Forgotten Jews battle to belong in Israel

When we picture the people fighting for Israeli Independence in 1948, we tend to think of the image of the Holocaust survivor or Eastern European Jew.

However, the fighters were more diverse than that, Yirmiyahu Danzig told Limmud Johannesburg on 16 August.

“There were Mizrahi Jews. There were Sephardic Jews. There were Jews that had been living in the land for generations. And, there’s also an Ethiopian Jew. There is an Ethiopian Jewish man from the Beta Israel community that essentially walked to Israel to join in the effort to defend the newborn Jewish state.”

Danzig is an educator specialising in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish diversity, history, and identity. He regularly speaks at joint Israeli-Palestinian events to navigate competing narratives and aspirations. He also produces educational content for Instagram and TikTok as @that_semite, and on YouTube at @unpacked.

From the time he was born, Danzig has found himself at the intersection of different identities. His father’s side of the family has lived in Israel, specifically in the Old City of Jerusalem for nine generations, while his mother’s side are Jews from the Caribbean.

Danzig said the Zionist founding fathers envisaged a “new Jew” that would be the impetus for creating a brand-new Jewish society within the land of Israel.

“Often that new Jew came from a mould that they were most familiar with. And most of the founding fathers and mothers of Zionism were from Eastern Europe,” he said. “And so, the Zionist contribution from Zionist thinkers from North Africa, the Middle East, other parts of Africa, and parts of Asia, weren’t part of the conversation.”

Danzig said that soon after the establishment of the state of Israel, these communities that were left out of the conversation started to challenge what it meant to be a Jew, thus changing what the law of return meant.

This became a question in the 1970s, from two communities which had arrived in Israel. The first was the Bene Israel community, the Jewish community from India.

Said Danzig, “It’s one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, and when it arrived in Israel in the 1950s, it arrived under the law of return, and there wasn’t really a lot of questioning about how its members got there. They came because the Jewish Agency was active in India and said all Jews could make aliya.”

From 1948, when aliya was enabled, the entire community immigrated within a decade. But once in Israel, they faced discrimination. Settled in peripheral towns, they discovered that the rabbinate didn’t fully recognise them as Jewish, restricting marriages with other Jews.

“They realised that after they had already settled in periphery towns, alongside Moroccan, French, and Romanian Jews, that they weren’t allowed to marry Jews from other backgrounds. They found out, essentially, that the rabbinate had kind of secretly decided that they weren’t Jewish,” he said.

As a consequence of this, the largest protests up until that point in Israeli history happened between 1951 and 1952. The streets of Israel were filled with Israelis advocating for Bene Israel to be married by the rabbinate.

“They were going on hunger strikes; they were following a lot of [Mahatma] Gandhi’s non-violence efforts to protest; and a number are actually deported back to India,” he said. “After this pressure, the rabbinate makes the decision that the Bene Israel are 100% kosher Jews and there’s no reason to prevent them from marrying Jews of other backgrounds. But something still lingers today.”

Danzig said that in 2020, some families from Bene Israel wrote to the Ministry of the Interior complaining that they weren’t allowed to make aliya.

Similarly, Jews from Ethiopia, or Beta Israel, wanted to make aliya for decades, yet weren’t allowed to or couldn’t. This continues today, when there are people in Ethiopia who have family members in Israel who are waiting to make aliya.

Said Danzig, “One of the main Ethiopian Jewish activists at that time was advocating for aliya. He was trying to direct his messaging towards the Jewish community in Israel to lobby on behalf of Ethiopian Jews. He said Jews from Yemen and India were brought up, why not Ethiopian Jews? They made excuses, and the wound still exists today.”

Danzig said that though some Ethiopian Jews were allowed to make aliya, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie forbade Jews from leaving the country. In the 1950s, Ethiopian Jews started to move to Israel illegally, started dodging deportation, and covertly tried to organise protests and meet people that might be sympathetic.

As a result of pressure and some personal relationships, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Abad Yosef ruled that the Ethiopian Jews were Jewish, but with the caveat that they would have to go through a conversion process.

Said Danzig, “When people are arriving, there’s something happening where people are being woken up in the middle of the night and told to come with agents, and then being taken to a mikvah. Agents are telling the men to strip naked, and without asking permission, they’re picking people to do circumcision on the spot. Shortly after this, people started protesting in the streets.”

As a result of these protests, the process of conversion was stopped, Danzig said, and Ethiopian Jews started to play a large role in Israeli society, with the holiday of Sigd even becoming a public holiday.

Discrimination persists, he said. Many Ethiopian Jews whose families made aliya during the Operations Moses and Solomon are still waiting in Ethiopia. Since 2018, their relatives in Israel have protested, urging the government and Jewish Agency to facilitate their immigration from the remaining Jewish communities.