THE Ethiopian Israelites initially observed the ways of the biblical Israelites.
They had a Torah which they called Orit.
It was a written translation of the Hebrew Torah in the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez. When women were on periods, they would go to designated places outside the camp and spend that week with other women on their periods as it was commanded to the Israelites in the Bible.
Males were initiated in mountains and animal sacrifices were common.
This literal form of biblical Israelite culture is very African in nature and by no way resembles the Judaism from the West which is tainted by Rabbinic interpretations.
For a long time, the Ethiopian Israelites believed they were the only Israelites left.
They were the only group known to have Nazarenes; that is dreadlocked Israelite nobles separated for the service of God.
After guarding their authentic Israelite culture for millennia, their efforts would be reversed after the Israelites of Ethiopia were found out by the European partakers of Talmudic Judaism.
In the 1860s, a French Jew called Joseph Heleibi entered Ethiopia and ran into the Beta-Israel or Falasha community.
He observed their mannerisms and was convinced they were Israelites because they observed ancient Hebrew festivals, doctrines and literature.
Heleibi was a linguist. His top student, an ethnologist called Lovich, who was also a white partaker of Judaism, came to Ethiopia in 1904 to study the Ethiopian Israelites.
He lived in Ethiopia for two years and returned to Europe to organise pro-Falasha communities in Italy, Germany and the US, the places where the Jews were most populated before they took over Palestine 40 years later.
It is important to note that the Beta-Israel were found out by the Europeans in the late 1800s, when Zionism was beginning. Thus they were a debated group among the European Jews since the very beginning of their plot to form a home nation for all partakers of Talmudic Judaism.
The Zionists set up a company in the US called Jewish Agency. This agency was, and still is, responsible for determining who is/not to be accepted as an Israelite into Palestine. This agency’s decisions on who is/not a Jew are determined by Rabbis who are partakers of Talmudic Judaism.
Thus the Jewish Agency advised Lovich to convert the whole population of the Ethiopian Israelites to Talmudic Judaism so as to make them acceptable. This entailed forsaking much of the traditions they had conserved for so long and adopting foreign ones without roots in the Torah, but in the Talmud, which is essentially a collection of corrupt Rabbinic interpretations of the Torah.
Lovich’s teacher Heleibi had already set up an organisation called Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training (ORT) which was specifically meant to convert Israelite groups into Talmudic Jews. Thus this process of converting the Ethiopians began as early as the 1860s.
Both the Jewish Agency and the ORT supported Lovich in establishing schools, training institutes and synagogues in Ethiopia to accelerate the process of conversion.
The Ethiopian Israelite students were taught Hebrew, the Talmud and many other things. Some were even taken to Israel/Palestine and among these was Baruch Tegegne. Baruch was a top student and he became a member of the Israeli secret service.
The term ‘rescue’ which was used in the Jewish Agency’s mandate for the Ethiopian Israelites implies they were in some sort of danger.
However, the Ethiopian Israelites had lived and multiplied in Ethiopia without the interference or intervention of the Europeans.
The European Jews had to create a state of urgency in order to carry out their scheme to remove the Israelites from Ethiopia.
Because there was no imminent danger associated with the Israelites in Ethiopia, the Jews started making them feel disadvantaged over miniscule things like not having running water, electricity and living in primitive mud huts called chikuwo.
This was not confined to Ethiopian Israelites but all Africans who lived in the same way. However, the Jews sold the Ethiopian Israelites dreams of better living in the modern cities of Israel/Palestine.
Tegegne and others were also sent back to Ethiopia to try and smuggle the first Ethiopian partakers of Judaism out of Ethiopia and into Israel.
All this time, Ethiopia was ruled by the descendants of Ebna la Hakim or Menyelek who had become Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. This same group was then successfully targeted for conversion to Judaism along with the non-Christian Israelites of Ethiopia.
After the ousting of the last Israelite king of Ethiopia, Negus Tafari in 1974 by Mongistu, the rate of conversion and co-operation with the European Jews increased among the Ethiopian Israelites.
Mongistu was communist backed while Ethiopia’s allies under the Christian Israelite kings had traditionally been backed by non-communist nations like Britain on the grounds of Christian brotherhood. Thus the Ethiopian Israelites felt less secure, giving the Jews a chance to win them over.
The Mongistu regime was very militant and redistributed land in a way that caused many Ethiopians, including non-Israelites, to flee in panic to neighbouring nations like Sudan. There were thousands of Ethiopians in Sudan and the UN set up refugee camps.
Ethiopians set forth on the dangerous route on foot and would arrive malnourished and having suffered loss of lives on the way to the refugee camps.
Tegegne was speedily assigned to go to the UN camps in Sudan in order to inform them that Zionist Israel was making efforts to take the Ethiopian Jews into the land of Israel. He would also go into Ethiopia to make lists of who was Jewish, that is a partaker of Talmudic Judaism, and he would make head counts.
This became a religious issue and not a tribal one, because Judaism is a religion and being an Israelite is an identity of a specific lineage.
This led the lists to include Ethiopians who were not Israelites on the basis of them being followers of Judaism. The lists would also exclude some Israelites who were Christians because they did not follow Judaism.
The refugee crisis increased and reached its peak in 1984. Ethiopians from all groups; indigenous, Israelite, Muslim and Christian were running away from the warring in their nation.
The Jews were only concerned about the Ethiopians who were Jews and by the summer of 1984, there was a world known crisis in the UN camps of Sudan.
The Ethiopians were dying in thousands at the camps, particularly children. The walk could take up to three months on foot and the warring was fatally dangerous.
The Jewish Agency and ORT submitted their lists of Ethiopian Jews along with Tegegne’s to the Zionist government.
The CIA of the US and also the US embassy in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum were consulted and they agreed to assist the Zionist government in undertaking the rescue of the Jewish Ethiopian refugees in Sudan by way of sending them to Israel.
Money and weapons were reportedly used to bribe Islamic Sudan to allow the selected Ethiopians from the refugee camps to be taken away peacefully.