Haftam Yizhak Heathwood used to be private about her Jewish migration story.
After she was born during the Ethiopian civil war, her family fled their home in Gondar on foot when she was a baby, and headed to Israel in the early 1990s, where she faced discrimination. As an adult, after she settled in New York City, she came to realize that her history had value.
“Now I’m the opposite — I want to share, because I want to show the connection that I have with other people that went through their own trauma,” she said on Wednesday from inside New York City Hall.
Heathwood was on hand inside City Hall’s rotunda for New York’s first-ever municipal celebration of the Ethiopian Jewish holiday of Sigd, the latest milestone for a celebration that until recently was little known outside of the Beta Israel communities in Ethiopia and Israel.
Celebrated 50 days after Yom Kippur, the holiday celebrates Ethiopian Jews’ connection to Jerusalem and their acceptance of the Torah. After many Ethiopian Jews moved to Israel in the 1990s, their celebration evolved but continues to include a fast followed by a feast; prayers and protection from the community’s priests, called kessim; and a pilgrimage up a mountain to face Jerusalem.
Sigd, which means “prostration” in an ancient Ethiopian language, became an official Israeli holiday in 2008. In the last several years, Sigd has gained attention beyond the Ethiopian Jewish community, in part because of a move to celebrate Jewish diversity. Vijah Ramjattan, executive director of the Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, said marking the holiday was a way to fight antisemitism, too.
“We are here to celebrate and commemorate this Sigd event because we believe that New York City’s diversity should be celebrated,” Ramjattan said during a brief ceremony on Wednesday evening as the one-day holiday began.
“For far too long, many have used our diversity to divide us, and this is one avenue where we can showcase the diversity of the Jewish experience within New York City here, and it’s one way to combat antisemitism,” he continued. Because the more we know about each other, the less we hate each other, the more we look at someone, we can commemorate and celebrate who they are, their true ethnicity and their true background. Collectively, we can say, ‘Hey, you belong, you are part of the fabric of New York City.’”
About a dozen members of the Ethiopian Jewish community in New York attended the event, which also drew Jewish nonprofit professionals and other city officials, including Fabian Levy, the Jewish deputy mayor of communications who had just returned from accompanying Mayor Eric Adams on a trip to Israel.
The event was organized jointly by Ramjattan’s office and Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit that provides programming about diversity and Jews of color in Jewish spaces. Last year, Bechol Lashon received a citation from the mayor’s office for its work in “promoting greater awareness of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish holiday of Sigd.” The group published a graphic novel, “Hyphen,” that includes Heathwood’s story, and developed an exhibit that will be up in City Hall for the next week.
Sigd is commemorated for the first time at New York City Hall. (Jackie Hajdenberg)
“Anybody who’s going into City Hall can actually learn about Sigd,” said Julian Voloj, the group’s executive director. (Voloj is the spouse of New York Jewish Week’s managing editor, who was not involved in the production of this story.) “And obviously these are mostly non-Jewish people working or coming for meetings to City Hall. So I think it’s kind of nice awareness-building.”
The New York City celebration comes amid a swell of initiatives meant to get Sigd recognized in the United States. In 2021, for example, PJ Library distributed a picture book, “Pumpkin Pie for Sigd” about an American child who celebrates Sigd while visiting Israel to its subscribers. The next year, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the largest Jewish nonprofit in the world, distributed resources related to the holiday after Sigal Kanotopsky became the first Ethiopian Jew to hold a regional leadership position, in the northeastern United States.
Wednesday’s event is thought to be the first municipal celebration of Sigd anywhere in the United States.
“To me, that is very, very heartwarming, very symbolic,” said Batia Eyob-Serrette, an Ethiopian-Israeli community member and leader in New York. “And in a place where there are, probably, the majority of Jewish population outside of Israel being New York, and for New York to be the one place outside of Israel to recognize it — to me it’s just a beautiful thing.”
Like many of the Ethiopian Jews living in New York, Eyob-Serrette came to the city via Israel — though she had a stop in Montreal, which has its own substantial Ethiopian Jewish community. She arrived in New York in the early 2000s.
“Here in New York, I think every family celebrates it very differently,” Eyob-Serrette said. “When there is a moment to gather, we gather. When there is no opportunity to gather and we are just by ourselves, I’ll light a candle, I’ll tell the story, I’ll try to show my girls pictures of the family and traditions and why we celebrate it and we just reflect.”
Eyob-Serrette said the local community of Ethiopian Jews was small, and scattered across the tristate area. (Among the members is chef Beejhy Barhany, who runs the kosher Ethiopian restaurant Tsion in Harlem.) There is no centralized organizing body, which makes it difficult to gather the community and to celebrate the holiday of Sigd.
“It’s very hard to feel the spirit of Sigd as a communal holiday when you’re doing it alone, when you’re not doing it in community,” she added. “So I know what it feels like, so I have a yearning for it, and it makes me sad when I don’t have it.”
Eyob-Serrett said she hoped the local celebration and exhibit would be only the start of a conversation about the place of Ethiopian Jews in New York City.
“My hope is that people will show curiosity and would like to know and recognize that there are other Jews that are not what we perceive them to be — mainstream, Ashkenazi Jews only — and the Jewish community is a diverse community that comes in all colors and shapes and sizes and languages,” she said. “This will give these type of opportunities, give space for that type of conversation to happen.”
But while the public celebration may increase visibility for the holiday, Ethiopian Jews are also planning to continue their intimate personal observances, as well. Heathwood said she would be lighting candles next to photos of her parents after returning home from City Hall.
“I remember as a kid, my dad was always the one who took us to Jerusalem just to celebrate and pray in front of the [Western] Wall,” she said. “And I want to honor them.”
