Meanwhile, the Standing Conference in London, though it suffered from the deaths of Norman Bentwich in 1971 and of Rose Henriques in the following year, continued its efforts to increase the aid programme. The British OSE Society had managed to send a succession of three Jewish doctors, of whom two were Israelis, to work in the Gondar area where they set up a mobile medical unit to supplement the threg, health centres. This operation was helped for a few years by the international co-operation branch of the Israeli Foreign Office. The seven village schools were also maintained, of which only one, at Ambober, which received some support from the Ethiopian Government, taught up to the sixth standard.

About the same time a committee was formed in Israel under the chairmanship of Professor Arieh Tartakower, the Jerusalem representative of the World Jewish Congress. Among its members was Ovadia Hazzi, a regimental sergeant-major in the Israeli Army, popularly known as 'the father of the Israeli soldiers', a Yemeni Jew by origin, who had been brought up in Asmara where his father had been employed by the local Jewish community. It was he who reported that there were neglected Falasha villages in the Shire district of Tigrai whose existence had not been notified by Yona Bogale, despite the fact that some of them had been visited by Faitlovitch and Nahum and were known to the English missionaries. Hazzi visited these Tigrinya-speaking settlements in December 1971 and was deeply impressed by their strong attachment to the Mosaic laws and their ardent desire to be united with the Jews of Israel. He considered that they had a slightly higher standard than the Jews of the Gondar area and he noticed that some of them owned their land. They had elected Mikhail Admass Eshkol, a Falasha from near Gondar who, having visited Israel, knew some Hebrew, as their spokesman. He had received the blessing of Uri ben Baruch, the High Priest at Waleka, near Gondar, but was involved in a bitter quarrel with Yona Bogale, who alleged that he was a Kemant and not a Jew. The Falashas of Tigrai, having heard of the assistance which was arriving from abroad, could not understand why they had been forgotten and, with encouragement from ben Baruch, they vented their wrath on Bogale, the representative of the Jewish