Beya Tesfa left his home 22 years ago on his way to the State of Israel • But he and his friends are still stuck in Ethiopia • In a special column he reads: End the unnecessary saga

My name is Beya Tesfa, I am a cantor at the Tikvat Zion Synagogue in Addis Ababa and a graduate of Addis Ababa University in the field of science and technology. In 1998, I left the village with my family to immigrate to Eretz Israel. At that time, no one told us "come to the Promised Land" - not the Israeli government, not the rabbis and not the charms. We came as God said to Moshe Rabbeinu in the Book of Exodus, "I have commanded." The covenant of God knocked at the doors of our hearts like the voices of the generation heralding the beginning of redemption. We all got up and left the villages where we lived for many generations to Addis Ababa and Gondar. This year almost my entire family immigrated to Israel, including my late grandfather and grandmother. Part of my grandmother's family even immigrated in Operation Solomon.

- Cases demand: "Let us decide who will immigrate to Israel" 

When I left the village with my family 22 years ago, the God of Israel motivated us to come, just as many other Jews from the other side of the world immigrated to Israel. In answer to those who wonder why we did not ascend earlier, our answer is clear - now is the time God wanted us to come.

I have been waiting to immigrate to Israel for over 22 years for no tangible reason. In the community, we pray three prayers a day, put on tefillin, women dip in the mikveh, we keep Shabbat and holidays, we have study halls and Gemara study. Thank God, I was privileged to come to the Holy Land in January for the first time in my life to attend a conference of Jewish students, and to study in a yeshiva for a few weeks. I received a residence permit for a month only.

When I landed in Israel after 21 years of waiting and longing, my family and childhood friends, who had already immigrated to Israel, came to welcome me. I missed Grandma's hug so much. When I saw her in the distance, I did not know if I was dreaming or not. The only thing I did was cry and hug her. My mouth was closed because I could not get a word out of my mouth. I was happy, God willing.

It is difficult for me to describe the moment when I arrived at the Western Wall. I cried while praying. I brought a lot of notes that the children from the community sent with me to put on the Western Wall, and with these intensities I prayed. I begged the Blessed One to think of us, to do a miracle for our rejected community and to send complete healing to all the patients in the Land of Israel and Ethiopia. My uncle and cousin took me to the inner rooms, where rabbis pray and study Torah with youth, and I could not stop the feeling that in a second I was bursting into tears. In Ethiopia we are thirsty for every word of Torah but in the Land of Israel the words flow like a river saturated with water and it made me cry.

For years we have suffered in Ethiopia from the Gentiles around us due to our Judaism and this is true to this day. But now, it is people from our people who are hurting us, who are hindering our aliyah. And it hurts us to the depths of our souls, more than anything else. We are from the seed of Israel. We have old men who can attest to that. There are Jews from all over the world and we are Jews too. This is also our country.

Immigrating to Israel is our innate right, not a grace that such a leader or another gives us. Human beings are not the ones who decide who is entitled to immigrate and who is a Jew, when and where. Only the Blessed One makes the decisions.

Gd promised, "If he be driven from the end of the heavens, from thence the Lord thy God will gather thee, and from thence he will take thee." We will ascend to the Land of Israel with the help of God. And as long as our aliyah is delayed and the cemetery is filled with the bodies of people who dreamed of Jerusalem and did not get to reach it, we and our families in the country will not sit still.

The author is the cantor of the Tikvat Zion Synagogue in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia