Family Education Centers: Helping Ethiopian Jews One Family at a Time

by Bonnie Riva Ras

Ethiopian Jews long have dreamed of returning to the land of their ancestors, eretz Yisrael.

Early in the 1980s, the dream seemed to come true as the return to Zion began, but the story does not have a happy ending, at least not so far.

Ethiopian Jews – known as the Beta Israel, the house of Israel, in Amharic – have a long history; folklore traces the community’s origins to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But more recently, the conditions Beta Israel faced in Ethiopia have been bleak.

In the 1980s the Ethiopian government outlawed the teaching of Hebrew and the practice of Judaism. Many of Beta Israel, falsely accused of spying for Israel, were imprisoned. Religious leaders, called kessim, were constantly harassed. There was also a rise in anti-Semitism when the Marxist government relocated peasant farmers onto state-run collective farms. Non-Jews were forced into some of Beta Israel’s villages.

Life in Ethiopia was hazardous; political unrest led to constant threats of famine and warfare, disease was rampant, and there was no viable health-care system. Operations aptly named Moses, run by the Israeli government in 1984-1985, 1985’s U.S.-sponsored Joshua, and the Israeli-led Solomon in 1991 helped the Beta Israel escape. There has been a steady flow of immigrants since, and altogether more than 120,000 Ethiopian Jews have made aliyah to Israel.

But the reality of modern Israel is very different from the dream. For many of the olim, the immigrants, the adjustment has been very difficult. “They came to Israel with a lot of handicaps,” said Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. The olim lack financial resources, they speak only Amharic, and many find it difficult to learn Hebrew.

Many of the problems the olim face are cultural, according to educators and community activists who work with them. Their culture tends not to value formal education, and most Ethiopians never studied in a formal school setting. People who have never learned how to study do not know how to help their children in school, so the problem perpetuates itself. The vast majority of the adult olim are illiterate and either unemployed or work in jobs that provide both low status and low pay. Many live in extreme poverty. As a result, heads of household often lose their status within the family, and in the turmoil that follows the family disintegrates. The children do poorly at school and many drop out; the result is drug use and a rising crime rate. Some Ethiopian Jews also feel that there is racism in Israel and that they never will be truly accepted into Israeli society.

The situation is understandable but the problems are huge. “You could imagine how frustrating it is to come to a land you have been dreaming of and then you don’t find the opportunities that you expected,” Rabbi Epstein said. “If things are not turned around it could lead to a permanent underclass in Israeli society.”

The government’s absorption and social service programs are not well equipped to handle these problems. Although the government and Jewish organizations have spent a great deal of money, their programs have not proven to be effective enough.

One of the community leaders is Rabbi Yafet Alemu, whose unusual life trajectory in itself gives the community hope. Born in Ethiopia in 1958, as a child Rabbi Alemu prepared to be a religious leader, learning his community’s traditions orally from his own kess. When he was 14, though, he changed his mind, and enrolled in a public school for secular studies. When he was 20, he tried to leave Ethiopia to study medicine, but the government refused to let him go. To escape, he walked through Ethiopia to the Sudan; after a harrowing 28- day trek he crossed the border and made contact with the International Red Cross. “After four months, including one night in jail because I had no papers, I was given a ticket by the Red Cross and flown to Israel. God did not forget his promise and now I am in Zion,” he said.

In Israel he became a nurse; later he enrolled at the Schechter Institute of Rabbinical Studies in Jerusalem. He was ordained as a Conservative rabbi in 1998, when he was 40 years old.

A community activist, Rabbi Alemu studied in the Mandel School for Educational Leadership in Jerusalem and designed a new model of education for his community, a multifunctional family education center that would offer a holistic approach to address the unique issues facing Ethiopian olim. In 2004, a group of educators and social activists, including Rabbi Alemu, formed a national movement called Equal Opportunity for Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Its founding principle is that the help the olim need must come from inside the community itself.

In a paper he wrote during his stint with the Mandel School, Rabbi Alemu spelled out some of his community’s problems. “The absorption of Ethiopian immigration has thus far been characterized by an emphasis on the absorption of children and young people, while parents are treated as a ‘desert generation’,” he wrote. “The exclusive focus on children and teenagers, without addressing the difficulties of their parents, is merely symptomatic treatment that ignores the parents’ essential role in their children’s development.”

The government’s absorption policies have marginalized the Ethiopian Jews’ rich cultural and religious heritage, Rabbi Alemu charged. In the process, community leaders have lost their traditional roles. “Members of the Ethiopian community often feel rootless and start to question the continued relevance of their personal histories. The loss of identity leads to confusion and sometimes anger.” Many young people believe that to become fully Israeli they must reject their parents’ traditions. This has led to alienation, violence between the generations, a breakdown of the family support system, and a loss of parental authority.

Rabbi Alemu’s research became the EOEJ’s Family Education Center initiative. The centers, according to the vision in the initiative, would offer workshops for parents and children separately and for entire families. There, they would learn how to study, how to learn together, and how to involve parents in their children’s education. The main goal is to “educate holistically and to return to the parents their parental authority,” said Aviva Groen, the center’s education and community organizing director. This initiative will cater to people who could not read and who had never studied.

Before it could be implemented widely the initiative had to be tested, so Rabbi Alemu set up two pilot programs. The first was an adult education workshop held in Beit Shemesh, a city near Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem itself. Forty families participated.

The second pilot involved 60 families in three workshops in Beit Shemesh and the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Kiryat Menachem and Talpiot. In the workshops, parents and children studied Jewish values and education together. In one, participants discussed the patriarch Abraham, who left his home at God’s command. The children were asked how they thought their parents felt when they decided to leave Ethiopia, the land of their birth, to come to a new place. And the parents had to talk about what they thought their children felt. “This was the first time that each group had to think about how the other felt and discuss it,” Rabbi Alemu said. “The discussion helped them understand each others’ feelings and find ways to support each other. Each family had to discuss how they would like to build their joint future.”

If all goes as planned, the first comprehensive holistic Family Education Center will open in Jerusalem in 2007. Center staff will work with adults, children, and teens, both separately and together. The long range goal is to open centers in every neighborhood where Ethiopians live. But before even the first center can open, neighborhood workers must be recruited and professionals who know how to teach study skills must be hired, Mrs. Groen said. And of course all of this requires funding.

That was the situation before United Synagogue became involved.

As is so often the case, our involvement began with a series of personal connections. In the summer of 2006, Robert Spiro, an American USY alumni – and a friend of Rabbi Alemu’s – was working in Israel when he ran into Nina Freedman at a rally for Ethiopian Jews. Mrs. Freedman is the wife of Rabbi Paul Freedman, who went from being USY’s first international president to running the entire organization as its long-term director and who is now the director of United Synagogue’s Israel Commission. The Freedmans made aliyah in the early 1990s. Recognizing a shared passion for the Ethiopian Jewish community, Mr. Spiro, Rabbi and Mrs. Freedman, Rabbi Alemu, and Mrs. Groen discussed the possibility of forging a partnership between United Synagogue and the Family Education Initiative. The commission agreed, quickly and enthusiastically, United Synagogue’s board approved, and the partnership began.

This February, the Israel Commission sent letters to United Synagogue’s member congregations. Each was asked to donate $1,000 for a grant to sponsor one family’s participation in the program. The commission, though, hopes that the program will go beyond philanthropy. As its letter to the congregations put it, “By maintaining regular contact with partnered families through exchanged letters that could be shared with the congregation, through visits to Israel and possibly joint touring there, and through inviting young Ethiopians to teach Hebrew in the partner congregation after they have completed their army service, United Synagogue members will develop an ongoing personal connection to Israel.”

As Rabbi Epstein pointed out, $1,000 is not a large sum to ask a congregation to donate and is a fairly painless way to make a significant difference in a family’s life. “We can’t change everything for the Ethiopian Jewish community, but we can help, family by family,” he said.