Soldiers say Israel still won’t let Ethiopian siblings immigrate

Two Israeli soldiers born in Ethiopia are accusing the state of dragging its feet on a promise to bring relatives to Israel, after an outcry over their situation led former interior minister Gilad Erdan to grant special permission for their siblings to move here earlier this year.

Chalachew Mekonen, a former member of the Givati infantry unit, and his friend Argaw Tesfaye, who serves in the paratroopers, are accusing the Absorption Ministry of ignoring Erdan’s directive and throwing up a number of bureaucratic hurdles.

“Not long after the message from the interior minister, we understood that this was probably going to be a battle with Israeli bureaucracy that would be harder than the battles we fought during Operation Protective Edge,” Mekonen told the Walla news site on Monday.

Mekonen received a citation for his actions in the Gaza Strip during last summer’s war. However, a news report later detailed that he and Tesfaye were unable to be reunited with their siblings, who were stuck in Ethiopia without permission to immigrate, sparking interest in their case.

Mekonen and Tesfaye are members of the Falash Mura community of Ethiopian Jews, whose demand to immigrate to Israel has been held up by legal disputes and confusion for years. The community has a unique status among Ethiopian Jews, known for its members’ professed conversion to Christianity under pressure from missionaries in the 19th century.

As a result, their status as Jews has been questioned more than that of other Ethiopian Jews. They have not been afforded the privilege of automatic eligibility for immigration to Israel normally granted to Jews and their families.

The Israeli government launched Operation Dove’s Wings several years ago to bring the rest of the community to the Holy Land. The Jewish Agency and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews run a center for the prospective immigrants in Gondar, where they receive humanitarian assistance and a range of social services that prepare them for life in Israel.

In 2013, the Israeli government officially declared an end to a program, which by then had that brought roughly 7,500 Falash Mura to the country, but left perhaps several thousand community members behind who were not cleared for immigration. Mekonen’s and Tesfaye’s relatives are among them.

Erdan, the outgoing interior minister, said at the beginning of May that he would begin issuing more special visas for the community following a flood of some 4,000 applications from the Falash Mura requesting permission for some 20,000-40,000 community members in Ethiopia to immigrate to Israel.

“The Interior Ministry said that [my sister] would arrive after us. A week turned into two weeks, which turned into a month, which turned into 11 years,” Tesfaye told Channel 10 news in April.

Mekonen told Walla that the Interior Ministry had said they could come in as tourists, and only later would begin their formal immigration process.

The soldiers’ attorney, Ayal Faltek, said that in the month and a half since receiving special permission from the interior minister, there had not been any progress in bringing the relatives to Israel.

“I spoke with the Interior Ministry, the Absorption Ministry, with legal advisers and with the immigration department,” said Faltek. “One person would say ‘yes’ and the other would say ‘no.’ The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. They sent Chalachew first to the Interior Ministry office in Ramat Gan and then to the one in Jerusalem. In short, the epitome of bureaucracy.”

Faltek also said that even promises to bring the soldiers’ relatives to Israel as tourists have gone unfulfilled. He said they had approached the Jewish Agency offices in Gondar but were met with bewilderment by office administrators unfamiliar with their case.

The Absorption Ministry said in a statement, “The interior minister is permitted to grant requests from anywhere in the world for entry into Israel on humanitarian grounds as ‘permanent residents,’ but his decision does not cover granting them the benefits and rights of new immigrants.

“In this instance we are not talking about ‘immigrants’ nor ‘aliyah to Israel.’ There is nothing keeping them from coming into Israel in accordance with the visas they have received.”

The statement from the Absorption Ministry seems to contradict statements put out by the Erdan-administered Interior Ministry in the first week of May that were made in response to reports about the soldiers’ families in April.

“We appreciate the service and contributions of the two soldiers to the nation’s defense, which cannot be ignored, and we will do everything possible to help them,” the Interior Ministry statement read at the time.

Mekonen has said that if his and his friend’s siblings are not granted any immigration benefits, they will organize demonstrations against the Absorption Ministry in Jerusalem.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.