"From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia I will bring My worshippers, the daughter of My dispersed ones and they shall bring My offering." - Zeph. 3:10
For The Falashmura, The Window Of Opportunity May Be Closing
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Just Who Occupies The Interior Minister's Chair Affects Their Right To Immigrate
By Yair Sheleg
Among the first potential victims of the new government are the Falashmura, waiting in Ethiopia for the change to immigrate to Israel. Only two weeks ago, the outgoing government voted to adopt a new criterion, based on Halakha (Jewish Law) that paves the way for their immigration to Israel. However, it was initiated by outgoing Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who has now been replaced by Avraham Poraz of Shinui. One doubts that Poraz has similar views on the place of Halakha in government decision-making.
Just who is occupying the Interior Minister’s office is important, as the government decision also states that he will chair the Minister’s committee that will decide on the steps through which the decision will be implemented. Thus, the Interior Minister is well positioned to either give high priority to the plan or shelve it entirely. An aide to Poraz said yesterday that he would be reexamining the issue together with Absorption Ministry officials. Poraz will discover that they are bitterly opposed to the decision. Similar objections have been voiced by Jewish Agency representatives, as well as among civil servants in the Interior Ministry.
In a conversation with Haaretz, Yishai said the decision he had personally pushed through was now at risk. In an effort to counterbalance what seems like a potential reversal of the decision, Avraham Negusa, director-general of the Kanaf Darom Letzion (“Southern Wing to Zion”) association, which has been coordinating the Falashmura struggle to immigrate to Israel, says that immediately after the new cabinet was sworn in, his organization conveyed its congratulations to the new government and began scheduling meetings, with the idea of moving ahead with implementation of the decision.
The decision does not call for the automatic immigration of all of the Falashmura, rather for their immigration on an individual basis. The difference between it and the existing situation is the addition of a new criterion unique to the Falashmura community. Until now, two criteria were used to affirm the right to immigrate: the Law of Return (Jews, the spouses of Jews, their children and grandchildren) and family reunification (first-rank relatives of someone who has already immigrated to Israel). Most of the Falashmura still in Ethiopia do not meet either criterion.
The new decision rests on a purely Halakhic criterion: those who can prove continuity of Jewish matrilineal descent (mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc.) are entitled to immigrate. They will not be considered immigrants through the Law of Return, but will be allowed to enter Israel through the Entry to Israel Law, “in order to return here to Judaism in an official manner, and to strike roots once more in the Jewish People,” as the decision states.
According to Halakha, even if those matrilineal ancestors converted to Christianity, they are still considered Jews (based on the principle that “A son of Israel, even if he sinned, remains a son of Israel”), but individuals who have a patrilineal Jewish ancestor who married a Christian-born woman who did not convert to Judaism would be disqualified for immigration. Even those individuals who were born in such a family, in which the patrilineal ancestors were Jewish, and who were even raised and educated as Jews, would be disqualified for immigration.
In the course of the public debate, mention was made of the list of names of the Falashmura who are considered immigration candidates; the list was prepared on the basis of a detailed survey conducted in Ethiopia in 1999 by a committee chaired by David Efrati, a former head of the Interior Ministry’s Population Registry. The list originally included 26,000 names; Falashmura activists assured that it was “the final list” of those entitled to immigrate. Since then, about 7,000 of the Falashmura on the list have immigrated, meaning that 19,000 people on the list remain in Ethiopia. The recent cabinet decision disregards the list and relates solely to the Halakhic criterion. This could create a situation in which people on the list who have waited years for their turn to immigrate will now find they do not meet the criterion of matrilineal Jewish descent. Conversely, there may be many Ethiopians not on the list who do meet the Halakhic criterion.
Avraham Negusa accepts, and even welcomes, the decision. He claims not to be worried about its reductive aspect. “Even after conversion to Christianity, the vast majority of Falashmura did not mingle with the Ethiopian Christians (mostly due to the disinterest of the Christians Y.S.), and there was no intermarriage,” says Negusa, who estimates that 90 percent of those on the list will be able to immigrate “since most of them are married to descendents of Jewish mothers, and the government will definitely not break up families.”
Nevertheless, members of the community prefer the full list. “The people on the list are our last and final request,” says Negusa, who cautions: “If they begin to adopt the new criterion, and all sorts of people who are not on the list are allowed to immigrate, they will not have solved the problem.” Nevertheless, he does not anticipate any substantial growth of the list.
Negusa, who has dedicated more than 10 years to the issue, first approached Eli Yishai and David Azoulay, MK of Shas during the Barak administration. At the time, Azoulay chaired the Knesset’s Interior Ministry. Negusa asked that they act to work to effect the immigration of the Falashmura. Yishai turned the decision over to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who assigned the file to an associate, Shlomo Amar, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. Amar went to Ethiopia and composed the Halakhic opinion, which states that the Falashmura are “from the seed of Israel” and every effort should therefore be made to bring them back to Judaism.
Yishai was so eager to implement the ruling after its approval by Rabbi Yosef that he rushed to ring it up for cabinet approval only a few weeks before the election. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein objected, for fear that the decision was tainted by electoral considerations, and forced its postponement until after the elections. The fact that Shas and Yishai, who have put the screws to non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and even made things hard for parents of combat soldiers who applied for citizenship, were the proponents of the new decision, raised suspicions that the move was a Shas play for electoral gain. Yishai angrily rejects the charge; “Do you think Rav Ovadia would even consider having non-Jews immigrate to Israel only to get a few more votes?” he asked. Both Azoulay and Negusa say Yishai’s promise to solve the Falashmura problem was made in August, before anyone even knew the elections would be moved up.
Eli Yishai’s real victory was in having a decision passed in which the Halakhic perspective superseded the civil perspective as regards Jewish identity. According to the civil approach, anyone who decided to convert to Christianity ceases to be a Jew, while the Halakhic approach sees Jewish identity as an irreversible biological matter, and therefore the convert, as inappropriate as it may seem, remains a Jew. Incidentally, much religious import is place on “bringing a Jew back to his roots”.
The debate over the new decision conjures up the petition brought in 1962 by Carmelite priest Daniel Rufeisen (Brother Daniel), who converted during the Holocaust, but asked that the High Court of Justice recognize him as a Jew since he was born to a Jewish mother. His petition was rejected, but at the time, the religious justice on the panel, Moshe Silberg, noted that the petition would have been accepted on the basis of Jewish Law. An echo of the Rufeisen verdict can be discerned in the Law of Return itself, which awards the right to immigrate to those born to a Jewish mother but who “are not members of another religion”. In other words, according to the Law of Return, a Jew who converted to Judais not entitled to immigrate. Rabbi Menachem Waldman, who has devoted himself to the immigration of the Falashmura for years, notes that even if there is some similarity between the Rufeisen case and that of the Falashmura, “You have to remember that Brother Daniel continued to carry on a Christian lifestyle, while the Falashmura wish to resume a full Jewish lifestyle.”
Double Bias
The government decision also leads to the practical question of how it is possible to check the Jewishness of a matrilineal dynasty in a society that lacks authoritative documentation. Rabbi Amar suggests checking back no more than three or four generations, since it was then that the phenomenon of conversion began. “Based on impressions from my visit to Ethiopia, and the examinations I conducted, people remember their family line of descent in a more credible manner than written documents,” says Amar. Nevertheless, it is clear that Amar’s approach, which was adopted by the government, creates a double bias for the Falashmura over members of other communities: it allows descendents of converts to Christianity to enter Israel, something that was not done for other communities, and suffices with testimony from neighbors and relatives as proof of Jewish identity.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are required to provide a full set of documents to prove their Jewish identity, and Shas representatives frequently cast doubt on the validity of the documents. It is not implausible to foresee a scenario in which the solution to the Falashmura problem engenders a public struggle by immigrants from the former Soviet Union that ends up in the High Court of Justice.
Amar rejects allegations regarding a Falashmura bias: “The examinations we are talking about would be more stringent than those used for the immigrants from the former Soviet Union. We are speaking about corroboration of several types of evidence, over and over, until all doubts are cast away.” In any event, this would mean another prolonged waiting period. A senior government source claims it would be possible to defend the decision on legal terms, “on the grounds of the unique conditions that exist in the Falashmura community: a community whose members may have converted to Christianity, but were not absorbed in their surroundings and can still be identified.”
The new policy has created a storm among the civil servants, who mostly oppose it vehemently. Sources in both the Absorption Ministry and the Jewish Agency call the decision scandalous. They fear that negation of the decisions determined in the Law of Return will bring hundreds of thousands of Christian Ethiopians to Israel, as well as other peoples claiming Jewish roots.
Some of the officials do not seem to have studied the government decision too seriously, and have not detected the potential for postponement that is inherent in the requirement of Jewish matrilineal continuity. Yet even those familiar with the details claim that if the government has already decided to negate the definitions of the Law of Return, this should at least be done with proper consideration for economic criteria. Such a demand is not raised when it comes to immigration from other countries, at least not publicly. The chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Absorption and Diaspora affairs, Natan Sharansky, says he is not opposed to the decision, but he did demand meticulous entitlement tests as well as the securing of resources prior to its implementation. Sharansky says the Absorption Ministry alone would have to invest NIS 2 billion. During and after the cabinet session, Yishai described this as a racist demand, since Sharanksy had not raised any similar demand for immigrants from other countries.
The requirement to secure resources stems from the assumption that world Jewry, which funds a sizable portion of the immigration budget, will not be excited about underwriting the immigration of those not recognized by the Law of Return. A Jewish Agency official relates that criticism of the cabinet decision was voiced at a meeting of its Board of Governors last week. Due to the opposition, Agency sources say the organization will ask that funding of the Falashmura immigration come from government budgets, not its own. “In any event, the government should make a proper application to us, and ask for our participation, because it is obvious that immigration through the Entry to Israel Law does not fall into our regular mandate,” said the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s immigration committee, Arieh Azoulay.
The decision will now undergo the acid test of implementation. Even if it is not formally amended - a reasonable scenario given the makeup of the new government - more than a few potholes can be expected.
The entitlement test will be administered by Interior Ministry representatives (most of whom oppose the decision) and the Chief Rabbinate, and it is not at all certain that they will adopt the liberal approach of Rabbi Amar. Even before the in-depth examinations, the ministerial committee chaired by the interior minister is supposed to determine the practical steps for implementation of the decision, and to secure funding for it. Since Interior Minister Poraz is not as committed as he predecessor to the Halakha, it could take a few more demonstrations by the Falashmura before the decision will be implemented.
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