MILK AND HONEY, BUT NO ENJERA

Janine di Giovanni finds the

Ethiopian Jews still baffled by life in Israel

Zefat, the Galilee THERE IS a very bad but telling joke in Jerusalem: since the olim, the recent im- migrants (in particular, the Soviet Jews), began pouring in, the price of a prostitute has dropped from 50 shekels to 10 shekels, the rough equivalent of £4. The Soviet Jews, we know, are not finding it easy to settle in Israel. They say that the sunshine is very nice and their new settlement houses in the West Bank are comfortable, but nothing quite lives up to those impress- ive videos the Israelis showed them back home. Every day the Soviet embassy has a queue of hopefuls who want to go home.

This is not the case with those other recent immigrants, the Ethiopian Jews, who are finding Israeli culture so baffling that they barely have time to miss their northern provinces of Gondar or Tigris. Falasha means 'outcast', and, not surpri- singly, the Ethiopian Jews dislike the term. They sit in their absorption centres, hotels and mobile homes in Tel Aviv, and kib- butzes in the north, fingering their strange Israeli-made clothes, learning to speak Hebrew and desperately trying to get used to the taste of hummus.

In Zefat, the ancient religious city in the Galilee, a depressing place littered with kosher pizza stands and day-tripping Hassi- dic Jews, there are 363 Ethiopians settled since Operation Solomon delivered them from Addis Ababa to Ben Gurion airport last May. One hundred and thirty-two Falashas are at the Hotel Central, one of the 50 new absorption centres recently opened, and all of them miss enjera, the national food of Ethiopia. Random survey taken in the Hotel Central: 'What do you miss most about Ethiopia?' Eight out of ten Falashas answered, eyes lighting up: 'Enjera.' Enjera is a flat, sour pancake that was the staple of their diet. Instead, the Ethio- pians were being served a lunch that looked quite healthy to me, but one that they considered beyond consumption: a vat of chicken soup, hunks of grey meat With rice, yogurt, fruit. They stared at the sliced rye bread as though it came from another planet: all of them, curiously enough, poked out the soft centre of the bread, which they examined and then ate, and left the crust, along with most of their food, on their plates. 'For the Ethiopians, it's not just a jump of 2,000 kilometres to Israel,' admits Yehuda Weinraub of the Jewish Agency, which is described as 'the Jewish people's instrument for reinforcing the State of Israel' and which oversees the immigration of Soviet Jews and Ethio- pians. 'It's a jump in 1,000 years of culture. They have to catch up.'

The 'house mother' who was assigned to look after the new immigrants in the Hotel Central knows very well that the Ethio- pians have a long way to go. When the Falashas arrived, exhausted and confused after their long journey, she had to teach them everything. 'And I mean everything.' Not only teaching them Hebrew, the rules of the Torah, and how one behaves in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, but how to use a lavatory, to use a knife and fork, how to soap up and rinse in a shower, how to insert Tampax, wear a yarmulke, answer telephones, open a carton of yoghurt; how to sleep on sheets and use nappies for the children and about the fundamentals of birth control. 'The main thing is to teach them cleanliness. We teach the mothers that if their children are not clean, they will be sent home from school. This is a real disgrace to the Ethiopians.'

She recruited six of the Ethiopian women to help her, and many times she would climb in alongside the women in the shower or in the lavatory to show them what to do. 'The one thing I did not have to teach them', she said brightly, 'was how to 'I'm feeling a little peaky.' clean their teeth. The Ethiopians have very good teeth, much better than the Israelis. The other problem was that they knew what soap was, but they were very con- fused by the shampoo. And they were washing with the toothpaste.' There were also some medical problems that were specific to Ethiopia, although one man told me, pointing at his stomach, that all their medical problems had to do with the food in Israel. 'I was in the hospital a few times because of the food. In Ethiopia, we used to have special food from the cattle that we grew. And we had enjera. Here we eat what we are given. Never enjera.'

One Ethiopian, about 15 years old, was staring glumly into his soup bowl and picking out the soft centre of his bread. He wore an embroidered yarmulke, held on to his head by two hair-clips. His friend spoke English, so I do not have to rely on the censored reply the house mother gave me, after someone translated from Amharic into Hebrew and finally the watered-down version came to me in English (i.e., 'They are happy to be here in the land of milk and honey').

`Ask him', I prodded his friend, 'why he is wearing a yarmulke.'

His friend translated, and the young Ethiopian shrugged. 'He says that some- one gave it to him when he arrived. He doesn't know what it's for. He just wears it.'

The manager of the Hotel Central, Chaim, now has a booming business funded by the Israeli government, but he says that he generally enjoys the company of the Ethiopians, and often takes them with him to the synagogue. 'The Russians demand. The Ethiopians don't. Everything we give them, they say thank you, thank you. I give an old man trousers and a shirt and he thanks me 100 times. They also get sad and upset if you don't say Shalom to them in the morning,' Chaim said. 'They're very sensitive.'

At Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar, north of Zefat, the Ethiopians live in squat, com- munal buildings behind the parking lot, out of sight of the big, modern hotel where American Jews come and marvel at the wonders of kibbutz life. Here, the Ethio- pians feel slightly more comfortable, be- cause the lifestyle is more akin to village life back home, but there are still big problems. I found one group of women, many of them heavily tattooed on their hands, faces and necks — some, oddly enough, with Christian crosses — who handed me a very fat baby, and proceeded to tell me their tales of woe.

Apparently, in Ethiopia, when a woman has her period, she is sent to a but at the end of the village where no one can see or touch her. A child is then sent in once or twice a day to bring her food and drink. `Here,' one young mother complained, 'we don't have the room to do it, and so we have to stay in the same room as the men. It is the most • difficult thing. When a woman has her period, she is not pure. She must have her own hut.' The men find it equally distasteful, but one social worker at the kibbutz said that the Falashas will simply have to get used to it. 'There is simply no room for them to have a separate hut. They have to adapt. They have no other choice.'

There is another major problem, a group of ten middle-aged men who were gathered in front of a makeshift schoolhouse told me. 'We used to be farmers,' said one. `The women were the housewives. Now when the women are cleaning the rooms, we have to help because we don't have our professions. We help with the washing. When you have ten or eleven children, there is a lot of washing. But is this man's work?' He stood back proudly. 'Now take my photograph.'

Many of them are still suffering from what one social worker described as `trauma and shock — not just the 72-hour flight, but the three to four years before they were allowed to leave the country. They are refugees.' Many of the Ethio- pians who boarded the jumbo jets last May took nothing from Addis Ababa when they left. Most of them did not know, when they got the phone call to come immediately to the Israeli embassy, that they were leaving Ethiopia forever. They thought they were going for inoculations. Some had been waiting, not in the best of conditions, in the city for two years. When they arrived, they had the traditional clothing they were wearing, and not much else. Now they have other things to wear.

One 23-year-old man wore the most peculiar T-shirt: emblazoned on the front was a paragraph, gruesomely describing a leg amputation: ' . . . Then she was sewing me and they moved me into a hallway to prepare my leg for the stitch. My leg was unbearably painful. The wound was swol- len. There was a complete lack of move- ment. . . ' It was hideous. I asked him where he bought it.

`Tel Aviv!' he said proudly.

`And what does it 'mean?'

He looked crestfallen. But it's Israeli!'

The house mother in Zefat estimates that it will take about 11 months for the 14,194 Ethiopians who arrived in May to learn how to live in the Western world, `And to become good Israeli citizens'. After that, the Falashas leave their absorp- tion centres for apartments or houses in the community. They go into the army, where, apparently, they make excellent soldiers, like the Druse. They will be spread all over Israel, apparently forgetting the culture that they left so quickly. In Yehuda Wein- raub's Jerusalem office of the World Zion- ist Organisation, there is a poster quoting Isaiah 60 tacked up on the wall: 'Thy sons shall come from far . . as doves to their windows.' But across the room is another, more revealing poster, depicting a rose growing among thorns: 'We don't promise you a rose garden.'