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Newly DiscoveredEthio Says JVMI Is Answe


It shall come to pass in that day That the Lord shall set His hand again the second time


To recover the remnant of His people who are left,


From Assyria and Egypt, From Pathros and Cush, From Elam and Shinar, From Hamath and the islands of the sea. He will set up a banner for the nations, And will assemble the outcasts of Israel, And gather together the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the earth.


—Isaiah 11:11-12 NKJV BY SARAH


oliso is a rugged, rural region two hours south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A lush, verdant, agri- cultural area, where precocious monkeys peer curiously at new visitors from their arboreal homes, it is dotted with pictur- esque, primitive grass huts—creating an iconic African landscape, common to the pages of National Geographic.


W


ting. Yet when Jonathan Bernis and the Jewish Voice


This is not a stereotypical Jewish set- Ministries


International


(JVMI) outreach team visited the newly discovered Gefat Tribe in April 2010, they found a people who very much identified with Israel and the Jewish People—who observed Israel’s earliest biblical com- mandments, including circumcision of their male babies on the


eighth day, applying the blood of a sacrifi- cial lamb on their doorposts at Passover, and celebrating the biblical observances found in Leviticus 23. Numbering between twenty and thirty thousand, the Gefat have lived in this remote setting—impoverished, isolated, and rejected for nearly 800 years, after migrating from Addis Ababa. “They are outcasts being restored to their heritage and promises,” notes Jonathan Bernis. When Jewish Voice announced a new med- ical outreach to Woliso in 2011, the Gefat were ecstatic, proclaiming it an answer to prayer.


Jonathan and the Jewish Voice out- reach team first learned about the Gefat community and their plight through JVMI UK Board member and well-respected expert on Ethiopian Jewry, Gerald Gotzen, whose research found that much like the Jews of Addis Ababa and Gondar, the Gefat were persecuted and marginalized. Where- as their northern brethren were called Falash, a derogatory term meaning “out- cast” or “stranger,” the Gefat were called Fuga by the surrounding people, an even more offensive term meaning a “hated” or “disliked” people. Fuga is a perversion of a word that originally meant “blower,” revealing a proud heritage as blowers of the shofar. Their oral history includes a tra- dition and belief that suggests their ances- tors accompanied the procession of the Ark of the Covenant to its protected place in Ethiopia, blowing the shofar along its sacred route.


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