ABSTRACT
Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel with a heightened sense of Jewish identity and an already emerging Israeli identity. They felt that as individuals and as a community they had been tested, selected and purified through their suffering and had therefore earned their ‘right’ to enter Israel, God’s land, and to participate in Israeli society.1 They had developed and consolidated a self-concept of a brave and resourceful people who had successfully stood up to the many challenges of the journey. They saw their arrival in Israel as a return, as a restoration from the state of exile, and viewed themselves as a part joining its main body, to become a ‘whole’ again. In Israel, they believed, among their fellow Jews, they would feel more complete.
