Jerusalem – As a small child in a village near Gondar, Ethiopia, the days leading up to Sigd were some of the best days of the year for Moshe Yehayes.
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It was a time of intense preparation and anticipation, with his grandfather, a respected kes (religious leader) preparing to lead holiday prayers, and the women of the family preparing for the celebration by cleaning, washing holiday clothes and preparing special foods.
Most of all, however, Sigd – a uniquely Ethiopian Jewish holiday marking the 50th day after Yom Kippur – was a time to dream about Jerusalem.
“It is hard to describe the feeling of expectation, of dreaming about a place we had never seen and only heard about,” said Yehayes, now 54 and an ordained Kes in the beachside city of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. “The elders in our village, especially my grandfather and father, told stories about the origins of Sigd and the Land of Israel – the holiday began after the destruction of the First Temple, while our forefathers in exile for 70 years [in Babylon].
“But while they were abroad they forgot a lot about the Torah and our traditions and everything got mixed up. But people wanted to re-learn the Torah, and so God sent the prophets Ezra and Nehemia to lead them back to our land and to teach them,” Kes Yehayes added.
That background, Yehayes told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) on the sidelines of the community’s annual celebration at the Hass Promenade in southern Jerusalem, gives the holiday a special power given the festivities’ current location.
“It’s a dream; nothing less. There is no other word to describe the blessing of it all – God chose us, the Jewish people, and here we are, in our land. We’re looking at the place where the Temple stood. I feel nothing but joy,” Yehayes said.
Kes Yehayes’ sense of gratitude and excitement was on full display Thursday, as some 10,000 Ethiopian-Israelis – and a sizeable minority of non-Ethiopians – took advantage of an unseasonably warm November day Thursday to celebrate Sigd in the capital.
The celebration itself illustrates a broad picture of the Ethiopian community in Israel: Leather-faced men and women aged both by years and having lived challenging lives together alongside teenagers in tight jeans and styled hair. Traditional kessim dressed in white together with black-skinned yeshiva students in knitted kippot in the style of European/Sephardic Orthodoxy.
The challenges inherent in that mix are obvious at first sight: Community elders typically try to maintain tradition in an absence of a traditional framework, while the younger generation tries to balance the unique, pre-Rabbinic Jewish culture they inherited from their families while also trying to participate in Jewish religious life in a country where religious practice is defined largely by European and Sephardic orthodoxy – if they are interested in observance at all.
As in previous years, the mid-day prayer service occupied center stage, with more than a dozen kessim holding colorful ritual umbrellas while dressed in traditional white, chanting prayers for repentance, unity and redemption, first in Gez, the community’s sacred language, and then translated to Amharic. The prayers were interspersed with sermons from the Kessim about morality, Torah lessons about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the birth of the Jewish nation and especially about the Holy City.
Even to the uninitiated, the prayers clearly hit home for the faithful. Men and women alike spread their arms and bowed their heads to the floor to accept the blessings; one woman who was not outwardly observant turned to this reporter and said “can’t you feel it? I know you can’t understand the language, but can’t you just feel God’s presence?
On the other hand, Sigd has also morphed in recent years – or, perhaps, the holiday has taken on new facets of identity. Several people told TPS they felt the festival is mainly important because it is an important link to an ancient tradition that is in decline. Others viewed it as a sign of Ethiopian Jews’ unique contribution to the multi-faceted collage of modern Israeli society, a fact they said should also be seen as a call for unity and multi-cultural respect.
“(Sigd) is a unique holiday,” said former MK Penina Tamanu-Shata, who represented the Yesh Atid party from 2013-2015. “Hearing the the songs of the Kessim – it is so meaningful, so exciting. To think that Jewish people for so many generations kept the Torah, kept the traditions. it’s very important, very exciting.
“We have a special benefit that we can bring to Jewish culture,” added Gilad Tesfahun, a 35-year-old father of three from Ma’aleh Adumim. “To me, that means I can be proud to be a black Jew, that I have something special to teach to other Jews. I think about my history, we pray, I tell my children about life in Israel and how we can love Jews as much as we can, and how all Jews in Israel can learn about us – our customs, prayers.
“Sigd is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it is a chance to stop and just be proud of my community,” Tesfahun said.
Why does race always need to be mentioned by them? Genetically they are not hidden that’s why all are forced to convert