Eat, Pray, Wait: The Informal Jewish Education of Ethiopian Youths Awaiting Aliyah

• In Event: Israeli Education: Ethnicity and Music....

Abstract

For Jewish Ethiopian refugees at the Tikvah summer camp in Gondar, Ethiopia, Jewish informal education keeps dreams of Jerusalem alive while simultaneously reinforcing Israeli gatekeeping practices. The ethnic and religious ideologies underlying Israeli nation-building and statecraft surface in campers’ exterritorial encounter with Israel’s vision of an “ideal” Jew. Through a collaborative, community-based approach, this study provides a holistic representation of Tikvah as a world suspended between Israeli socialization and informal Jewish education, where dreams of Jerusalem merge with humanitarian crises, and Jewish values clash with Israeli gatekeeping practices.

Approximately 1,500 children of the Jewish community in Gondar, Ethiopia, have grown up waiting. How do children and youths learn to be “Jews” and “Israelis” in a transnational limbo? What ethnic and religious ideologies underlying Israeli nation-building and statecraft surface in campers’ exterritorial encounter with Israel at Tikvah? How does Jewish informal education serve to celebrate, mediate, and rearticulate Jewish identity in this extreme context?

In this paper I first present the unique role of Jewish informal education in shaping Jewish identity among youths at the nexus of socialization and education. Then I introduce the state-crafted construct of a “Jew” as a legal category in Israel with ethnic and immigration-related elements, and describe how this category shaped the Aliyah journey of the Jewish Ethiopian diaspora from the famous exodus of the 1980s to the infamous transition compounds in Gondar and Addis Ababa today. Methodologically I then justify my choice to collaborate with children and youth using visual strategies and presenting the data in narrative form. I divide the results into three categories – eat, pray, and wait – where elements of material poverty, Jewish practice, and existential insecurity are pieced out and examined. The discussion reunites those pieces into a larger frame to explain how Jewish informal education enacts national and religious ideologies that expose the growing distance between diverse traditions and identities of Jews around the world and Israel’s reconfiguration of what it means to be a “Jew.”

Author

• Marva Shalev Marom, The Schechter Institute