Immigration and Jewish Agency officials are experiencing great difficulties in registering the more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews who arrived in the Operation Solomon airlift last weekend.
The newcomers themselves are being kept confined to the hotels and absorption centers to which they were sent, until the complicated process can be completed. The officials do not want them wandering around a still-unfamiliar country, in search of family members who preceded them to Israel.
The problem is compounded now because even the relatives who preceded the new arrivals are themselves wandering from one reception center to another, seeking family members.
The search for missing kin is being assisted by the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s latest program, an Immigrants Network, which broadcasts two hours a day in Amharic the names of the newcomers and the reception centers where they have been placed.
But the problem remains of registering the names, and the difficulties are myriad.
There is presently no available means in Israel of printing out the unusual Amharic script, of which no print fonts are available. The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv has adopted the only available method, printing daily a photograph of lists of the new immigrants written roughly by hand.
But even the names themselves represent a problem. Family names have not been in use within the Ethiopian Jewish community, whose members bear only a given first name, followed by a patronym, the name of the father. Computer lists are therefore useless in compiling a register of families.
One suggestion is to give the immigrants new family names, based on the given name of the grandfather most recently deceased.
Another problem arises from the fact that none of the newcomers was ever issued certificates indicating date and place of birth. And for most Ethiopian Jews, calendar dates are vague.
Most of them recall they were told they were born, or that a certain event happened, in “the year the Italians bombed Gondar,” “when Haile Selassie left Addis Ababa” or in “the third year of the great famine.”
But absorption officials are determined to overcome all the problems.
“It’s going to be like Ellis Island at the turn of the century,” one veteran official said. “When a new immigrant from Russia or Poland, responding to an immigration official’s question as to his name, said ‘Nicht verstanden’ (I don’t understand), he was registered as Nick Vorstand.”
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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.
