Patriarch Tekle Haimanut, the leader of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic Christian) Church, arrived in Israel last Thursday. The official occasion of the visit was to celebrate the Easter holiday, but he is expected to deal with the long standing controversy between the Ethiopian Church and the Egyptian Coptic Church over the control of two chapels in a monastery near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City.
There is little chance that Haimanut will be able to resolve the dispute during his visit since the Israeli government is under heavy pressure from Egypt to grant it control over the chapels. A special ministerial committee which was set up here 10 years ago to deal with the issue is still working on it. Haimanut is scheduled to meet with Israeli leaders, including President Yitzhak Navon.
FIRST VISIT BY AN ETHIOPIAN LEADER
This is the first visit by an Ethiopian leader since Ethiopia severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973 following the Yom Kippur War. It is Haimanut’s second visit overseas. His first was to the Soviet Union. There are some 15 million Christians in Ethiopia, half of the country’s population.
Upon his arrival in Israel, the Patriarch told reporters that the condition of the Falashas, Ethiopian Jews, is as “good as the condition of other minorities in Ethiopia.” He refused to elaborate. There are some 25,000 Falashas in Ethiopia, and so far there is no progress in securing their emigration to Israel.
(Last November, at the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations in Montreal, Yona-Bogale, the leader of the Ethiopian Jewish community for the last 50 years, who was allowed to leave his native land less than three weeks earlier, told the assembled Jewish leaders:
(“We were once 250,000 people. Now we are less than 25,000. Time is against us. Every year, every month, every day we lose our young people to war, to discrimination and to persecution. We cannot sustain much more such loses and if the Jewish people in America and throughout the world and in Israel do not act quickly to help us come to Israel, then God forbid that perhaps in five or 10 years we might disappear.”)
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