In Israel, distress signals from Ethiopians

Alimu Ishete was trying to bridge the divide between Ethiopian Jews and their adopted country.

During a recent talk in this Tel Aviv suburb, he brought out a traditional white robe, worn in Ethiopian villages on Jewish holidays, and picked away at the krar, an Ethiopian guitar.

His audience of Israeli educators listened closely. After two decades, it seemed it was the first time they were really hearing about Ethiopian Jews.

The gap between black and white Israelis seems, with some exceptions, to be growing. For Ethiopians, it is visible in impoverished neighborhoods, soaring unemployment, and the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel.

Twenty-six percent of Ethiopian youths have either dropped out or do not show up for classes most of the time, raising concerns that the community's current difficulties may become chronic. Drug use, including glue-sniffing, is on the rise, and criminal activity, hardly known among Ethiopians before they came to Israel, has been growing.

Ethiopian Jews, who number just over 1 percent of the more than 6 million Israelis, arrived mostly in two waves: during the early 1980s and then in a dramatic US-backed airlift a decade ago. Most started almost from scratch in education and job skills. There were also cultural differences. "In Ethiopia, children look down when their teacher talks," Mr. Ishete says, in contrast to native Israeli children, who look their teachers right in the eye.

For the Ethiopians, 95 percent of whom were subsistence farmers, the leap to 21st-century, first-world Israel was so enormous as to be hard to grasp, he adds.

But not everyone is sympathetic. Israeli mayors unabashedly urge the government to keep Ethiopian immigrants away from their cities.

During a break in Ishete's talk, Masha Aroshes, Rishon LeZion municipality official, says that more Ethiopian families due to arrive here are not welcome.

"They are going to a neighborhood which the mayor has been trying very hard to improve," she says. "It is just starting to flower. Adding another 35 Ethiopian families is not right. It impacts on the education level. In order for the Ethiopians to be properly absorbed, they should not go there."

That kind of talk is adding to alienation among Ethiopians, according to Asher Elias, a staff member at the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ).

"Ethiopians have lots of motivation to become Israelis, but they are not accepted," he says. "In jobs, in education, people feel they are discriminated against because they are black. I'm not saying it is right or wrong, but it is what we are feeling, and that is enough."

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