To the Editor:

Edward Alexander’s instructive article, “Operation Moses” [July], cogent and sensitive as it is, must be regarded as a mid-term progress report. As long as 6,000 to 10,000 Jews remain trapped in Ethiopia, hostages of a corrupt, discriminatory Marxist regime, the rescue operation remains unfinished. Our responsibility as humanitarians and Jews is somehow to accomplish the total recovery of these endangered members of the Jewish people. They must not be forgotten.

Josephine Harris
Highland Park, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Edward Alexander’s article emphasizes “the humane and generous reception of the Ethiopian Jews by the Israeli people” and justly excoriates those enemies of Israel who have engaged in perverse denunciations of a stirring and remarkable achievement.

Nonetheless, Mr. Alexander’s story also contains Jewish villains. “The Chief Rabbinate and its followers,” we are told, have arbitrarily cast doubt on the Jewishness of the Ethiopian Jews (the Beta-Yisrael) on the basis of allegations that their marriage ceremonies or divorce proceedings were improper or that they received converts who were not converted according to halakhah (Jewish religious law). Moreover, according to Mr. Alexander, this decision stems from an ironic tendency by “Israel’s appointed guardians of talmudic tradition” to subordinate religion to ethnicity. In support of this last assertion, Mr. Alexander cites a remark by Howard Sachar that a 1968 refusal by the rabbinate to register an Ethiopian Jew for marriage was made because of a suspicion that the Beta-Yisrael had intermarried in Ethiopia generations earlier, “and therefore since they weren’t Jews by nationality (ethnic identification), they were not entitled to Jewish religious rights” (emphasis in the original).

It is difficult to know what to make of this presentation. Improper marriage and divorce have no halakhic bearing on Jewishness, and I suspect that Mr. Alexander has confused the issue of Jewishness with that of mamzerut (illegitimacy). According to Orthodox law, the second marriage of a Jewish woman who had been properly married but improperly divorced can result in children who may not marry most Jews. This possibility has been raised with respect to the Beta-Yisrael, and since it is a problem that arises only if the people involved are Jewish, the more humane position within Orthodoxy may actually be to assign a doubtful status to the Jewishness of the Beta-Yisrael.

As to Sachar’s point about ethnicity, it is an uncontested principle of traditional halakhah that Jewishness is not established solely by the observance of Judaism. Descendants of an intermarried couple in which the woman was an unconverted or improperly converted Gentile are simply not Jewish unless they themselves convert; it is incomprehensible that such a straightforward assertion by a rabbinical court should be the basis for the peculiar allegation that ethnicity has been substituted for religion.

There is, however, a deeper issue here. The orgins of the Beta-Yisrael are obscure, and by the standard canons of historical scholarship there is surely significant doubt that they meet the criteria of Jewishness demanded by traditional Jewish law. It follows that what Mr. Alexander and similar critics expect, indeed demand, of Orthodox rabbis is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty. According to these critics, rabbis are morally obligated to pretend that they believe a historical assertion that no historian would be expected to endorse. What lurks behind this demand is the unarticulated conviction that Jewish law is infinitely malleable and that rabbis can and should reach any conclusion preordained by humanitarian considerations. (In this case, as I have noted, it is not even clear that Mr. Alexander’s position is the humane one from an Orthodox perspective.) Although historical pressures and human needs have indeed shaped halakhic decisions, it is a fundamental misapprehension to think that a halakhist stands in the same relationship to his sources as a potter does to his clay. Divine law has at least some claim to be treated with integrity. (For a well-reasoned halakhic presentation of the stringent view, see J. David Bleich’s article in Or HaMizrach, 24:3-4, 1985.)

The integration of Ethiopian Jewry into the Jewish people is an opportunity of historic dimensions, and Orthodox Jews have generally responded to the challenge at least as well as their non-Orthodox brethren. They do not deserve to be criticized for being honest with the criteria of halakhah and the evidence of history.

David Berger
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn, New York

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To the Editor:

Edward Alexander’s article on Ethiopian Jewry is excellent as far as it goes (though his description of the actions of the Chief Rabbinate is rather one-sided), but it does not go far enough.

The Israeli government was involved in a very unfortunate incident shortly after the arrival of the final group of Ethiopian immigrants. This action could have very serious consequences for the future of the Jewish state.

Several of the Jewish towns and villages in Judea and Samaria offered to provide homes for a few hundred Ethiopian families, affording uncrowded housing and a warm welcome in a religious environment. This is something many of the newcomers were anxious to obtain. Additionally, Kiryat Arba in Judea has been for several years one of the principal absorption centers for Ethiopian Jewry.

However, the Israeli government refused the Ethiopians permission to move over the green line [the pre-1967 armistice lines] into Judea and Samaria. As justification, the government said that millions of dollars contributed by the United States for the absorption of the immigrants could not be used over the green line. The government also claimed that if money from the American UJA were used in Judea and Samaria, the UJA would lose its tax-exempt status.

The Israeli government’s explanation is unsatisfactory. With reference to American aid, it would appear that Israel is willing to relinquish sovereignty over internal matters in exchange for a few million dollars. A preliminary check with the IRS indicated that there would be no loss of tax-exempt status for the UJA should UJA money be used for charitable purposes in Judea and Samaria. Anyway, money has no odor, and the Israeli government could simply use other funds for immigrant absorption in Judea and Samaria if it so wished.

The government’s refusal to accept the settlers’ offer sparked a protest demonstration in front of the Knesset by 200 Ethiopian Jews and supporters demanding the right to live in Judea and Samaria.

The government’s action is obviously not directed only against Ethiopian Jews but against all Jews, and is part of its policy to hinder Jews from living in Judea and Samaria, at least outside the area of the so-called Allon plan. This is only one of many recent decisions aimed at preventing the growth of the Jewish sector of Judea and Samaria while favoring the growth of the Arab sector. Should this trend continue, it could result in the loss of Judea and Samaria, which would undoubtedly lead to the demise of a truncated Jewish state. After all, Judea and Samaria are not the core of the Arab-Israel conflict; the Arab attempt to eliminate Israel is the reason for Arab-Israel strife.

The dangerous precedent of the Sinai giveaway, the loss of oil and the uprooting of Yamit in exchange for a piece of paper honored only in the breach, is fresh in everyone’s mind, and many Israelis fear that the government has placed itself in a trap which would force it to give up territory should negotiations with Jordan ever materialize. . . .

Peter E. Goldman
Director, Americans for a Safe Israel
New York City

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Edward Alexander writes:

I did not mean to suggest that all the Jews of Ethiopia have been rescued, and Josephine Harris is right to call attention to the plight of those still there. That plight is greater than ever now that the new regime in the Sudan, Ethiopia’s neighbor, has put on trial former officials involved in the “crime” of airlifting Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

David Berger speaks of “Orthodox rabbis” as if they were a monolithic group rigorously pursuing truth according to the strictest standards of historical scholarship in brave disregard of the pressures exerted on them by impatient secular humanitarians to bend “divine law” to suit the exigencies of the moment. But the Chief Rabbis of Israel are not merely halakhists but powerful state officials who have the right to determine (among other things) questions of personal status and who is entitled to be married. When the rulings of the Chief Rabbis about the Jewishness of the Beta-Yisrael contradict rulings issued by their own predecessors, both in and out of office, as well as those by many other halakhic authorities, something more is involved than the scholar’s disinterested sifting of historical evidence. Menachem Begin would probably not have begun Operation Moses in 1977 if the Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef had not ruled in 1975 that the Beta-Yisrael were indeed Jews.

When young Ethiopian Jews (if I may call them so) now insist that they ought not to have been brought to Israel under a law that applies only to Jews if the current Chief Rabbis are not bound by the decisions of their predecessors, it is insufficient to reply to them that the Chief Rabbis cannot put limits on their “intellectual honesty.” This is not, to be sure, the reply that the rabbis have made to Ethiopian Jews (the majority) who refuse to undergo conversion. Neither have they said that mitzvot of rabbinic origin, unlike those of biblical origin, are changeable under certain circumstances and by authoritative scholars. Instead they have chosen to blame the recalcitrance of the immigrants on the “Marxist influence” that Addis Ababa University exercised over them. Whether Rabbis Hildesheimer, Kook, Yosef, and Goren had also fallen under the sway of Marx when they ruled that the Beta-Yisrael were Jews, Rabbis Shapiro and Eliahu have not yet said.

Mr. Berger is shocked at the suggestion that the present Chief Rabbis might be influenced by ethnicity in their rulings on the Ethiopian Jews. Yet he insists that “the origins of the Beta-Yisrael are obscure, and . . . there is surely significant doubt that they meet the criteria of Jewishness demanded by traditional Jewish law.” If ethnicity plays no role in the blanket imputation to the Beta-Yisrael of intermarriage with non-Jews and of possible mamzerut (something that would prohibit them from marrying non-marnzerim for ten generations), why were the same objections not raised to the Russian Jewish immigrants of the 1970′s? Would Mr. Berger recommend that any Jewish community examine its lineage as closely as the Chief Rabbis pretend to be examining that of the Ethiopians in their abstruse researches? He must be aware that there is also a halakhic tradition which forbids checking up on antecedents, in order not to discover problems. This is a tradition that recognizes the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

In the past, those who resisted the acceptance of the Beta-Yisrael as Jews complained that they have “customs that are strange to the spirit of Torah and Judaism.” The same objection was raised to the Bene Israel of India. If these peculiar customs (but peculiar to whom?) by themselves raise questions about whether a group is of Jewish origin, then surely ethnic considerations have been active. There is, of course, an alternative explanation, from which I charitably refrained in my article: namely, that rabbinic insistence on ritual immersion or a “reaffirmation” of willingness to observe the commandments or some other token gesture of obeisance has been a way of forcing the Beta-Yisrael to acknowledge rabbinical authority within Jewish religion.

Like Mr. Berger, I believe that the integrity of divine law must be protected from trendy idolatries to which secular Jews in Israel as in the Diaspora are so susceptible. But I think that, despite his concessive reference to “historical pressures and human needs,” he conceives of halakhah as a fortress and forgets that the strength of a fortress is also its weakness: it cannot take the offensive against its enemies and conquer new ground.

If it had been the purpose of my article to criticize the Israeli government for inadequate settlement of Judea and Samaria or to attach the settlement issue to the already heavily burdened coattails of the Ethiopian Jews, then I might be moved by Peter E. Goldman’s complaint that the article “did not go far enough.” But if, as he himself acknowledges, the allegedly misguided Israeli action “is obviously not directed only against Ethiopian Jews but against all Jews” and visits its effects without discrimination upon all citizens, regardless of origin or color, I see no reason to revise my view that the Beta-Yisrael have been received as full and equal citizens of the state. Mr. Goldman’s contemptuous reference to American aid as “a few million dollars” appears to ignore the fact that the American government played a crucial political as well as economic role in the rescue operation. It’s all very well to insist on truth and justice even though the heavens fall, but then you should take care to ensure that they are going to fall only on you and not on other people.

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