The Masorti Foundation, and collegial organizations, are creating a special emergency fund to pursue justice for Yosef Kibita and the Abayudaya Jewish community from Uganda. Yosef lives at Kibbutz Ketura, a kibbutz with Masorti affiliations in Southern Israel, where he has been for a year. He is seeking to make Aliyah.
The Israeli Ministry of the Interior rejected Yosef Kibita’s request to immigrate under the law of return; moreover, the Ministry used this ruling to broadly disqualify the entire Abayudaya community of 2,000 from making Aliyah, declaring that the community and their conversion to Judaism is not recognized.
The Masorti Movement is developing an emergency, multi-pronged, campaign to correct this injustice. Please give as generously as you possibly can –and as quickly as you can– since the court case must be heard THIS JUNE! All funds contributed will be used to support Masorti Israel’s efforts for Yosef Kibita and equality for the Abayudaya community.
This is an issue that hits close to home; as some of you may know, it was only with considerable opposition from the Chief Rabbinate that the Ministry of the Interior eventually decided to allow Karaites to make aliyah in a time of great crisis for Egyptian Jews in the early 1950s. Gershom Sizomu is a good friend of a good friend, and it stings to once again see the validity of a group of “weird Jews” legally questioned.
You can read the statement of the Masorti/Conservative movement (who are also being thrown under the bus with this decision) over here. If you have a few shekels or words of encouragement to send their way, all the better.
“How does the Interior Ministry dare to deport someone who was born a Jew?” the outraged chairman of the committee, Avraham Nagosa, asked its representatives attending the session. “Do you have special criteria for black converts?” Nagosa, a member of the ruling Likud party, was born in Ethiopia.
According to the Law of Return, any individual converted in a “recognized Jewish community” is eligible to immigrate to Israel. Several years ago, the Jewish Agency granted recognition to the Abayudaya.
Interior Ministry officials attending the Knesset session said that, as far as they were concerned, the Abayudaya were not a recognized Jewish community but rather an emerging Jewish community and, therefore, not eligible to immigrate to Israel under existing criteria.
Nagosa proposed in response that the Agency and Interior Ministry form a joint committee to determine whether the Law of Return applies to emerging Jewish communities – in other words, communities in which the vast majority, if not all, of the members are converts to Judaism. Many such communities exist around the world today, particularly in South America.
The Abayudaya began practicing Judaism some 100 years ago, but were only officially converted in recent years. Most of the members were converted by rabbis from the Conservative movement.
Rabbi Mikie Goldstein, president of the Rabbinical Council of the Conservative Movement in Israel, noted that when he immigrated to Israel from England, no questions were raised about his Jewishness. “But when someone comes from Africa and his skin color is different, there are lots of questions asked,” he said. “And on top of that, he’s told that he’s not Jewish.”
Mooncustafer 