The Jewish Writing Project

By Steve Pollack (Woxall, PA)

My son’s bar mitzvah year called us to the northernmost Israeli seacoast town of Nahariya in the summer of 1991, the year that 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted as part of “Operation Solomon.” We wanted to lend our hands to the historic and miraculous effort.

The Israeli government provided the new immigrants with temporary housing, Hebrew language classes, and job training. Local B’nai B’rith leaders collected clothing and other personal needs. One day we were assigned to distribute various powders & liquids—soaps for bathing, washing clothes or cleaning dishes—and to demonstrate their use for people accustomed to washing in a river, not certain the purpose of each plumbing fixture in a hotel bathroom. That assignment is what sent me to an upper floor where I met a man whose priestly position in the tribe I learned only later. 

I did not ask his name nor speak mine. I did not speak Amharic, the official language in Ethiopia. Yet I stood before him, an elder among recent immigrants ravaged by famine and civil-war, awed by his dignity and personal warmth. His coarse cotton robe, white ragged beard, and distinctive scepter of smooth wood and horsehair held upright looked to my Western eyes as unfamiliar as my shorts and baseball cap must have appeared to him.

The elderly man motioned for me to sit by him on the bed and opened a well-worn leather-bound volume. He turned the thick book to a page inside the back cover and together we recited the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—Alef, Bet, Gimel… This was no test or school lesson, no bland reading. The experience felt like a joyful song, an ancient chant of profound connection.

Our group of B’nai-B’rith volunteers visited the new immigrants most afternoons. We strolled the mosaic promenade parallel to the Mediterranean Sea holding hands with the youngest children while their parents prepared evening meals served in a common dining hall. Lean teenagers walked with us, their English vocabulary more extensive than my Hebrew. They taught us their Amharic names, articulations unpronounceable by my lips. 

While at local playgrounds or on Nahariya sidewalks, we were greeted with broad smiles from Israelis going about their everyday routines. A tribe of African kids parading with North Americans was a sight that became a local headline. We were hosted like celebrities at the Mayor’s city hall office and gifted commemorative pins; the city’s name, from nahar, Hebrew for river, its iconic water tower and idyllic position by the sea symbols on the crest.

During an evening talk with our group, an Israeli-educated anthropologist who had fled from Ethiopia only a handful of years before highlighted his community’s history and customs on the Horn of Africa. I learned that the elderly man who I had met was much respected. His scepter was a sign of sacred wisdom, not kingly wealth. 

I learned, too, that to be married in their tradition, young couples presented him with family documents going back seven generations, proof they were not too closely related. It was quite a contrast to the way my wife and I had applied for a marriage license in Philadelphia. We had gone to city hall, passed blood tests, and then a rabbi in tailored business suit witnessed our names and wrote the wedding date on our ceremonial ketubah. 

Sitting among new friends during that informal evening, and often during the many years since, I thought about the many leafless branches on my family tree—before immigrant grandparents I was privileged to know. Of those who never boarded a boat, I know nothing. How many millions of lives could have been saved if US quotas had not been imposed, if safe harbor had been open ten years before 1948, when the modern state of Israel was born in my lifetime? 

Social scientists have researched several theories about the Ethiopian Jewish community, and notable rabbis authenticated their origins to the tribe of Dan, one of the ten lost tribes. I wondered also about millennia before, which of Jacob’s twelve sons, which mother carried my seed—concubine or wife? I must be satisfied with Biblical narratives, stories of struggle and strength, grateful for names and traditions passed forward, one generation to the next. 

During our month-long adventure that year, we also took in sights and tastes as tourists from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from chalk cliffs of Rosh Ha’nikra to sandstone mountains of Eilat, from Galilee to Dead Sea, from Nahariya to Jerusalem. But it was those minutes that I shared with a black African man who had traveled across a desert and flown through clouds to a Promised Land thatheightened my pride in being Jewish and broadened my sense of Am Yisrael. 

Although Jews are dispersed in different lands, across seas and circumstance, all of us are bonded through an alphabet, the poetic language of urgent prayers, and the covenant of an enduring faith.

We are one people of many faces.

Steve Pollack hit half-balls with broomsticks, rode the Frankford El, sailed across the equator on the USS Enterprise. He’s been an usher, delivery boy, engineer and administrator. Creative writing found him later. “Bashert”, appeared in Jewish Literary Journal. His poems in print and on-line, most recently Poetica Magazine and Schuylkill Valley Journal. His poetry chapbook, “L’dor Vador–From Generation to Generation”, was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press. He serves on the One Book One Jewish Community team sponsored by Gratz College, and sings bass with Nashirah: the Jewish Chorale of Greater Philadelphia.