For centuries, the Jews of Ethiopia, Beta Israel, prayed to return to Jerusalem. In the early 1980s, civil war and famine made staying impossible. Thousands set out on foot toward Sudan, a journey of weeks through desert and danger. Many never arrived. It is estimated that as many as 4,000 died on the way.
The airlift
Between November 21, 1984 and January 5, 1985, in a secret operation later named Operation Moses, some 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were flown from refugee camps in Sudan, through Brussels, to Israel. More than 30 flights, about 200 people each, night after night.
Before that winter, only a few hundred Ethiopian Jews lived in Israel. After it, a community.
The operation ended abruptly when news of it leaked. About a thousand people were left behind in Sudan; roughly 500 of them were brought out two months later in a U.S.-led follow-up, Operation Joshua.
The hands that helped
This did not happen on its own.
For a decade before the airlift, American Jews, through the American Association for Ethiopian Jews and others, pressed governments and Jewish organizations to act, when many preferred to look away.
The idea for the airlift came from an American official responsible for refugee affairs, and the United States embassy in Khartoum and U.S. agencies worked alongside Israel to make it possible.
And when the planes landed, the cost of absorbing thousands of newcomers was carried, in large part, by ordinary American Jewish families. The United Jewish Appeal's emergency Operation Moses campaign set out to raise $60 million between Thanksgiving 1984 and March 1985, and raised $62.5 million.
When the airlift stalled, it was again American Jews, together with members of the U.S. Senate and Vice President George H. W. Bush, who pushed for the rescue of those left behind.
Speaking to the Knesset days after the airlift ended, Prime Minister Shimon Peres said: “There are no black Jews and white Jews: there are Jews.”
Six years later: Operation Solomon
The story did not end in 1985. In May 1991, as the Ethiopian government collapsed, Israel flew more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours, in Operation Solomon. One El Al jumbo jet carried more than a thousand people on a single flight, a record that still stands. Once again, American Jewish organizations and the U.S. government helped open the way.
These photographs, taken on May 24, 1991 as the planes landed, show what every family who came home in those years carried with them: fear, exhaustion, and hope.
Why Arevim
Arevim comes from the Talmudic principle Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: all of Israel is responsible for one another (Shevuot 39a). In 1984, Jews in America lived that principle for families they would never meet.
Our families received. This is how we give back: by being, for Jews in America who are thinking about coming home, what American Jews were for us. Personal guidance, free, for as long as it takes.
The founder
Adiel Sanbata, founder. His family came home to Israel in Operation Moses.
A software developer with a B.A. in Technology Management, Adiel started Arevim to help his brothers and sisters in the United States and across the Diaspora come home, as a way of returning the kindness that brought his own family to Israel.