Christian missionaries are infiltrating Israel through Ethiopian aliyah initiatives, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, David Lau, warned the Aliyah Ministry in a letter last Monday calling for the dedicated aliyah project for Ethiopia to come to an end, as almost all the Ethiopian Jews had already immigrated to the country.
Lau claimed that Christian missionaries were coming to Israel in an attempt to convert Ethiopian Jews.
Many Ethiopian Christians who are immigrating to Israel do not meet the criteria for aliyah, wrote Lau.
Almost two-thirds of the Ethiopian immigrants to Israel between 2020 and 2022 identified as Christian, according to the 2023 Israeli Immigration Policy Center’s data. They have been coming to Israel as part of humanitarian family reunification programs. In this case, therefore, Lau stressed, they do not meet the normal requirements for aliyah according to Israel’s Law of Return.
Lau argued that the current waves of aliyah were not the same as the initial aliyah of the Beta Israel community, which had “fought for its uniqueness and preserved some of the values of Judaism,” or the initial Falash Mura, which had been forcibly converted to Christianity in the past.
Each aliyah heralded as the last led to emptied immigration camps and programs being filled again with new applicants. Lau said that he had warned 16 years ago, in response to a State Comptroller report, that only those who could prove that they had Jewish ancestry would be able to make aliyah.
'Time to treat applicants from Ethiopia equally'
While the aliyah initiatives for Ethiopian Jews to Israel, which began around 40 years ago, provided a landmark in the history of Israeli immigration, Lau said that it was “time to treat applicants from Ethiopia the same way as [one does] anyone who applies from anywhere else in the world.”
Successive Israeli governments have debated ending the Ethiopian aliyah initiatives. Some have suggested ending family reunification altogether.
Over 4,000 people from camps in Gondar and Addis Ababa had filed requests for aliyah in August in the wake of worsening political and security conditions in Ethiopia.