Conservative Judaism's Outreach in Israel
May 20, 2000

This the season for graduations. This holds true not only here in the United States but throughout the world. A graduation that I would like to speak about this morning will take place in a few weeks in Israel. The site is the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. The Schechter Institute serves as the spiritual and intellectual center of Masorti Judaism as our movement is known in Israel. Ordinarily, its graduation ceremony is not extraordinary news. Every year it sends out rabbis and educators, diplomas in hand, to spread Conservative Judaism in Israel's cities and towns where religious pluralism is still in its infancy.

What is different about this year is that the first Ethiopian Jew is to be ordained as a Masorti rabbi. The story of Yafet Alemu's life is fascinating in itself. But it also provides insight into the difficulties faced by a lost tribe only recently reunited with the Jewish people. His story also illustrates why Masorti Judaism best serves this Ethiopian Jews' spiritual needs.

As a boy living in Northern Ethiopia, Yafet Alemu dreamed of becoming a Kes. A Kes is the equivalent of a rabbi in our tradition. Yafet came from a long line of Kesim and his father very much wanted him to follow this path. So every morning Yafet sat with a dozen other children in a circle on the ground repeating prayers and Psalms after their teacher. These prayers were not in Hebrew. The Jews of Ethiopia have their own sacred language called Ge'ez. On occasions their teacher would also explain to them the qualities that a Kes needed to posses: to speak firmly but softly, and most important of all, to draw people close to God with patience and love.

But Yafet Alemu's journey to becoming a spiritual leader of his people was to undergo many twists before he reached this destination. At age 14, he dropped out of the program training him to be a kes because he was attracted by secular education at the local elementary school. After finishing elementary school, he won a scholarship to a high school. Then he entered medical school in Addis Ababa.

But two years later, he made a fateful decision. A large numbers of Ethiopian Jews, frustrated by Israel's reluctance to bring them to Israel, decided to take matters into their own hands. They began walking to Israel. Yafet Alemu joined them. But wars and politics in Africa hindered their march. They ended up starving and plagued by disease in refugee camps in Sudan. But then something marvelous happened. In 1983, waves of Israeli planes landed near the refugee camps and airlifted 8,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Yafet Alemu was among them.

Anxious to begin a new life, he enrolled in a nursing program in Tel Aviv. In this large cosmopolitan city, he came into contact with Israel's secular culture. His encounter with non-religious Jews and the way they denigrated Jewish tradition baffled and disoriented him.

But he also felt alienated from the religious community. Judaism practiced in Ethiopia is different from Judaism as we know it. Judaism in Ethiopia was based solely on the Bible whereas our Judaism is based on interpretations of the torah found in the Mishneh, the Talmud and the Shulkhan Arukh. These volumes had never made their way into the hands of Ethiopian Jews who were unaware of the rest of the Jewish people just as the Jews of the world were unaware of their existence until just over a hundred of years ago. Because they didn't practice Judaism according to current norms, the orthodox rabbinate in Israel was ambivalent about accepting them as fully Jewish. Therefore, at first, the chief rabbinate insisted that the immigrants from Ethiopia undergo immersion in a mikveh, "to renew the convenant" as they euphemistically called this conversion process. Moreover, even though all the males were circumcised, the Chief Rabbinate insisted that they had to undergo hatafat dam brit, the drawing of blood as symbolic re-circumcision. Ethiopian Jews were outraged at the aspirations cast on their religious legitimacy. Yafet Alemu helped organize protest marches, including a five-week encampment outside the Chief Rabbinate headquarters in Jerusalem.

The encounter with Israel's orthodox establishment so disillusioned Yafet that like many young Ethiopian immigrants, he became secular. He lost faith not in God but in Judaism. A chance encounter, however, changed Yafet's relationship to religion. Students from the Schechter Instituted of Jewish Studies had come to the demonstration outside the Chief Rabbinate headquarters in Jerusalem to show their support. One of the Schechter students befriended Yafet and invited him to visit his school. Yafet was reluctant at first. His antagonism toward Judaism because of his experiences with rabbis and orthodox Judaism had not yet abated. Moreover, he had already had a negative encounter with a religious school in Israel. When he first arrived, Yafat approached a Yeshiva with thoughts of studying there. One of the rabbis said to him, "Come, we'll teach you how to be a 'real' Jew." Yafat felt he was a "real" Jew and that his traditions were just as legitimate as those of this orthodox rabbi. That experience made him leery of visiting yet another "yeshiva." But after overcoming his initial reluctance, he found that he felt at home at the Schechter Institute. The students and teachers respected his traditions. Moreover, some of the Masorti practices he found familiar such as men and women praying together and not separated as in orthodox synagogues. In Ethiopia, too, men and women were not segregated during prayer. The tolerant Judaism Yafet found at the Schechter Institute enabled him to feel spiritually at home in Israel for the first time since arriving there.

Yafet began his rabbinic training in 1995. But in order to support his wife and four children, he continued to work as a nurse at Hadassah Hospital. As the day of his graduation draws near, he has set as his goal opening a school that will blend the normative Judaism of Israel with the rapidly fading traditions of Ethiopian Jews.

Yafet Alemu's return to religion because of Masorti Judaism demonstrates the important role that our movement can play in Israel. Its open-mindedness, coupled with its traditional practices, are appealing to many spiritually minded Jews, from Ethiopia and elsewhere. The Masorti Movement is reaching out especially to the million Jews who have come from the former Soviet Union in the past two decades. Many of them are interested in learning more about their heritage, which was denied them under communism. Masorti Judaism's non-fundamentalist, yet reverent approach to Jewish tradition appeals to them.

Through its synagogues, through its Tali schools, through the Schechter Institute, Masorti Judaism is making a difference in Israel. It is helping Israeli Jews like Yafet Alemu find a meaningful connection to their religious traditions. With your help, the Masorti Movement can accomplish so much more. It can build more synagogues, train more rabbis and teachers and extend its outreach. I am going to hand out to you brochures about both the Schechter Institute and the Masorti Movement. I hope you have been sufficiently moved by the story I told to want to lend your support. In advance, I extend to you my thanks.