The Falashas: The Forgotten Jews of Ethiopia, by David Kessler

Today's date is: 5/12/2025
HOME | Cover Page | Contents | Introduction 1| Strangers in the Midst 9 | Legend and History 24| Judaism, Christianity and Islam 58 | The Middle Ages 74 | Resistance and Defeat 94 | Missions and Missionaries 106 | Jacques Faitlovitch 130 | The Struggle for Recognition 147| Postscript 170 | Select Bibliography | Images | Index |


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Jewish centres in Palestine and the Diaspora.' Although this forceful declaration must have helped Faitlovitch to raise funds it failed to create more than a ripple in the Jewish world where other pressing matters were demanding urgent attention - such as the pogroms and confusion following the end of the war and the birth-pangs of the Jewish National Home.

Back again in Ethiopia in 1924, Faitlovitch arranged to open the first Jewish boarding-school in Addis Ababa with Tamrat Emanuel as the headmaster. Many years later Yona Bogale gave the present writer this account of the school, which is reproduced in his own words:

The building was a hired house with several tukuls [huts] which served as classrooms and dormitories for the students. The first students were children of Falasha families who were forcefully brought to Addis Ababa by Emperor Menelik II in the 1890s, to build palaces and churches. The Emperor settled these workers in a special quarter not far from the Imperial Palace, which they gave the name Avuare in memory of the village Avora near Gondar where they came from. The opening of a Jewish school in Addis Ababa was received by this people with enthusiasm and regarded as a providence of God to keep them and their children from complete disappearance. The news of this school was received by the Falashas of Begemedir and elsewhere as a fairytale. Young men and grown-up people did not hesitate to walk the several hundred kilometres by foot to reach the school. In the following years the school compound became unfit for a great number of students. In this situation a new school compound has been granted by the Emperor Haile Selassie I in the Gulale area. In the same year a provisional building with several rooms was built with wood and mud and the school transferred to it. On one occasion the emperor himself visited the school.

The school had eighty boarding students and the greatest part of them came from different parts of the country. The grown-up students, after two years study, were sent to the interior to open schools in the central Falasha villages. The younger and gifted ones, after a certain preparation, were sent abroad. On this basis, in the following villages schools were opened: Wokerdiba in the Woggera region; Wachgedebge in the Belessa region; Beluha in the Kwara region; Yadeva in the Kwara region, and Wolkait in the Wolkait region.

From 1924 to 1935, about forty students were sent to Eretz Israel, France, Germany, England and other countries. On their


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