israel and Ethiopia, but eventually the immensity of the refugee situation required him to stay for longer and longer periods in Ethiopia, while his wife and children remained behind in Israel.  While understated, the impact on Israeli social workers and their families also was a dimension of the Ethiopian Jewish upheaval.

Eventually, rebels resisting the Meginstu government were able to encircle Addis Ababa in May of 1991, making the situation of more than 14,000 Jewish refugees critical.   As it was clear that the government would fall, lesser officials wanted to save their own skins, and arrangements were made with both the faltering government and with the rebels for a window of several days to permit the mass evacuation of Ethiopia’s Jewish population in what became known to the world as Operation Solomon.  Feldmann’s account of this hectic, heart-stopping operation is spellbinding.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com