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'THE JEWISH DIASPORA NEVER HAPPENED'
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by meninarmer: [QB] Operation Solomon 25 years later "As an Ethiopian immigrant in Israel, you have to erase everything Ethiopian in order to be Israeli. For example, when you first get here they erase your name and give you a new one. When we arrived they asked me my name and I replied ‘Yuvnot.' The girl didn't understand what I said, so she said ‘OK, from now on you're going to be Rahel.' So I was Rahel until after my army service. All through my childhood I wanted to be Israeli so much, so I was Rahel, my accent was Israeli, I didn't like Ethiopian food, only Israeli food, I dressed Israeli and so on. The Ethiopian part of me was completely pushed aside. I didn't want to deal with it". Instigated by the majority Ashkenazim, official absorption processes have often failed to account for the particular social and cultural needs of minority ethnic groups. Yuvi points to this identity crisis experienced by so many of the Ethiopian olim as a significant contributor to the alienation inadvertently fostered among the Ethiopian community by the Israeli establishment. "When two Ethiopian kids are speaking Amharic in class" she says, "the teacher will intervene and force them to speak Hebrew. When parents come to the school, the teacher will often have to translate what he says to the parents to their child, or vice versa. If you ask an Ethiopian youngster about Ethiopia or about his Ethiopian name, he'll say ‘I don't have any Ethiopian name--only Israeli'. I think it's a big problem. I think that this is a big part of the underlying cause of a lot of the things that are happening to Ethiopian youth--the crime, the drugs and so on". Besides having to start virtually from scratch economically, Ethiopian Jews (like the Mizrachi immigrants two decades before them) have found themselves consistently confronted with prejudice, discrimination, and racism from both Israeli society and the country's political establishment. While vast amounts of government money have been poured into absorbing these immigrants, progress has been slow. Figures released in 2007 show how serious the socio-economic disparities still remain between Israel's Ethiopian population and the rest of Israeli society: Ethiopians live in impoverished neighborhoods, face sky-rocketing unemployment, and have the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel. With average per capita income among Ethiopian Jews standing at NIS 2,000 a month, Ethiopians' salaries are around half those of all other Israeli Jews, and considerably lower even than those of the country's Arab population. Ethiopian youth often fall behind in basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic early on in their education. As a result, around 40 percent of Ethiopian adults of employable age don't have an education beyond elementary school level. In deprived neighborhoods, drug use is increasing dramatically and criminal activity, practically unheard of among Ethiopian Jewish communities before they came to the country, is on the rise. When Ethiopian immigrants began to settle in Israel during the early 1980s, their dream was to integrate and become accepted in their new homeland while at the same time retaining their own unique character, identity and values. It's a sad but very real indictment of Israeli society that they've been rewarded for their unparalleled devotion to this country with the racism, prejudice and discrimination that their communities continue to face to this day. The work being done by Yuvi and her friends in Gedera not only betrays ongoing concerns about the disempowerment of the Ethiopian community in Israel, but highlights the importance of grassroots action and local community involvement in creating meaningful and lasting political change in the face of a government and state unwilling, and often unable, to take care of its own people. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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