Abstract
A few years ago I attended a circumcision ceremony for the eight-day-old son of a man I had first met when he himself was only a boy of seven, languishing at a transit camp in Addis Ababa. Tadesse’s family had been designated ‘Feres Mura’, or descendants of Ethiopian Jewish converts to Christianity. As such, they were excluded from the dramatic airlift that brought more than 14,000 people to Israel in the course of just two days during the chaos that accompanied the collapse of Ethiopia’s Dergue Regime in 1991 (cf. Bard 2002; Seeman 2009). When permission for Tadesse’s immediate family finally came to immigrate in 1995, it was on humanitarian grounds of ‘family reunification’, though that was later coupled with a (formally) optional government-sponsored ‘Return to Judaism’ program for descendants of converts who sought recognition as Jews in Israel.
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Seeman, D. (2013). Pentecostal Judaism and Ethiopian Israelis. In: Marzouki, N., Roy, O. (eds) Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World. Islam and Nationalism Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137004895_5
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