The last living Jew
A wooden Star of David is pitched at the front of her mud hut in Wolleka, otherwise known as the ‘Falashas Village’, a former Jewish neighbourhood. Rows of arched huts stretch across lush rolling hills. The small village is partitioned by a winding bitumen highway, just five kilometres from the centre of Gondar.
It is the rainy season, so the ground is soft as we approach the last living Jew in this village. She jumps out of her seat to greet us. A damaged mezuzah is fixed on the right of the doorway. Her home is no bigger than twenty square meters.
She peppers her salutations with the little Hebrew she knows: “shalom” (hello) “mashlomech?” (how are you?) Her liquid eyes smile as she introduces herself as ‘Marye Negusie’. It is surprising that this energetic woman is in her mid forties, a mature age in Ethiopia, where the average life expectancy is nearly 60 years.
We round the small hut while Marye, who dons a dusty, faded, cotton dress and fuchsia plastic slippers, gives a tour. To the side of her home is where the ‘synagogue’ once stood, she tells us. The prayer house, which she had herself constructed and prayed in, was dismantled in 2010 and the area taken over by the people currently inhabiting it.
There is another ‘synagogue’ (an empty thatched-roof mud hut, garnished with a metal Star of David) just 500 meters on the opposite side of the village. The synagogue was built by Christian dwellers and costs about 3 ETB ($0.17 AUD) to enter. Even if Marye had the spare cash to pay for entry (which she certainly has not) she tells us that she would not be welcome there.
The villagers have cast Marye out because of her Jewish faith, but this hasn’t stopped them from capitalising on the town’s Jewish history, by turning it into gimmick targeted at Jewish tourists visiting from the West. As we walk talk to Marye, children eagerly try to sell us potted figurines of the Lion of Judea, King Solomon and Queen Sheba lying in a cradle and Moses with the Arc of Covenant. A display of life-size clay formations of the same ilk rings one mud hut.
Because the Falash Mura were historically only allowed to own land in restricted areas, forced to pay higher taxes and evacuate their dwellings frequently, they organised themselves in self-contained communities, working as agriculturists, blacksmiths and potters. This would explain all the potted souvenirs. Marye shoos away all the children but one. The local boy tells me his name is “Zahava” in Hebrew. When I ask him what his name is in English, his dark face lights up. “Gold!”
* * *
Marye keeps a collection of her own pottery. Lined on the shelves of a rusty steel cabinet are dozens of biblical figurines. They sit amidst a collage of images glued to the inside of the shelf. There are pictures of the Israeli flag and photos of Marye smiling beside three Jewish European tourists, who had sponsored her trip to England and Germany, to teach others pottery and sell her work.
She shuts the doors of her cabinet before rotating to face us. Smiling sweetly as a child, she invites us to settle down on the plastic chairs outside, before bringing a plate of steaming boiled potatoes,
* * *
“I can remember how the people were going to Sudan,” she says, as we peel the skins off the hot tiny vegetables. It was 1984 and Marye was a young woman living in Wolleka, which was still a bona fide Jewish village. Her entire neighbourhood was preparing frantically to embark on a journey to Sudan, where they would be airlifted to Israel, as part of a covert Israeli operation dubbed Operation Moses.
When questioned about the conditions of that walk (thousands died en route to Sudan) Marye replies: “I was happy because I was walking with my mother. I was very young ... I was eager to be in Jerusalem. It was promised in the Holy Bible, so everybody was eager to be in Jerusalem."
“The young people wanted to escape from that situation on the way to go to Israel," she adds. "Not everybody was 100 per cent confident that we would survive. But we tried because something is better than nothing.”
But eight days into the trek, Marye’s mother died of exhaustion. In search for security, Marye joined a military encampment nearby and married one of the Christian soldiers there, who died years ago. She later returned to live in Wolleka, which was by this stage a ghost town — a village empty of its former life.
There is a pause in conversation. Marye disappears again into the dark recess of her doorway, before returning minutes later, with a bundle of documents. She proudly shows us her Jewish ID card and an English-Hebrew-Amharic dictionary. She tells us she washes her clothes and bakes injera (local bread) on Friday mornings, before resting over the Sabbath. On ‘Easter’, she eats the “holy dry bread” with “no yeast at all”, which our translator describes as a dry pancake. She says this continues for seven days. We realise that she is referring to Passover.
* * *
Marye lives alone. She built her own home and all of her basic utensils. The cuts on her scaly dark skin, dried out by the sun, evidence decades of frightful labour. “Since I am the only Jewish person here I feel bad. I am alone,” she tells us. “I have no one with whom I can pray and celebrate the holidays.” Marye’s only friends are among the dead buried in Gondar’s Jewish cemetery not far from her home.
Her efforts to register for aliyah over the past decade have been rejected. She missed the chance to join Operation Solomon in 1991 because she was living elsewhere with her husband and has since been blacklisted as an imposter. “I believe in God and I hope he will bring me back to Israel,” she says. “I wish I can go for one day, why not let me go at least for one day, and that is all I hope from God. That one day he will let me go to Israel ... Why don’t I die tomorrow if I can touch it for one day.”
I ask her why she has not moved to Gondar to live with other Jews, but quickly realise the naiveté of the question asked of an older woman who battles daily to wring a little food out of the sandy soil at her doorstep. “What can I do? Where can I go?”
Forty minutes later, we leave Marye, who is still beaming despite the weight of her words. “I am happy to get to talk to you. When you go away I will be alone again.”
//
Words: Timna Jacks
Pictures: David Michael
