16 North American Jewish Leaders Complete 10-day Mission to Ethiopia

Sixteen North American Jewish leaders who completed a 10-day mission to Ethiopia, under the auspices of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), reported that they experienced some of the most significant direct contact with Ethiopian Jewry in many years, including participation in the uniquely Ethiopian-Jewish festival of Seggid, along with 600 Falashas gathered from remote villages in the Gondar province.

The mission members spent almost a full day at the Seggid, a festival combining the joy and religious rites, chanting of prayer and fasting of Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah. Government and military personnel were present, and two of them addressed the assembled Ethiopian Jews at the conclusion of the ceremonies. The festival is normally concluded with food, which was omitted this year because of growing food shortages in which grain prices have risen 140 percent in recent months.

The delegation, NJCRAC’s third mission to Ethiopia in the past three years, was able to receive permission to visit five Jewish villages in Gondar including Ambober, where the Seggid observance was held, Wolleka, Aba Antonius, and the villages of Attege and Kashershelit which had not been visited by outsiders since ORT’s worldwide social welfore, educational and medical projects in Ethiopia were terminated in 1981. With local government approval, the mission distributed medical and school supplies to the Ambober and Gondar clinics.

FEAR FAMINE MIGHT REACH GONDAR

While the famine crisis has only reached the fringes of the Gondar province, where most Jews live, both officials and inhabitants of the Jewish villages are very fearful Gondar will be the next area affected by the growing famine in Ethiopia.

The Americans and Canadians on the mission found the earth to be cracked with deep fissures and extremely dry in most of the places they visited throughout the country, including the Jewish villages and other areas even where “Tef,” a grain unique to Ethiopia, sorghum and other grains were being harvested, but at much lower levels.

In furtherance of the NJCRAC plenary session vote last February on behalf of advocacy for the faminestricken areas of Africa, including Ethiopia, the NJCRAC mission investigated the famine gripping the country in meetings with the Catholic Relief Services, the Save the Children organization, officials of the Ethiopian government’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RCC), and with American and Canadian embassies. A detailed report on the mission’s findings will be issued later this month.

While in the Gondar, the group met with Rep. Gary Ackerman (D. NY) who was there to inspect famine relief camps with a U.S. Congressional delegation headed by Rep. Mickey Leland (D. Texas). Ackerman also reported on the worsening and traumatic conditions including increased fatalities occurring in the north of Ethiopia, which he witnessed.

The mission was led by Gerald Kraft, president of B’nai B’rith International, and included Abraham Bayer, director of the NJCRAC International Commission; Alan Rose, executive director, Canadian Jewish Congress; David harris, deputy director, International Relations Department of the American Jewish Committee; Stephen Solender, executive vice president Associated Jewish Charities and Welfare Fund of Baltimore; David Ravitch, vice president of the Central New Jersey Jewish Federation; Elaine Ravitch, national officer of Women’s League for Conservative Judaism; and Charlotte Turner, MetroWest Federation.