|
NEW IMMIGRANTS
High Achievers
Immigrants from Ethiopia, like Yarden
Fanta Vagenshtein, Baruch Dagan, and Abaynesh Tessema, have overcome
tremendous obstacles to successfully integrate into Israeli society. The
Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency for Israel
launched a campaign to make the public aware of the Israeli-Ethiopian
community’s ability and desire to contribute to building Israel into a
flourishing, modern state. by Heidi J. Gleit
The first time that
Yarden Fanta Vagenshtein, 33, a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University,
set foot in a classroom she was 14. She spent the first 12 years of her
life helping her family tend cows in Macha, a tiny, remote Ethiopian
village with almost no connection to the modern world. It took Fanta and
her family two years to travel from there to Israel, via Sudan, and to
settle into a new home in Netanya.
The transition to
the classroom, and the Western world, was not easy for Fanta, who was
illiterate like her parents and most Macha residents. However, “I
figured if I could survive all the difficulties we encountered on the
way to Israel, then I could handle this,” she recalled during an
interview in her home in Givatayim.
Like many of her
fellow immigrants from Ethiopia, she more than succeeded not only in
learning to read, but also in integrating into Israeli society. Despite
this achievement, much of the Israeli public is only aware of the cases
of extreme failure that make headlines when a member of the
Ethiopian-Israeli community is involved in a tragedy. Since there are
only about 105,000 Ethiopian Israelis, roughly half of whom are under
19, and most of the community is concentrated in a handful of towns,
many Israelis do not personally know members of the community or
understand the difficulties they encountered and sacrifices they made in
order to immigrate to Israel. As a result, many Ethiopians must work
twice as hard – fighting the mistaken perceptions in addition to their
own personal battles.
The Ministry of
Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) recently
teamed up to change this with a public awareness campaign and
initiatives to open doors to the community in the job market, academia,
and other arenas of Israeli society.
“We decided to work
toward making Israeli society more open to and willing to give
opportunities to Ethiopian immigrants,” explained Minister of Immigrant
Absorption Tzipi Livni at a press conference that launched the campaign.
“There is a gap between the public’s belief in immigration and daily
life. Immigrants are not received with open arms. We are telling
everyone, whether he is a mayor or a teacher, to ask himself if he is
influenced by stereotypes.”
“The campaign will
make it possible for Israelis to become acquainted with the
accomplishments of the Ethiopian community, which are many, though
unfortunately they have not received attention,” JAFI Chairman Zeev
Bielski added.
The
Ethiopian-Israeli community’s accomplishments are even more impressive
when the obstacles the community had to overcome are considered.
Difficult does not seem a sufficient word to describe Fanta’s journey
from Ethiopia to Israel.
The village she was
born in was almost completely cut off from the modern world – it did not
have electricity, let alone radios, telephones, or televisions. Though
she has visited Ethiopia twice since immigrating to Israel, she did not
visit her village because it is not accessible by car and she did not
want to ask the groups she was traveling with to make the long journey
on foot to reach it.
For as long as they
could remember, Fanta’s family had heard the people around them talking
about Jerusalem and how much they wished they could go there, but that
the journey was impossible. In 1985, that situation changed. Family by
family, the Jews from her village slowly began to head toward Jerusalem.
At the time, it was illegal to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel, and so
they had to do so clandestinely – disappearing from the village at night
and walking along little-known paths in the dark so that they would not
be caught. “We held each others’ hands while walking along narrow
mountain paths in pitch darkness,” Fanta recalls. “I was carrying one of
my younger sisters and holding on to the hand of another sister. I was
terrified that if I let go of her hand she would go off in the wrong
direction and be lost forever. Looking back, I’m amazed that I could do
that at such a young age.”
It took Fanta, her
parents, nine siblings, and grandmother a full month to walk to the
Sudanese border. The Sudanese placed them in a refugee camp, where they
waited to be able to immigrate to Israel. “It was a nightmare,” she
says. “It was extremely hot, we lived in tents, disease was rampant,
there were constantly people dying, and there was the eternal suspense –
would we receive permission to go to Israel that day? We lived from day
to day and did not know whether we would die or make it to Israel.” She
added that one of her sisters and several other relatives died in the
refugee camp.
In Israel, her
family spent nearly a year moving from one immigrant absorption center
to another until they finally settled in a home of their own in Netanya.
Fanta began studying at a boarding school in Holon, where she succeeded
academically, with the help of extra time and attention from teachers
and tutors. Even so, the idea of attending university seemed out of
reach to her until she participated in a science program for youth at a
university. “I suddenly saw that there was a light at the end of the
tunnel and that it was not out of reach,” says Fanta, who completed high
school with honors and earned a B.A. from Bar-Ilan University and an
M.A. from Tel Aviv University.
This experience led
her to establish a program called “Thinking Science,” with the
assistance of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and Tel Aviv
University in 2001. The program exposes 13-15-year-old
Ethiopian-Israelis to science and technology and provides them with
support in science-related subjects in school. Volunteers work regularly
with some 350 pupils at their schools and several times a year the
pupils go to Tel Aviv University to perform experiments in the labs
there. The program provided some of the pupils with the tools to succeed
in honors courses and Fanta hopes that they will go on to do well at
university.
Fanta’s belief in
the importance of education led her to pursue graduate studies in
education. She recently submitted her doctoral dissertation and is
waiting for it to be accepted. Her research focused on how illiterate
people adapt to modern technology, she said, noting that many of the
older members of the Ethiopian-Israeli community have not learned to
read Hebrew. Fanta’s findings were surprising – she found that
illiteracy is not necessarily connected to lack of intelligence or
inability to learn, but to lack of opportunity and a need for hands-on
instruction. She found that they have an impressive ability to memorize
signs and symbols that allows them to function in society – for example,
they memorize the pattern they must dial to make a phone call, instead
of the digits. She hopes that her research will help erase the stigma
against illiterate people in the West and improve educational programs
for them. Though her research focused on illiterate members of the
Ethiopian-Israeli population, the lessons drawn from it can be applied
to people around the world.
Thus far, the
campaign has been met with a warm response. Over 1,500 people responded
in the weeks after it was launched – 1,000 called the hotline to offer
to volunteer, 200 offered to provide employment, and many others just
called to offer support and encouragement. The Ministry of Immigrant
Absorption and the Jewish Agency emphasized that the campaign is only
one of many steps aimed at reinforcing Israeli society’s active role in
immigration.
The full
article
appeared in ERETZ Magazine 103. To read it,
subscribe to ERETZ Magazine. |
