Eight years after they were "left behind", the Jewish community of the remote Lower Quara region in north-western Ethiopia began arriving in Israel yesterday. A group of 76 Lower Quara Jews flew from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport, the first arrivals from a community numbering some 3,000.
In the past three decades tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, more widely known by the somewhat derogatory name "Falashas" (which means "strangers"), have been airlifted to Israel. Their "return to Zion" resulted in a 1991 airlift, when some 14,000 were brought in one weekend.
But the 1991 airlift excluded the Jews of Quara, because the region was at the time inaccessible, controlled by anti-government rebels. And although several thousand Jews from Upper Quara have been brought to Israel in subsequent years, those from Lower Quara were left behind, apparently because the local Jewish leader on whom Israel relied for its information, Mr Kes Tayen, was in a bitter dispute with them, alleged by them to have misappropriated community funds.
The Israeli government promised more than a year ago to rescue the Lower Quara Jews, who were living in conditions of extreme poverty and were particularly vulnerable to disease. But the pledge went unfulfilled, apparently because the Interior Ministry, controlled by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, had reservations regarding their Jewish credentials.
Only in recent days, amid reports of epidemics killing dozens of children in Gondar, the city to which the Jews had trekked to await the promised airlift, has the government been spurred into action.