style="margin-left:0in; margin-right:0in">The rejection of Ethiopian-Israelis’ Jewish iden-tities is antithetical to Israeli thinking of the past 40 years, including that of Israel’s leading rabbis. In the early 1970s, both the chief Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis ruled that members of the Ethiopian Beta Israel communities were full-fledged Jews.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (no relation to the author) ruled unequivocally that Ethiopians’ Jewish identities were not in question. Yet, in 2021, ITIM filed a lawsuit against a state rabbi as a last resort, following a four-year struggle to get the state religious establishment to take responsibility for the institutionalized racism that exists in some of its corridors.

In November, 2016, the municipal rabbi called the plaintiff and...

Please subscribe to keep reading.