“I will never forget my mother waking me in the middle of the night to tell me we were leaving for Jerusalem. I was only seven, but I knew that Jews were not allowed to leave Ethiopia. From that night on we were always in danger. It was a miracle that we made it to Israel, our homeland.”

In soft-spoken, fl uent English Assia Nathanel Avera, 30, tells the story of his family’s aliyah from their village in Ethiopia in 1984. Of walking for weeks across the scorching desert, robbed by bandits, shot at by rebels, and barely surviving in the disease infested refugee camp in Sudan. “When we fi nally arrived to our homeland, we knew that we were fulfi lling the centuries-old dream of our people,” says Assia. More