Ethiopian Jewry,
Beta Israel

Why this Chapter exists

The Jewish story has an African chapter.

At the center of that airlift were the Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia. Jewish communities lived across Africa for centuries, from Egypt and Morocco in the north (see A Connected People, The Jews of North Africa, and the Departure from MENA) to the highlands of Ethiopia. The Beta Israel kept their own form of Jewish life in Ethiopia for many centuries, and between 1984 and 1991 Israel carried most of them out in a series of airlifts.

What the tradition holds

A community that traces itself to Solomon.

Ethiopia’s national epic, the Kebra Nagast, traces the country’s royal line to King Solomon, the ancient Israelite king, and the Queen of Sheba, whom it names Makeda. The epic holds that their son, Menelik I, returned to Ethiopia from Jerusalem around the tenth century BCE with Israelite priests. Beta Israel traditions of the community’s own origin overlap with that story in places, and elsewhere claim descent from the tribe of Dan or from Israelites who came out of Egypt. In the epic, Menelik and the priests brought the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest from the Jerusalem Temple, which Ethiopian Orthodox Christian tradition says remains today at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum.

Scholars hold several different positions on where the community came from:

• Emergence in Ethiopia. This position is set out in Steven Kaplan’s The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia (1992). It holds that the Beta Israel took shape as a distinct group in Ethiopia between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing on the Hebrew Bible–based traditions already present in Ethiopian Christianity.
• Older Judaic roots. An earlier twentieth-century position, holding that the community preserved Hebraic practices present in Ethiopia before Christianity, possibly through contact with Jewish merchants or the Jewish community of southern Arabia (Yemen).
• The “lost tribes” framework. Descent from the Israelite tribe of Dan, found in some of the community’s own traditions and in the sixteenth-century ruling of the Radbaz (described below). A 1973 ruling by Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, would adopt it.
• The dating. The earliest clear evidence of the Beta Israel as a distinct community dates to roughly the fourteenth or fifteenth century CE. The positions above differ on what came before.

The term “Falasha,” used in Ethiopia and in older scholarship, comes from a Ge’ez root meaning “exile” or “stranger” (Ge’ez is Ethiopia’s ancient liturgical language), and it now carries a pejorative sense. The community’s own name for itself is “Beta Israel” (House of Israel), and scholarship has shifted to that term.

From the fourteenth century, Ethiopia’s Christian emperors fought repeated wars to bring the Beta Israel of the northern highlands under their rule. In the early 1600s the army of Emperor Susenyos defeated them, ending their independence. The Beta Israel lost their title to land. They farmed land owned by Christians and became blacksmiths, weavers, potters, and builders. Their neighbors often accused them of being buda, people with the evil eye and magical powers. The great famine of 1888–1892, which came with war, cattle plague, and disease, killed between a third and a half of the community.

What the tradition includes

A Judaism shaped by long separation.

Beta Israel religious practice differs in key ways from Rabbinic Judaism. That form of Judaism grew up across the wider Jewish world after the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Jewish worship, was destroyed in 70 CE. The differences show how far the community stood from that world:

• The scriptures. The community preserved its scripture in Ge’ez, above all the Orit (the name means “Torah”), the Torah with the books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. The Talmud, the vast compilation of Jewish law and debate completed around 500 CE, and the wider rabbinic literature never reached the community.
• The leadership. The religious leaders are not rabbis but the kessoch (singular kes, roughly “priest”), who inherit the role through priestly family lines and lead through ritual rather than the study of the Talmud.
• The practice. It includes the Sabbath (Senbet), the Hebrew Bible festivals (Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, but not Hanukkah or Purim, whose post-biblical traditions never reached the community), dietary laws, ritual purity, and circumcision on the eighth day.
• Unique observances. The community keeps festivals not found elsewhere in the Jewish world, above all Sigd, observed 50 days after Yom Kippur, marking the giving of the Torah and the community’s longing for Jerusalem.
• Monasticism. The Beta Israel kept a monastic tradition, celibate religious practitioners in monastic communities, with no parallel in Jewish communities elsewhere since antiquity. Scholars trace it to the fifteenth century, when the community adapted the monastic institution of Ethiopian Christianity. Its monks became the main keepers of Beta Israel religious life. It declined through the twentieth century and has all but disappeared.

The Western encounter

How the wider Jewish world found them.

European travelers described the community from the sixteenth century. What brought the Beta Israel to wide European attention was the Scottish traveler James Bruce, in Ethiopia from 1769. His account appeared in Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790). In the nineteenth century, European missionaries and scholars produced accounts of the Beta Israel, along with attempts to convert them to Christianity. Those accounts brought the community to wider Western Jewish attention.

The French Alliance Israélite Universelle and the broader European Jewish world engaged with the community from the 1860s on. Whether the Beta Israel were Jews under Jewish law was debated in the rabbinic literature. In 1864, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, a leading European rabbinic authority, published a public appeal. It recognized the Beta Israel as Jews and called for their aid. In 1867 the Alliance sent the scholar Joseph Halévy to visit the community. The twentieth-century rulings would build on those precedents, and on a sixteenth-century responsum (rabbinic legal opinion) by Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra of Egypt, known as the Radbaz.

The bridge to world Jewry

One scholar’s life work.

The link between the Beta Israel and the modern Jewish world was built by Jacques Faïtlovitch (1881–1955), a Polish-French Jewish scholar. He worked with the community from 1904, made his last journey to Ethiopia in 1946, and continued the work until his death in 1955. He founded the Pro-Falasha Committee in 1907, pressed for recognition of the community as Jews, and set up schools in Ethiopia to support it.

The community’s twentieth-century history ran through the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936–41), the restored empire under Haile Selassie (1941–74), and the revolution of 1974.

The Halakhic recognition

A 1973 ruling that opened the door.

On February 9, 1973, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, ruled that the Beta Israel were Jews under Jewish law, identifying them as descendants of the Israelite tribe of Dan. Israel has two chief rabbis, one for each of the two main branches of Jewish tradition. The Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, at first disapproved of the ruling. In the winter of 1978 he met new immigrants from Ethiopia and told them, “You are true Jews.”

The ruling did not create the community’s Jewish identity. It established the halakhic basis, the basis in Jewish law, on which the wider Jewish world and the Israeli state could formally recognize Beta Israel as Jewish.

The recognition meant the Beta Israel were entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return (1950), which grants automatic citizenship to Jews, and that made the rescue operations possible. When Menachem Begin became prime minister in 1977, he made bringing the community to Israel a national goal, and Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, was given instructions to bring them. The first attempt came that same year. Ethiopia was then ruled by the Derg, the Marxist-Leninist military regime that had seized power in 1974, under Mengistu Haile Mariam. In a secret agreement, Israel was to supply Ethiopia with military aid in exchange for letting about 200 Beta Israel leave for Israel. After 121 had arrived, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan revealed the agreement to the press, and the emigration was halted. Getting the rest of the community out would require other routes.

The road through Sudan

An escape on foot, through famine.

Because the Derg regime banned emigration to Israel, the evacuation had to run through a third country. The route that developed in the early 1980s ran through refugee camps in Sudan.

The wider catastrophe of those years set the stage. The Ethiopian famine of 1983–85, the disaster behind the Live Aid concert of July 1985, drove a mass migration of Ethiopians across the border into refugee camps in eastern Sudan. The Beta Israel, hit by the famine like everyone else, walked from the Gondar region to those camps. The journey was brutal. Some 4,000 Beta Israel are estimated to have died along the way or in the camps, from starvation, disease, and banditry on the route. The names of about 1,700 of them are engraved on a monument on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where a ceremony is held for them each year.

Sudan made it harder still. The Sudanese government under Jaafar Nimeiry was an Arab League member with hostile relations toward Israel, so there could be no open cooperation. The evacuation depended on covert operations through intermediaries and on payments to Sudanese officials, a quiet, partial cooperation that let the flights happen while letting officials deny them in public.

Operation Moses · 1984–85

The first airlift, and how it ended.

Operation Moses brought between about 6,500 and 8,000 Beta Israel, depending on the count, from the Sudanese camps to Israel between November 21, 1984 and January 5, 1985. It was run by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, with the Israel Defense Forces, the Jewish Agency (the body that organizes Jewish immigration), and American Jewish organizations.

The Beta Israel were moved in small groups from the camps to an airstrip near Khartoum, where Boeing 707s of the Belgian charter airline Trans European Airways carried them to Israel by way of Brussels. About three dozen flights ran over six weeks.

The operation was exposed on January 5, 1985, after public comments by Israeli officials. Under Arab League pressure, Sudan halted it, leaving about 1,000 Beta Israel stranded in the camps. Those brought out became the core of the Ethiopian Israeli community.

Operation Joshua · 1985

The American hand in the rescue.

Operation Joshua, in March 1985, brought out roughly 500 to 800 Beta Israel who had been stranded in the Sudanese camps. This one was run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency with Israeli support, the direct American role in the rescue. American C-130 transport planes flew the Beta Israel from a remote airstrip near Gedaref, close to the camps, directly to Israel. Vice President George H. W. Bush helped coordinate it.

Operation Solomon · May 1991

14,325 in 36 hours.

Operation Solomon evacuated 14,325 Beta Israel from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours on May 24–25, 1991.

The setting was a country collapsing. The Derg regime was falling to rebel forces under Meles Zenawi. Over the previous two years, with Israeli encouragement, the Beta Israel had moved from the Gondar and Tigray regions to Addis Ababa. They were concentrated in about 100 compounds near the Israeli embassy, waiting for a way out.

A deal made it possible. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe on May 21, leaving acting president Tesfaye Gebre Kidan in charge. The departing government agreed to let the Beta Israel leave in exchange for about $35 million, paid by the Israeli government and American Jewish organizations. The payment was completed on May 22–24.

Thirty-four aircraft flew the operation, shuttling between Addis Ababa’s Bole airport and Tel Aviv. They included Israeli Air Force C-130 transports, El Al Boeing 747s with the seats removed, and other civilian planes. One of the 747s carried 1,088 passengers on a single flight, still the Guinness World Record for the most passengers ever flown on one aircraft. Unofficial counts that day ran as high as 1,122. At the operation’s peak more than two dozen aircraft were in the air at once, and people were loaded as fast as the planes could hold them. Two babies were born in the air on the record flight, and the official count includes them. All 14,325 arrived without a single casualty. The last plane left Addis Ababa on May 25. The rebels took the city three days later.

What followed the airlifts

What came after the landing.

Bringing the Beta Israel into Israeli society, from 1984 on, proved difficult. The framework included absorption centers, transitional housing for new immigrants, such as Mevasseret Zion near Jerusalem. It also included Hebrew instruction, vocational training, and housing programs.

The Israeli Chief Rabbinate questioned whether Beta Israel religious tradition fit its own Rabbinic framework. Those seeking to marry under rabbinical authority faced extra ritual steps. The rabbis required a symbolic ceremony: ritual immersion, and for men a ceremonial circumcision. They called it a “renewal of Judaism,” not a conversion. Some in the community felt the ceremony was an insult, and in the autumn of 1985 their opposition culminated in a month-long strike. Demonstrations and court appeals continued after it.

Wider tensions have included discrimination, economic gaps, and unequal access to education. The Ethiopian Israeli community has also produced its own leaders. Pnina Tamano-Shata was three years old in 1984 when her family fled Ethiopia and was flown out of Sudan in Operation Moses. They spent several years in an absorption center before settling in Petah Tikva. In May 2020 she became the first Ethiopian-born Israeli cabinet minister, as Minister of Aliyah and Integration.

The community today

A living community, still arriving.

The Ethiopian Israeli community numbered about 177,600 at the end of 2024, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. It is concentrated in central and southern Israel, in Netanya, Ashdod, Rehovot, Beer Sheva, and Hadera.

The Falash Mura are Ethiopians descended from Beta Israel who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most remained in Ethiopia after the main operations. Tens of thousands have immigrated to Israel since 1991.

The Sigd became an Israeli national holiday by act of the Knesset in 2008. Today it is observed with gatherings at the Armon HaNatziv promenade in Jerusalem, overlooking the Old City.

Open questions

What historians still debate.

The scholarship on Ethiopian Jewry carries several contested questions:

• Origins. The historical origins remain debated. The community tradition (Solomon and Sheba), the emergence-in-Ethiopia position, the older-Judaic-roots position, and the “lost tribes” framework each have adherents. The 1973 ruling adopted the lost-tribes framework for the purposes of Jewish law. The historical question is still open.
• The Falash Mura. The status of the Falash Mura under Jewish law, and Israel’s policy toward them, remains contested, involving questions of descent, immigration policy, and politics.
• Absorption. Israel’s record on absorption includes failures alongside successes, discrimination in housing, education, and employment, and friction over policing, including the protests of 2015 and 2019 against police violence.
• The 1996 blood controversy. In January 1996 the Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported that Magen David Adom, which runs the national blood bank, had been quietly discarding blood donated by Ethiopian Israelis for fear of HIV. About 10,000 people demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.

A community that prayed toward Jerusalem from the Ethiopian highlands for many centuries now celebrates the Sigd in Jerusalem. The arguments about fairness continue, in protests and in the courts.

Object Spotlight

The Orit.

The central object of Beta Israel religious life is a book: the Orit, the Torah and its neighboring books rendered in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia. Copied by hand onto parchment, bound as a codex, and kept in the synagogue in the care of the kessoch, the Orit stood at the center of the community’s scriptures.

Beta Israel preserved the Bible but not the Talmud. Its Judaism grew up around the Ge’ez Bible in an Ethiopian world the rabbinic literature never reached.

Orit manuscripts collected in Ethiopia in the early twentieth century are preserved today in research collections. They include the Faitlovitch Collection of Tel Aviv University’s Sourasky Central Library: some forty manuscripts in Ge’ez, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Agaw that Jacques Faïtlovitch left to the city of Tel Aviv, transferred to the library in 1974.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History, Decolonization & Modern Africa and the Middle East: the Beta Israel and the Israeli operations of 1984–91 within African and Middle Eastern history.
• World History, Human Rights: Operation Solomon, which moved 14,325 people by air in about 36 hours.
• World Religions: a community that kept the Sabbath, the festivals, and the Hebrew Bible in isolation, without the Talmud.
• Comparative Migration: read beside Soviet Jewry (the parallel late-twentieth-century migration), the Modern State of Israel (the Law of Return framework), and American Jewry (the American campaign for Soviet Jews, the parallel effort of the same decades).
• Historical Thinking: recognition, rescue, and the record of discrimination alongside the rescue.
• Source Analysis: the 1973 ruling, the Operation Solomon records, and the 1996 press reports.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 10.7 (decolonization and the modern Middle East and Africa) and 10.10 (human rights, Operation Solomon).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective and primary sources): the 1973 ruling, the Operation Solomon records, and the 1996 press reports.

Further Teaching Resources

• JDC, Operation Solomon, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, directly involved in the airlift, on how it unfolded.
• The Jewish Agency, Ethiopian Aliyah, the agency that ran much of the immigration, on the operations and their aftermath.