According to updated community estimates, the names of nearly 15,000 Jews of Ethiopian origin are now written and documented as waiting in Ethiopia. Many live in designated “waiting stations” and compounds in Gondar and Addis Ababa. On Sunday, February 1, 2026, more than 3,000 Ethiopian Israelis gathered again outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to demand that the State of Israel finally bring them home.

With chants of “Bring our families home now!” and signs declaring “One people, one heart Ethiopian Jews are Israel,” demonstrators filled the plaza in a peaceful but powerful show of anguish and determination. The rally was organized by community leaders Gabi Worku and Shmuel Legesse, who have repeatedly mobilized the Ethiopian Israeli public on this issue. This time, the protest had a bitter additional layer: despite the size of the crowd and the moral urgency of the message, most Israeli media outlets and almost all international Jewish media ignored the demonstration. A major protest in the capital, in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, by thousands of Jewish citizens pleading for family reunification, barely existed in the news cycle.

“Our people are literally listed by name. They are on the lists. They are waiting in Gondar and Addis Ababa,” said organizer Shmuel Legesse, a Black Ethiopian‑Israeli educator and diplomacy expert. “If 15,000 Jews with European faces were sitting in dangerous conditions, we all know this would be front‑page news and an emergency government priority. Why is our pain invisible?”

For the demonstrators, this is not about theory, ideology or party politics. It is about family. They spoke of elderly parents who have never met their grandchildren in Israel, of brothers and sisters separated for decades, of children growing up in waiting compounds under unstable and sometimes violent conditions. Many of the 15,000 have immediate relatives who are already Israeli citizens, yet they remain in limbo, depending on charity for food and healthcare, their lives on hold while politics in Jerusalem shift from one coalition crisis to another.

Community leaders stressed that they are not asking for favors; they are demanding the fulfillment of Israel’s own promises. Over the years, successive governments have passed resolutions, created committees and announced supposedly “final” operations and yet thousands remain behind. “We are loyal citizens. We serve in the army, we pay our taxes, we contribute to this country in every field,” said Gabi Worku at the rally. “But our families are still in Ethiopia. How many more demonstrations do we need? How many more years must our mothers, fathers and children wait on those lists?”

The sense of double standards runs deep. In just the last three years, tens of thousands of Jews and those eligible under the Law of Return have arrived in Israel from countries such as Ukraine, Russia, France, the United States and elsewhere, often through accelerated emergency frameworks. At the same time, Israel has approved new frameworks for groups from India with much more distant and limited historical connections to Judaism, opening the door for thousands more. Ethiopian families, by contrast, report facing years of bureaucratic delays, shifting criteria and political indifference, even when they have first‑degree relatives already living in Israel.

This is not only an internal Israeli question. It goes to the heart of how the Jewish people understand ourselves and how we present ourselves to the world.

At the very moment when Israel’s enemies are working tirelessly to portray the Jewish state as a “white colonial project,” there is no more powerful answer than the real story of Ethiopian Jewry: a Black, African, ancient Jewish community whose members prayed toward Jerusalem in Ge’ez for generations, whose spiritual leaders the kessim preserved Torah and tradition in the highlands of Ethiopia, and whose sons and daughters were airlifted to the Jewish state in some of the most daring rescue operations in modern history.

Operation Moses and Operation Solomon were not episodes of “colonialism”; they were the opposite. In 1984–85 and again in 1991, Israel sent its air force and its resources not to conquer a foreign land, but to bring home Black African Jews – many barefoot, many malnourished, all of them driven by a dream of Zion older than most European ideologies. Operation Solomon, completed in just 36 hours in May 1991, brought more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in a single weekend. C‑130s and Boeing jets took off from Addis Ababa with more people than seats, with babies born mid‑flight, with Torah scrolls clutched in hands that had waited a lifetime. It was one of the most extraordinary rescue missions of Jews, by Jews, for Jews, in history.

This is the true picture of the Jewish people and of the Jewish state that the world rarely sees: a state that airlifted Black Jews from Africa to give them citizenship, healthcare, education and above all a home. A people that is not “white” or “European” in essence, but a mosaic of colors, languages and histories stretching from Addis Ababa to Aleppo, from Casablanca to Kyiv.

And yet, while anti-Israel activists chant “decolonization” on Western campuses, fifteen thousand Black African Jews remain stuck in Ethiopia, waiting for the same promise to be completed. If Israel and the global Jewish world want to challenge the libel of “white colonialism” not with slogans but with facts, there is no better answer than to finish the job of bringing home the remaining Jews of Ethiopian origin and their descendants without further scrutiny that others do not face and without tearing families apart.

Protesters in Jerusalem also pointed to the wider international hypocrisy. Global Jewish organizations speak passionately about antisemitism and Jewish solidarity, but when thousands of Black African Jews are effectively stuck in a waiting room of history, the response is often muted. Major international Jewish media that can devote weeks of coverage to campus protests in America could not find space for thousands of Ethiopian Israelis crying out for their families in front of the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.

At the demonstration, letters from youth still in Ethiopia were read aloud. They spoke of fear, hunger, isolation but also of faith in the promise that “all Jews have a home in Israel.” Many in the crowd wept openly. The rally ended with the singing of “Hatikvah.” For these families, hope is not a slogan; it is a lifeline.

The message to Israel’s leaders and to the global Jewish world was clear:

– Fifteen thousand names are not statistics; they are souls. – They have a first‑degree family in Israel. – They have waited long enough.

As one sign at the protest declared: “The time for talking is over.” Completing the aliyah of Ethiopian Jews would not erase the real challenges faced by those already in Israel: socioeconomic gaps, painful integration failures. Those struggles are real and must be confronted honestly. But bringing the remaining families home is not a distraction from that work; it is part of it. It says, in the clearest possible way, that Black Jewish lives in Gondar or Addis Ababa are worth the same as Jewish lives in Paris or Kyiv. It says that when we speak of “ingathering the exiles,” we mean all of them.

If Israel truly believes in its founding mission as a home for every Jew, and if the Jewish people truly believe our own words about mutual responsibility, then the next step is obvious: authorize an emergency, time‑bound plan to bring those on the lists home, and then carry it out with the same urgency and creativity that once put entire communities on planes overnight.

Anything less is not simply a policy delay. It is a moral failure and a missed opportunity to tell, and to live, the most powerful story we have: that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are not what our enemies say we are, but what we choose to be.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)