GONDAR, Ethiopia — The sight of a mother trying to coax one more spoonful of mushy cereal into her child’s mouth is a far cry from the horrifying famine that engulfed Ethiopia in 1984.

An Ethiopian woman displays photos of people still awaiting immigration to Israel. [RNS/Reuters photo] 

Today, the hundreds of young mothers and wide-eyed infants crowded into the Gondar Beta Israel Association’s feeding centre face another problem: seemingly endless waiting. They are among several thousand Ethiopians in Gondar hoping for permission to immigrate to Israel.

“They really have no choice but to be here,” says Getu Zemene, chairman of the association, which runs an aid compound that provides food, schooling and some employment assistance to Ethiopians here who say they are part of the Beta Israel community of Ethiopian Jews.

These Ethiopians were practising Christians until recently, and claim links to Jewish progenitors who converted to Christianity several generations ago to escape economic and social pressures. They are known as Falash Mora.

“Israel made them a promise and they have come to Gondar,” Zemene said. “Here they wait.”

Over the last five years, more than 17,000 Falash Mora have been taken to Israel from Ethiopia, most of them from the Gondar area. Now, however, the Israeli government says it has finished screening potential Ethiopian immigrants. The list of Falash Mora that Israel committed to bringing in a February 2003 government decision has been exhausted, and except for a few hundred who will be leaving Ethiopia over the next few weeks, the vast majority of those waiting in Gondar will not be part of this mass aliyah.

Zemene says there are 12,000 Falash Mora living in desperate poverty in Gondar. “I’m disappointed in Israel,” Zemene says. “Look, these people have fathers and mothers” in Israel.

Since the exodus to Israel of Ethiopian Jewry – known as Beta Israel – in Operations Moses and Solomon in 1984 and 1991, respectively, Israel has taken in tens of thousands of Falash Mora. Due to the difficulty Falash Mora have of proving their links to Jewish progeny, Israel has relied on an informal 1999 census to identify potentially eligible immigrants. Israel requires that petitioners demonstrate that they have close relatives in the Jewish state and that they embrace Judaism as a condition of aliyah.

Zemene says the 12,000 people in Gondar – including people whose petitions for aliyah were rejected and some 8,500 or so who migrated to Gondar over the last five years but whom the Israeli government has declined to screen – will be stranded should Israel end its Ethiopian operation.

Zemene himself was rejected for aliyah seven years ago. When asked why, he says, “Still nobody has told me anything.”

American Jewish aid groups involved in Ethiopian aliyah have promised to provide domestic resettlement aid and humanitarian assistance for Ethiopians who waited in Gondar for years but whose petitions for aliyah were rejected.

As thousands of Ethiopians in Gondar await word of their fate, they continue to flock to aid compounds in the city that are funded by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee also runs health clinics here.

At the feeding centre, nearly 1,000 children up to age six come with their mothers twice daily for meals of cereals, eggs, bread, vegetables and fruit. Children ages six to 18 receive one daily meal consisting of a small pile of white beans, two eggs, an orange, a bread roll and a banana.

“The food here is not adequate,” Zemene says. No one is starving, he explains, but there is widespread hunger.

Over at another one of the compounds, hundreds of children study for up to four hours per day at the School for Hebrew, Jewish Culture and Religion. Zemene estimates that 85 per cent of children in the classes have never attended a regular school.

Around the corner, a nurse examines the younger children. The nurse, who does not want to be identified, says the children’s growth rates are acceptable.

Inspiration comes at the synagogue, adjacent to the feeding centre and a mikvah. It’s an open space partially enclosed with plastic sheeting and corrugated metal.

During a recent afternoon service, three older boys led the congregation in a mix of Amharic and Hebrew. Men and women, clad in traditional white robes, sat separately, many with heads bowed. They responded dutifully, with many of the younger ones following along in donated prayer books.

At the Gondar Beta Israel Association’s main office, 120 men can sit in small stalls for vocational training in traditional weaving, spinning and metalwork.

If Israel shuts down its emigration operation here, “we will continue as before,” Zemene pledges, without elaborating.