400 Falash Mura Jews plan to immigrate before election
Efforts are underway to bring 400 members of the Falash Mura community in Ethiopia to Israel, with a vote in the cabinet to approve the initiative expected at the next cabinet meeting next week.
By JEREMY SHARONThousands of Ethiopian Israelis celebrate the holiday of Sigd on November 27, 50 days after Yom Kippur, on Jerusalem’s Haas Promenade(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Efforts are underway to bring 400 members of the Falash Mura community in Ethiopia to Israel before the March 2 election, with a vote in the cabinet to approve the initiative expected at the following cabinet meeting next week.In October 2018, the government approved a decision to bring a thousand members of the approximately 8,000-strong community remaining in Ethiopia to Israel in 2019, but only 600 were brought by the government that year.Likud MK Gadi Yevarkan is apparently involved in the initiative to bring the remaining 400 of the 2019 quota, although he did not respond to requests for comment.Avraham Neguise, a former Likud MK, is also working on the effort and said he hoped government approval would be given as soon as possible, saying they could arrive in the next few weeks.Concerns have been raised that the effort to bring the 400 members of the community is a political ploy to boost the Likud’s electoral appeal to the 121,000-strong Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel.On the final day for the submission of electoral lists earlier this month, Yevarkan was ejected from the Blue and White Party for threatening to join Likud, and was then accepted onto the Likud list on the easily obtainable 20th spot.Neguise denied, however, that the push to bring the remainder of the 2019 quota was politically motivated, pointing out that the original decision was made back in October 2018.It is unclear if a cabinet meeting will be held as usual on Sunday, since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is anxious to avoid political problems over demands for immediate territorial annexations of parts of the West Bank as laid out in the Trump peace plan.Neguise said he did not understand why a new cabinet decision was needed at all, since the choice to bring the thousand members of the community was already approved by a cabinet decision in October 2018 and the requisite budgets for all thousand were appropriated by the government.Indeed, a cabinet resolution in 2015 decided to bring all 8,000 remaining members of the community, and Neguise said he did not understand why this decision did not obviate the need for any further cabinet resolutions. “This is the failure of the government,” he said. “Decision 716 was unanimously adopted in 2015 by the cabinet to bring the rest of the community but because the government is permanently and negligently dragging its feet it hasn’t been carried out.”
“I hope to see these immigrants here in Israel not in a week or a couple of weeks but by yesterday,” Neguise said.Whether or not bringing a further 400 Falash Mura to Israel would give the Likud a significant electoral boost is also questionable, given the size of the Ethiopian-Jewish community in Israel, and the fact that some parts of the community oppose continued immigration of the Falash Mura.The Struggle for Ethiopian Aliyah, an activist group, welcomed the effort, but said it was too small a number, and said all 8,000 remaining people should be brought to Israel immediately.The Falash Mura are descendants of the Ethiopian Jewish community, but do not have the right to citizenship under the Law of Return, since their ancestors converted, under duress, to Christianity.They are granted citizenship under the Law of Entry on the consideration of the interior minister, on the basis of family reunification principles, and they undergo Jewish conversion once in Israel.According to experts on the Falash Mura community, the remaining members of the community are patrilineal descendants of Jews, and were not included in the ruling of Shlomo Amar, former chief rabbi, who ruled that those of matrilineal descent should be brought to Israel.
