The Ethiopians Call Them Black

BETWEEN ETHIOPIA AND JERUSALEM Appendices: A Selection of My Reports in Yediot Aharonot

Appendix 2: The Ethiopians Call Them Black

By Adeno Dan Adebe, November 2020 Appendix 2: The Ethiopians Call Them Black1

The cemetery in Netanya is overcrowded. Hundreds of members of Beta Israel accompany one of the elders of the Ethiopian community, who has died at an advanced age, on his ﬁnal journey. His sons weep bitterly and his friends from the villages in Ethiopia have come from afar to say goodbye. In the plaza, among the many children of the deceased, Wanda stands out. His big eyes glisten from his tears. “Father, why have you left me?” he sobs. Members of the community stand in line to console the bereaved family.

“He wasn’t really his son, he was like his son,” whispers one of the guests. “I know the family from Ethiopia, from the area of xxx. They had ﬁelds, cows, horses, and this young man was their barya. I remember that the deceased loved his barya. I don’t know whether he loved him like a son, but he loved him,” he adds, walking over cautiously to offer his condolences.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT HE WAS A BARYA?

The man laughs under his breath; after all, this is still a funeral. “What, don’t you know what barawech looked like in Ethiopia?” He turns to the reporter Danny Adeno Abebe, who is also of Ethiopian origin. “Didn’t your family have a barya in Ethiopia? So why are you asking such irritating questions?” he rebukes him, then asks, “Whose son are you?” At this point, Abebe cuts off the conversation. “What do I know about what he knows about my family? Is it possible my family had a barawech back in Ethiopia? Maybe I should go to my family ﬁrst, to check whether we ever kept a barya at home.”

Abebe did not go to ask his family. The topic is a taboo in every Ethiopian home, and it is certainly not to be discussed with outsiders. No public discussion of the status of barya is allowed. Several months passed, and we both racked our brains about how to broach the subject with members of the community and get them to discuss it. It would be the height of discourtesy, practically an insult, to ask someone to his face, “Are you a barya?” Because what it means is: “Are you a slave?” Or the son of slaves.

In Ethiopia, Beta Israel were called Falasha—foreigners—among many other, more offensive epithets, such as “the hyena people.” But despite the insults and the feeling of alienation, even the Jews of Ethiopia, like other groups in the country, owned their own slaves. People with an inferior status. The Jews might not have been allowed to own land, and they were often treated with hostility by their Christian neighbors, but their barawech, their slaves, had nothing. No property, no family, not even a memory about their ancestral roots, one of the most prized assets of Beta Israel.

“We’ve come to write a report about the barya in the Ethiopian community,” we say cautiously to Wanda, who is still crying.

“An important subject,” he whispers. “But who would want to talk about it? Do you even know how many barawech there are in Israel? There are tons of them. I know many of them and they’re going through a difﬁcult period. By the way, who told you I’m a barya? What, do you know the family of the deceased?” he asks suspiciously and then quickly clariﬁes: “He was my father. I was his son.”

Only after a long pause does he share his story: “They say that I was a barya in Ethiopia. Over there, there were differ- ences between the barya and other people. They treated us with disdain, and we treated them with respect, truly with respect.” At a certain point, Wanda begins to feel uncomfortable. “There are lots of Ethiopians here who can hear our conversation. I don’t want them to hear, maybe we leave and sit over there, on that rock? I don’t even feel comfortable talking about this in Israel.”

The memories cause Wanda grief. “Sometimes I know deep down that the man who died was not truly my father,” he continues, his face contorted in agony. “But I’ve been with him since I was around eight years old. I was a shepherd, cleaned the sheep pen, brought cows for milking, took the children to sleep, woke them up, washed my masters’ feet. In short, I did everything in the house of rich people.

“They were OK to me. I loved them. I didn’t know anyone else. All I know about myself is that I was born in the region of Wolkite, far from the village where I grew up. I didn’t have a mother or a father. Both of them, I assume, died

1 Co-written with Natasha Mozgovaya, “7 Days,” 1 January 2002. 1 when I was a child. Maybe they were also barya. In Ethiopia, everyone knew that I was a barya. It was accepted there. We used to meet children in the ﬁelds who were other people’s barya and we used to play like normal. Till today, I still don’t like people calling me ‘barya.’ It’s offensive.”

Wanda is slim, short, and wears a large knitted kippah. His round face bears the scars of his childhood, creating a kind of drawing. His skin is pitch black, “blacker than a Sudanese,” as one of the mourners at the funeral says. His wide palms, long ﬁngers, kinky hair, and teeth as white as snow attest to his barya status.

HAS THIS EVER BOTHERED YOU IN ISRAEL?

“In the army, actually, I was an outstanding soldier in the Paratroopers Brigade, Battalion 890. After my military service, I was invited to work in a VIP protection unit. They asked me to do their admissions tests. After a long try-out, they sent me a letter, saying I wasn’t suitable. But what bothers me more is that I’m thirty-two and still unmarried. For Ethiopians, it’s unusual to be unmarried by my age, but no woman in the community wants to marry a barya.”

WHY?

“Because for Ethiopians, being a barya is like a stain for the rest of your life. You can’t escape it. When you want to get married, they count seven generations back. The elders are like the establishment, they know everything about you. You can’t get around them. I would only want to marry an Ethiopian woman. It’s important to me, I’ve dated a few Ethiopian girls. This is how it goes every time: at a certain stage, it starts to get serious, then you go to your girlfriend’s parents, and they start asking about my family, and as soon as they discover I’m a barya, it’s over. They won’t look at you anymore. They’ll say, “Thank you, but no thank you,” without even explaining why not.

ARE YOU SURE THAT’S THE REASON?

“Yes. That’s the accepted way in the community, not to tell you to your face. Everything is roundabout. I dated three girls I wanted to marry, each one separately, of course. But it was the same story with all three. So what will I do? Stay single for the rest of my life? I’ve got to get married. I want children of my own. I want something to continue from me. I don’t have a family line of my own.”

BUT IN ISRAEL, THERE’S NO SLAVERY.

“True, today there are no barya. We’re all the barya of the system in Israel. I have worked for many years for a large security company, I have a good job there. But the people who were my masters in Ethiopia do the grunt work, they’re cleaners. In Israel, nobody has a class. I am a barya who succeeded in Israel. I have always felt that I had to prove to everyone that I was the best. Even at my religious boarding school, Neve Amiel, I was a good student. I’m not some kind of delinquent or criminal. So why can’t I marry a girl who is not a barya?

“Five years ago, I met a girl from Bat Yam. We went out for three and a half years, I felt at home with her family, I even told them that I was the son of the family who raised me. They were very happy, because it’s a well-known, respected family. When I decided to make it ofﬁcial, I sent the ‘father’ who raised me to her parents’ home. Before he went, he asked me whether he should tell them the truth. Since it’s a community where everyone knows everyone, I told him yes.

“He went all the way to Bat Yam and told them the whole story: that I was a barya, that I’d come to him as a kid. That very moment, the girl cut me off, and every time I call her, she refuses to hear my voice. All this, because I’m a barya. I don’t understand why even in Israel, they keep up this racism against the other. They even give us trouble at funerals. The kesim are the biggest troublemakers.”

Wanda’s story has taken a happy if accidental turn. It happened, ironically enough, thanks to Operation Defensive Shield [the IDF operation in 2002 to crush the wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the Second Intifada]. Wanda: “I received a call in the middle of the night, they said to report in the morning to Beit Hachayal in Tel Aviv. I drove to the rendezvous point, and on the bus there I met a young woman called Yael, aged twenty-six, a new immigrant from Ohio. We started chatting and we’ve been together ever since. My prospects of marrying a girl from the community are dwindling. Today, I don’t mind anymore marrying someone from outside the community. Besides, her family won’t make a big deal of the fact that I was a barya in Ethiopia.”

HAVE YOU TOLD HER YET?

“No, that’s the last thing I need. If we get married, maybe after the wedding, I’ll tell her. She wants to take a trip with

2 me to Ethiopia. I’m not that thrilled by the idea.”

* * *

In Jewish folklore in Ethiopia, the barya are the descendants of Ham. This is how the community knows the story: “Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. When Noah was inebriated, he stood naked, and Ham saw him like that and laughed at him. But when Shem saw him, he went to bring him clothes. When Noah woke up, he blessed God and said that he would be a wealthy merchant and would sell the barya. And to his son Ham, he said: ‘You will be bought and sold.’ Ham was the ancestor of all the barya.”

The original tribe, the Barya (or Nara), who produced most of the slaves, currently number around 30,000 souls, living in southwest Eritrea. The tribe belongs to a group of Sudanese tribes, who were sold into slavery by other peoples. They live in small villages, earn their livelihoods mainly from farming, and most of the men have several wives. Most of them were forced to covert to Islam in the late nineteenth century, and Christian missionary organi- zations in Africa consider them to be one of the three Ethiopian peoples who are hardest to convert to Christianity.

But the lost descendants of this tribe, some of whose ancestors were solved into slavery centuries ago, have no connection to this tribe, nor is there any signiﬁcance to dredging up this history. The Muslim Barya are a separate group, like the Jewish barya and the Christian barya. The Jewish barya, the “Falasha barya,” ultimately made it to Israel. Some of the thousands of barya who made aliyah, especially the older ones, stayed with their former masters after receiving their deeds of manumission: Israeli ID cards.

In order to be the slave of a Jewish family, a barya had to convert. Barya children, arriving at their new masters’ homes, were circumcised and put through a conversion ceremony; so were the adults. But the fact that they are Jewish for all intents and purposes does not change the rest of the community’s attitudes toward them. Ethiopian Jews regard themselves as chewa, free people, of superior status; civilized folk from distinguished, established families, who have produced spiritual and political leaders.

The chewa regarded the conversion of the barya as a formal ritual, conducted to serve the masters’ purposes, but not something that changed the inner essence of a barya. Barya converts were not always allowed to enter syna- gogues or prepare injera, the traditional Ethiopian bread. As Hagar Salomon, of the Hebrew University, notes in her study, animals slaughtered by barya were not deemed kosher for “real Jews.” Even the Falash Mura—Jewish families who preferred to convert to Christianity—were treated more favorably, because according to the community, “in their hearts they remained Jews,” while a barya’s conversion to Judaism was only ever “skin deep.”

The worst part of the story is that in Ethiopia, memories have unbearably long lives. The Shenkala, Agawu, and Barya tribes were sold into slavery starting in the ﬁfteenth century, but even after so many generations, their descendants still carry the stigma of slavery and remain outsiders, occupying the lowest rung of society. A barya slave girl could bear children for her master, and they would still be considered barya, even if some of them had lighter skin than the master’s legitimate children.

Muslims and Christians had their own barya, but groups of slaves who were converted to different religions were forbidden from intermarrying. One of their ways of slightly improving their social status over the ages was to marry half-baryas, quarter-baryas, and so forth. “Till today, they prefer mixing as much as possible,” noted one of the young Ethiopian women we interviewed for this report. “To marry someone with slightly fairer skin, in the hope their children won’t be considered barya anymore.”

Micha Feldman—known as “Papa Micha” in the community—who headed the Jewish Agency’s operations in Ethio- pia in Operation Solomon, says: “Barya slave girls would wait for the opportunity to get impregnated by their masters, because the child would be only a half-barya. Then they tried to marry off a half-barya with another half-barya, and so forth. That way, over the generations, they tried to eliminate any trace of their enslavement. In Ethiopia, slavery was only abolished during the communist revolution. But social attitudes toward them have remained the same.”

HOW DID THEY MAKE ALIYAH? TOGETHER WITH THEIR MASTERS’ FAMILIES?

“When the Jews started to run away from Mengistu’s communist regime to Sudan, the barya arrived with the families to the refugee camps. After Operation Moses, a lot of barya had been left behind in the refugee camps, because the community leadership had decided to send the ‘real’ Jews to Israel ﬁrst. So Yona Bugala, the legendary leader of the community, went to the rabbis and explained that the barya had undergone a conversion, that they were Jews for all intents and purposes, and that they were part of the household. The Israeli chief rabbis ruled that the barya could make aliyah. They were brought over at the end of the operation and in the following operation, Ope-

3 ration Sheba. Back then, I was in the dark about this decision, but suddenly I saw in Israel, among the Ethiopian immigrants, lots of black people with faces that were much more negroid.”

Color is a sensitive subject. Israeli society does not distinguish between different shades of black. A chewa might ﬁnd himself being called a kushi just like a barya. In dealing with Israel’s racist, black-and-white system, many immigrants were forced to contend with being given a humiliating rank in the racial hierarchy. Israelis are unable to distinguish between “red” or “brown” skin of Beta Israel and barya “black.” In the eyes of Israeli society, both groups are the same. Sometimes this only accentuates the desire of the chewa, the free folk, to emphasize and preserve their separateness from the barya.

For the barya, such color-based distinctions are mendacious. They can accept racism between whites and blacks because “there really is a difference,” but they regard the distinction between black and black as nothing but a means of control. “Israelis can’t tell the difference between barya and chewa,” a woman of barya descent told Hagar Salomon, an academic. “They, the Israelis, would say the same about the chewa: kushi. So I don’t mind being called that, because my skin really is black. But I’m really happy that they also get called kushim. It makes me really happy!”

Unlike Wanda, Samuel is a giant of a man, with a long face and wide palms. “Everyone assumes I’m an American basketball player. Nobody thinks I’m Ethiopian. Sometimes on the bus people speak to me in English, and I don’t understand a word in English.” Samuel, 48, made aliyah eighteen years ago on the last ﬂight of Operation Moses. Now he works at a hotel in southern Israel.

“Last year, I won the outstanding employee award,” he says with pride, “and after years of searching, I also managed to get married. I couldn’t ﬁnd anyone in Israel who was willing to marry me. Every time I met a girl, and things moved in the direction of marriage, her family always asked me, ‘Whose son are you?’ and they start counting the generations, and then there comes the point when they ask, ‘What, you’re a barya? No thank you.’ Or they say they’re afraid that nobody will come to our wedding. The kesim always said: ‘No way. Why marry a barya when there are so many other Ethiopians in Israel?’ So nine years ago, I ﬂew to Ethiopia and brought a wife over from there. And now I have three beautiful children.”

HOW HAS YOUR LIFE CHANGED SINCE YOU MOVED TO ISRAEL?

“In Ethiopia, I had masters. We, the barya, were their slaves. I had to do all the dirty work at home and in the fields. What didn’t I do? From grinding flour to washing my masters’ feet. During the cold winter, they used to send me with the cow into the field. There was no shelter. Everyone sat at home, and I stood outside, making sure all the cows and sheep were still in their pens. Everyone gave me orders, every child was my master.

“My father took me to this village when I was eleven and a half years old, and I never saw him again. I didn’t know what a barya was, and when you’re a child, you don’t even think you might be one. At ﬁrst I was a shepherd and helped my master, who was like a father to me. When I grew up, I went to plough the ﬁelds, to harvest the crops, I was the one who did everything, and when I came back from working, I used to sleep in a kind of mini-room next to the huts. I was treated with disdain. I was never invited to events, I was always outside the family. The children used to curse me, and I had to take it lying down. The women, actually, treated me nicely. They made me feel part of the family. But in the village, everyone knew that I was a barya and did not belong to this family.

IN ISRAEL, ARE YOU STILL IN TOUCH WITH THE PEOPLE WHO WERE YOUR MASTERS?

I’m not in contact with my masters. I don’t want to reach out, either. When we moved to Israel, they wanted me to come and live with them. They thought they were still in Ethiopia. I told them to leave me alone.”

BUT THEY’RE YOUR ONLY FAMILY, AREN’T THEY?

“Leave it, I’ve got nothing in this world. No parents, no siblings, I have only my children and wife. I am building a new family of my own. Look, I know that even today, people insist on the difference between barya and non-barya. It makes me laugh. Someone needs to wake the community up and tell them they’re already in Israel.”

* * *

Most barya refused to speak about the issue or asked us not to publish the interview with them after it was over. They all had similar reasons: “I’m ashamed of it,” “it will only stir trouble,” “I’m afraid of the reactions.” In Ethiopian culture, dirty laundry is not supposed to be aired. Pain is to be kept deep inside, and feelings are not to be revealed to strangers. For this reason, the barya have never protested the social discrimination against them, and there is

4 certainly no organization to represent them. Most of the cases are hushed up by the barya themselves.

That was the case with a barya-born IDF ofﬁcer, whose chewa-born soldiers openly mocked him. This was also the case with an educated young man, who despite his academic achievements, which normally attract respect and translate into social status in the Ethiopian community, could not achieve the same treatment as his non-barya peers. Or take the case of a barya-born woman, who was retained as a servant at the absorption center in Arad, just as she was in Ethiopia, and did the housework for her former masters. Her degrading duties were terminated after the intervention of Jewish Agency workers.

The leaders of the Ethiopian community in Israel have also maintained their obstinate and embarrassing silence. “It’s a tinderbox,” we were told. “It’s not spoken about.” Shlomo Akela, the director-general of the Ethiopian Heritage Center, was one of the few ﬁgures willing to provide a reaction. “It’s not a pretty story,” he says. “I knew it would land on us one day, but I want to say something. The subject of the barya existed in Ethiopia and ended in Israel. Nowa- days, they live like everyone else. We’re all the barya of the establishment. There were some nasty things done in Ethiopia, but that was part of our culture there. I know that even today, it’s forbidden to marry them. The community needs to decide what exactly it wants to do. There’s got to be drastic change on the matter.”

WOULD YOU BE WILLING FOR YOUR DAUGHTER TO MARRY A BARYA?

A long pause. “Yes… In fact, I don’t know… Personally, I wouldn’t mind if my daughter brought anyone she wanted. But I know that my extended family would make a big deal about it, and there would be tough problems around the issue. They would stand up on their hind legs to break off such a relationship. It’s not easy. It won’t change in the wilderness generation. The community has problems, and one of our problems is the barya issue. We haven’t deﬁned it for ourselves because it’s so sensitive. Now, after this report, white people will give us hell. They’ll say, look, you’re also racist against your own people. Can you see the problems we’ve come to?”

“It’s a very sensitive subject in the community, if not the most sensitive subject,” says Dr. Shalva Weil, an anthro- pologist at the Hebrew University, who has studied Ethiopian Jewry since Operation Moses. Over the past decade. Dr. Weil has been investigating the structure of the family among Ethiopian Jews. “You can understand them. For two decades, the Ethiopians have been arguing that there is racism against them from the establishment or from whites on account of their skin color. And then suddenly, their dirty secret comes out: they themselves, or at least most of them, were effectively racist toward other people because of their slightly different skin color.”

Surprisingly, the Israeli establishment was similarly reluctant to provide a reaction. “It doesn’t sound like something that requires the involvement of our ministry,” was one kind of response. “This isn’t something we deal with,” said others. Academics warned us against “taking a culturally contingent phenomenon out of context, which carries the risk of being misunderstood in new circumstances.”

“The barya issue ﬁrst came to the decision-makers’ attention during Operation Moses,” says Dr. Weil. “We knew that there was a sizable group of people who had been left behind in the refugee camp in Sudan because they were barya. Operatives from the community, sent on behalf of the Israeli establishment, had put them to one side till they could send all the other Jews to Israel. Only then, they said, if there was still room, would they be permitted to board a plane to Israel. And indeed, some of them boarded the last ﬂight out and were taken straight away to the absorption center in Acre. I really wanted to see what the barya looked like, so I went all the way there. I met black people with round faces and remarkably slender frames; some had all sorts of scars on their faces.

“Many Ethiopians kept a barawech at home for purely sexual purposes. Slave girls used to bear children for their masters. I personally know an Ethiopian woman who lives in Israel, who had a barya for her own sexual needs. This lady was an exception, because of her senior status in the community. She is exceptionally powerful in the community, many worship her and admire her. True, it wasn’t accepted for a woman to keep a man to satisfy her sexual needs, but in the community, there are also outliers.”

HOW CAN YOU SPOT A BARYA TODAY?

“It’s a community in which everyone knows everyone. Besides, you can tell them apart by their physiognomy: black skin, round faces, a wider nose, really kinky hair, and they look more like Sudanese. The Sudanese have a bigger body structure than the Ethiopians, but there are lots of similarities. Numerous studies show that they originally came, it seems, from southern Sudan, which is geographically close to Ethiopia.”

WHAT IS THEIR STATUS IN ISRAEL?

“Not good. They have a really low status within the community. It’s strictly prohibited to marry them. There are

5 problems with their funerals. They are victims of racism from several directions. Members of their community can’t stand them and despise them. For us, the whites, all Ethiopians are the same. So they have it really bad here. That said, they represent some of the best success stories in the absorption process. Many of them marry white girls. The community is unwilling to compromise on the marriage question.”

Dr. Hagar Salomon, the head of the Jewish and Comparative Folklore Program at the Hebrew University, has conducted in-depth studies into the folk culture of Ethiopian Jewry. Since her two studies on the barya issue were published and provoked a genuine ﬁrestorm in the community, she has largely avoided interviews on the subject.

In her ﬁrst study, published in 1993, Dr. Salomon described her ﬁrst encounter with a barya during an in-depth interview with an Ethiopian family: “An old lady frequently served us coffee while we talked, never said anything to me, and was rarely spoken to or noticed by my hosts. We had never been introduced and I wondered who she was. One day I dared to ask. It was as if they hadn’t heard me. I tried again. Again they were ‘deaf.’ I understood after the second failure that for whatever reason, I would not receive a direct answer. Unexpectedly, the revelation came. The ‘invisible’ old lady was a barya.”

“I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors,” says Dr. Salomon today. “I’m immersed in the past, and racism plays a major role there. The Jews of Ethiopia who came to Israel were a symbol, for me, of the humanism of colorblind- ness. And to hear suddenly that inside this wonderful community there are people who are discriminated against because of difference—that was hard to take. I still have trouble with it.”

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE THE BARYA?

“It’s a group that used to be part of the cultural life of Ethiopian Jews, just like their Christian neighbors. They have been subjected to a litany of racist and discriminatory acts. They have the same culture as the rest of the community. The only difference is their inferior status. There are the blacks who, as blacks, are victims of racism from white people, and the barya are victims twice over: both of the white man and of the community’s treatment of them. Some of the barya families see the chewa families as their only family. I also developed a personal connection with some of the people I studied. It’s the sort of research you can’t remain apathetic in, you’ve got to connect to them. Even after you ﬁnish the study, you can’t be indifferent.”

HOW HAS THE SITUATION DEVELOPED OVER THE YEARS?

“It’s clear to me that nowadays, the question of the barya and their status has not blown over. But the status of the barya has changed in Israel. They have rights and aspirations, like anyone else. That said, we mustn’t forget that they are victims of stigmas and aloofness on the part of the community when it comes to weddings, funerals… To my great surprise, there are also more humanistic reactions from the community—since the Ethiopians are victims of the racism of Israeli society, some of them say, ‘In Israel, we’ve all become barya.’

“I’m hearing from barya people that they too believe it’s time to forget and integrate. I know for sure that they want to mix, to marry Ethiopian girls, to be part of the community. It’s really important, when an ethnic group comes with an aspiration to mix with another group. Even if the latter group is against it, it’s a beneﬁcial contributing factor. I think that the next generation will leave this behind and the community will be able to take pride in having succeeded in forgetting the past and living in the present.”

Micah Feldman is similarly convinced that this will all disappear in a generation or two. “In Israel, the barya have options, because they have become their own economic unit. They’re willing to take any job, so they make good money, and the situation of some of them is better than those who were their masters in Ethiopia. I think that within a generation, the criteria will change. In terms of marriage, I mean, there is still the problem of marriage between Gondarians and Tigrayans. When it comes to marriage, all the most explosive social questions come out, but it’s starting to fade.”

But despite the cautious optimism of academics and ofﬁcials, historical memory is still a burden for the younger generation, who were raised and educated in Israel. “If I brought a barya home, my parents wouldn’t accept him,” says S., 20. “It goes around by word of mouth. When you get married, they count seven generations back. When they can’t count seven generations, they work it out by the region he comes from. The barya are simply considered people with an inferior status. If I brought a Christian ﬁancé home, that would be even worse. Because the barya are still Jews. It’s known that the barya prefer to mix as much as possible, to marry half-barya and so on…”

One young Ethiopian Israeli, who made aliyah at the age of eight, surprised us: “This whole story about the barya is racism on top of racism. Whoever is blacker is called barya.”

6 “Are you sure that’s the whole story?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said. “I can ask my dad to explain to you why it’s all nonsense, and it’s not even relevant in Israel.” After a few days, he called us to apologize. “I didn’t think this would be his reaction, but my dad refused to talk about it. He said it’s too explosive and he’s not willing to take the risk of getting ostracized by the community.”

In the religious boarding school where Yossi (not his real name), 17, studies, only the principal knows that he comes from a barya family. Yossi was born in the refugee camp in Sudan after his parents escaped on foot from the region of Chilga in Ethiopia, along with the rest of the community. He made aliyah at the age of two and therefore ﬁrst learned of his barya heritage in Israel. “My father told me about it when I was a kid. He said that if anyone cursed me or called me a ‘barya,’ I shouldn’t take offence.”

AND DOES ANYONE SAY THAT?

“Only the adults. The children don’t say things like that. Among my peers, nobody knows that I am a barya. We once watched an action movie in the school common room, and there were also black actors. So one of the Ethiopians said, ‘Hey! They look like the barya from Ethiopia!’ I went ballistic. I didn’t know what to do. But nobody even looked at me. Then I understood, none of them even thought I was a barya. Because beforehand, I had always suspected that they knew but didn’t say anything.”

HAVE YOU GOT A GIRLFRIEND?

(Laughing) “Yes, but she’s not Ethiopian, she’s from America.”

WHAT IS SHE, BLACK?

(Laughing) “No, white.”

DO YOU WANT TO MARRY AN ETHIOPIAN WOMAN?

“I don’t know. If they don’t give me problems about it, why not?”