The American Jewish community is being asked to come up with $40 million by June 15 to pay for the initial costs of absorbing the more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel last weekend.
But the amount is small compared to the enormity of Israel’s heroic effort to help these people adjust to their new homeland, said Martin Stein of Milwaukee, chairman of the Immigration and Absorption Committee of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors and a past national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal.
“The fact that this little country is doing that is just a miracle. It’s a legitimate miracle,” said Stein, who returned Sunday evening after an overnight “eyewitness mission” to Israel with 16 other UJA and federation officials.
Stein, who watched two planes unload their emergency cargo of hundreds of Ethiopian Jews, said the “image is burned in your memory.”
“You see people coming off who have nothing other than the clothes on their back, having this regal appearance, this wonderful appearance of being in the right place, of being home,” he recounted in a telephone interview Tuesday.
The $40 million is the initial installment of an estimated $130 million that will be needed to cover the first-year absorption costs for the olim, said Gerald Nagel, a UJA spokesman.
The money will be raised by federations in conjunction with UJA and administered in Israel by the Jewish Agency.
The sudden and dramatic financial need comes on top of the Jewish community’s past and planned outlays to assist the I million Soviet Jews expected to make aliyah by the end of 1993.
“We are inspired by the bold commitment of the people of Israel and reminded of our own challenge, through our regular and Operation Exodus campaigns, to help make this aliyah successful, like the continuing and not-less-remarkable aliyah of the Soviet Jews,” said Nagel.
A STREAM OF VOLUNTEERS
Last year, Operation Exodus in the United States raised over $420 million for Soviet Jews. Worldwide Jewry will be contributing, through a loan guarantee program and more fund raising, an additional $1.5 billion to Israel’s ongoing absorption needs.
The sum needed for the Ethiopians is “an additional challenge and we welcome the opportunity,” said Nagel.
The Jewish Agency has opened 44 absorption centers around the country, where the Ethiopian Jews will live for their first year. Because of the vast differences between Ethiopian and Israeli cultures, the Ethiopian Jews could not merely be provided money and expected to find their own apartments, as Soviet Jews are these days.
Stein said that as the Ethiopians arrived, the outpouring of support from Israelis was tremendous. “At hotels, the people coming with clothes were like a stream, and they were finally asked to stop,” he said.
Joel Tauber of Detroit, a UJA national vice chairman who was also part of the mission to Israel, said that the street outside one hotel had to be closed because it was so crowded with Israelis coming to offer their help.
“On top of everything else, it’s so over whelming to think that Israel will absorb these people, and American Jews want to be part of this,” Tauber said.
Many of the newly arrived Ethiopian Jews have relatives who came during the secret Operation Moses airlift of 1984-85, when about 12,000 were flown to Israel.
Stein described one moving scene in which an Ethiopian young man, who came to Israel seven years ago and now is a university student, was waiting at one of the reception hotels to assist the new immigrants. “The first two people coming off the bus were his parents,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
