ICEJ sponsors Ethiopian youth soccer league

The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem recently began sponsoring a group of 12 football teams in a special soccer league established for Ethiopian Jewish youths in Israel. The ICEJ has purchased custom made jerseys in the various team colours as well as shoes for all the Ethiopian soccer players in the league. The bright jerseys carry the logo of the ICEJ as team sponsors.

ICEJ representative Doron Schneider distributed the uniforms and shoes at a recent gathering of the teams in Rehovot, and told them that they were gifts from Christian supporters of Israel from around the world.

Most of the team members were small children when they made the long difficult journey to an isolated airfield in neighbouring Sudan in order to be flown to Israel as part of the “Operation Moses” emergency airlift in 1984. At the recent ceremony in Rehovot, the teams observed a minute of silence in remembrance of the 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who lost their lives while trying to make it to Israel. Then they opened the season with an all-day soccer tournament in their new team jerseys.

“I was eight years old when I started my journey from Ethiopia to Israel via Sudan”, recalled Erez Dezlin. “My little brother was two years old and my mother was also six months pregnant. We walked about 600 miles on foot. We did not have much food with us to eat. Many families lost loved ones on the way, some died from hunger, thirst, diseases and some even were killed by robbers on the way.”

“During our waiting time in the Sudanese camps for the Israeli air planes to come pick us up, I had to work in one of the nearby villages so we would have something to eat. Almost every day I was beaten up by the people there, until one time I hit one of them back with a stone on his head and then I had to spend a week in prison. I am so glad that I finally made it and my dream to live in Israel became real.”

Today Erez is the supervising coach for the twelve youth soccer teams from the Ethiopian community in Rehovot and he has a new dream. He wants to help the Ethiopian Jews to integrate better into Israeli society and to give them hope and life skills through sports.

 Operation Moses was a secret Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan in 1984 during a difficult time of famine and civil war in the East African nation. The humanitarian initiative was a cooperative effort between the Israel Defence Forces, the Mossad, and the CIA after Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the head of the Mossad: “Bring me our Ethiopian brothers!”

Beginning on 21 November 1984, some 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were flown from Sudan directly to Israel until the operation was suddenly halted on 5 January 1985, when Arab rulers learned of the covert airlift and demanded that Khartoum stop it at once. Some 1,000 Ethiopian Jews were left behind.

The airlift also created more than 1,000 so-called “orphans of circumstance” – Ethiopian children in Israel separated from their families still in Africa – until 1991 when “Operation Solomon” brought 14,000 more Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

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