Child of Moses

After 2,000 years of being promised the Promised Land, in the early 1980s Ethiopian Jews finally began their holy journey. Yarden Fanta was an 11-year-old girl at the time. Now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, she was in LA last week and told me her story, which I wrote about in my column this week in The Jewish Journal.

A thousand Jews were gathered for the Passover seder. There were no tables or chairs or haggadot. The matzot were handmade. No one had gone shopping at the local markets, since they had grown all the food themselves. The plates were brand new; each family had broken their old ones in a wild ceremony and made new ones by hand, as they did every year.
The village had one rabbi, whose name was Kess Edene. Before the seder, he led all the Jews of the village, who were dressed in white for the occasion, up a small hill to make special prayers in their language of Amharic.
When everyone sat down for their seder meal, the rabbi got up and told the people the same story he told them every year, based on this idea: Our father Moses didn’t make it all the way to Jerusalem, but one day, we will.
In fact, for 20 centuries, the ancestors of these Ethiopian Jews heard the same message: Moses didn’t make it, but we will.