The last of the Falash Mura? A final flight will ostensibly complete the aliya of 7,500 members of a Jewish community

On Wednesday, (26 August 2013 ) a final flight will ostensibly  the aliya of 7,500 members of a Jewish community that had converted to Christianity. Is this really the end of a hugely controversial mass immigration process? Should it be? The Times of Israel reports from EthiopiaGONDAR, Ethiopia – The winter night was crisp and still. It was 5 a.m. The stars, glittering like slices of diamond in the jet-black sky, had not yet given way to the peeping sun. Silhouettes wrapped in gabis, white blanket-like scarves, walked slowly along the side of the road.

“They’re going to church,” Asher Seyum, head of the Jewish Agency in Ethiopia, said about the solitary figures, as he raced to bid farewell to a group of Falash Mura departing for Israel. (Falash Mura is a colloquial, albeit pejorative, term from Ge’ez describing Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries largely due to persecution and economic strife but who maintained a distinct communal identity.)